Smyth Suspicions Go Back Decades

Belfast Telegraph
June 22, 2015

http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/republic-of-ireland/smyth-suspicions-go-back-decades-31319683.html

Brendan Smyth died in prison

The activities of Ireland's most infamous paedophile priest sparked concerns years before he was ordained, an inquiry has heard.

There was suspicion that Fr Brendan Smyth, who admitted sexually assaulting hundreds of children, had abused a boy while training in Rome during the late 1940s.

The revelations were made to the Historical Institutional Abuse (HIA) inquiry, which is examining whether systemic failings allowed Smyth - a member of the Norbertine order - to perpetrate the abuse over more than four decades.

Jospeh Aiken, counsel for the inquiry, said: "The Norbertine order believes that knowledge of Brendan Smyth's activities exists prior to his ordination yet he was ordained as a priest in any event.

"A complaint had been made about Smyth when he was a student in Rome in the 1940s. He was accused of abusing a child in the vicinity of the college."

Retired judge Sir Anthony Hart is leading the HIA probe, one of the UK's largest inquiries into physical, sexual and emotional harm to children at homes run by the church, state and voluntary organisations.

He was told that advice from a senior cleric in Rome, not to ordain Smyth, had been ignored.

Smyth's direct superiors at Kilnacrott Abbey in Co Cavan and the Belgian-based Abbey which sponsored his study at the Vatican felt it would be a "shame" if the first student they sent to Rome failed.

A letter shown to the inquiry also revealed that they did not want the Abbott General - the Norbertine's most senior figure in Rome - "interfering" in their business.

Smyth's ordination went ahead in 1951.

But, shortly afterwards, a senior priest from Tongerlo in Belgium sent a letter in which he said the Abbott General's opinion may have been right.

"My letter is hard," he wrote. "I hope my fear is exaggerated."

Smyth, who was at the centre of one of the first clerical child sex abuse scandals to rock the Catholic Church, was convicted of 117 indecent assaults on children in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland from the 1960s to the 1990s.

There were also reports he abused children in Scotland, Wales and the United States of America.