SCOTLAND
National Secular Society
Posted: Thu, 19 Mar 2015 by Alistair McBay
Why did the CPS abandon investigation into Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor?
As the full scale of the British Establishment’s cover-up of child sex abuse becomes apparent, Alistair McBay argues it is time for the Crown Prosecution Service to make public its reasons for dropping the investigation into Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor 12 years ago.
It’s hard to know where to begin in writing about the issue of child sex abuse in Britain. As Home Secretary Teresa May said earlier this month, the abuse is “woven, covertly, into the fabric of British society”. She warned that “what the country doesn’t yet appreciate is the true scale of that abuse” but might have added “or the scale of the cover-up.”
The almost daily revelations suggest collusion between the various arms of the Establishment to protect the great and the good from investigation, either for abuse or for covering it up – police, priests, politicians and performers are all implicated one way or another. Beyond the police, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) is another arm of law enforcement that has some questions to answer. First, in the light of all that has been revealed in the intervening 12 years, why did it instruct Sussex police to drop a 2003 investigation into the head of the Catholic Church in the UK? And second, why did the CPS decide that its reasons remain confidential?
This case related to decisions made by Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor when he was a mere bishop in the Catholic diocese of Arundel and Brighton in Sussex between 1977 and 2000, and centred on how he handled allegations of child rape by priests and the notorious Father Michael Hill in particular. At the time, the chairman of the Association of Child Abuse Lawyers, which was dealing with a number of claims against various orders of the Catholic Church, called Murphy-O’Connor’s role in the case “indefensible” and called for his resignation. According to a Catholic Herald report at the time, a CPS spokesman advised that the details of the advice given to Sussex police to abandon the case against the Cardinal were ‘confidential’. The article also claims that the Cardinal was never formally contacted by the police during their investigation, although the police had contacted the CPS at least twice for formal advice on how to proceed.
So, in short, here was a situation in which a high-profile figure implicated in a child abuse scandal was never contacted by detectives over several months, during which the police were asking the CPS for guidance on how to proceed. Eventually the CPS instructed the police to drop the case and declared their reasons for this decision not open to public scrutiny.
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