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	Abuse Scandals Lower Church's Status in Ireland By Don Melvin Austin American-Statesman March 19, 2006 http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/world/03/19irelandabuse.html Gorey, Ireland — Colm O'Gorman was born 39 years ago into an Ireland in which the Roman Catholic Church was central to almost everyone's life. At 3 1/2, he began attending a state school owned and run by the church. When he was 8 or 9, he became an altar boy. Social life revolved around the church. The local priest was a revered and powerful figure. The church wielded a strong influence on Irish politics. "There wasn't an arena or an area it wasn't involved in," O'Gorman said. So, he said, when he was sexually abused by a priest for three years, beginning at age 14, he blamed himself. But the status of the church in Ireland has changed radically in recent years. The realization that priests were abusing children, and that church officials were protecting such priests, has helped undermine the primacy of the Irish church. "Suddenly, people were shocked and appalled by the goings-on of the clergy," said John Cooney, a journalist who has reported on religion in Ireland for more than 30 years. The most recent evidence of the problem was the acknowledgment this month by the Archdiocese of Dublin that, since 1940, at least 350 children in the Dublin area had been abused by more than 100 priests. The number of victims nationwide is much larger. "We don't know how many," said O'Gorman, who runs One in Four, an organization that helps victims of abuse. "But it's certainly in the thousands." The revelations began in earnest in the mid-1990s. Father Sean Fortune, accused of abusing Gorman and a number of other youths, committed suicide in 1999 as he was on the verge of going to court. Irish church attendance, once about 90 percent, has dwindled to less than 50 percent, and to below 20 percent in some areas. Ireland, which once exported priests around the world, now has a shortage. "If some guy says he's going into the priesthood, girls look at him like he's a pervert," Cooney said. "Many seminaries have no students at all," said the Rev. Sean Fagan, a Marist theologian and author. "Now, you have to put up with a lot of criticism." O'Gorman said that after Fortune abused him for three years, the priest offered him money to find a younger boy he could abuse. O'Gorman was depressed and suicidal. "If I had stayed, I wouldn't have survived," he said. "So I ran." After a couple of years of homelessness in Dublin, during which he sometimes allowed himself to be sexually exploited in exchange for a place to sleep, O'Gorman fled to England. He stayed away for 17 years. Fagan said that although church attendance has dropped dramatically, the Irish remain a spiritual people. Certainly, though, many routinely accept divorce, remarriage and contraception. "Middle-class Ireland has effectively become a la carte Catholics," Cooney said. But the faith of many has eroded further than that. Asked whether he is religious at all, O'Gorman, the former altar boy, answers in a single word: "No."
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