Maintenance of Secrecy
Dec 7th, 2009 • Posted in: What They're Saying
The Roman Catholic Church in Ireland was concerned only with “the maintenance of secrecy, the avoidance of scandal, the protection of the reputation of the church, and the preservation of its assets.”
– Excerpt from a scathing report released in late November by the Commission of Investigation Into the Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin. The report by the government-appointed commission found that “the Roman Catholic Church and the police in Ireland systematically colluded in covering up decades of child sex abuse by priests in Dublin,” reports the New York Times. The paper notes that the “cover-ups spanned the tenures of four Dublin archbishops and continued through to the mid-1990s and beyond,” with police and Catholic officials learning of abuse but doing little about it.
The Irish police and church representatives issued apologies after the report was released. “Because of acts or omissions, individuals who sought assistance did not always receive the level of response or protection which any citizen in trouble is entitled to expect,” said Ireland’s police commissioner, Fachtna Murphy, reports the Irish Times.
As the Associated Press reports, the “720-page report focused on why church leaders in the Dublin Archdiocese — home to a quarter of Ireland’s 4 million Catholics — did not tell police about a single abuse complaint against a priest until 1995. By then, the investigators found, successive archbishops and their senior deputies — among them qualified lawyers — already had compiled confidential files on more than 100 parish priests who had sexually abused children since 1940. Those files had remained locked in the Dublin archbishop’s private vault.”
Atlantic blogger Andrew Sullivan notes, “If the Catholic church were a secular institution in Ireland and had been found guilty of child abuse to the massive extent the Church has, it would be forced to close. Its top officials would not be issuing statements of apology and regret, but serving sentences in jail. The name of John Paul II would not be a revered mantra; it would be synonymous with the head of an international organization that had to be dragged kicking and screaming to acknowledge its own long-running, institutional brutalization of generations of defenseless children.”
Sources: New York Times, Nov. 26 — Irish Times, Nov. 28 – Irish Times, Nov. 28 – Irish Times, Nov. 28 – Atlantic (blog), Nov. 27 – Irish Times, Nov. 26 – Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Nov. 28 – AP, Nov. 26.
For more information, see: Report by Commission of Investigation into Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin — Related Newsline story, May 25, 2009 — Related Newsline story, Sep. 17, 2007 — Related Newsline story, Sep. 10, 2007 — Related Newsline story, Sep. 26, 2005 — Related Newsline story, Sep. 15, 2003.
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