TIMES ARE so tough for the Catholic church in Ireland that deputy heads have started to roll.
Today saw the resignation of Bishop of Cloyne John Magee. Speculation that Magee was pushed is immense: his resignation was accepted by Pope Benedict XVI after a full year of refusing to stand down. Magee had been criticised by church-appointed inquiry found that child protection practices in his Diocese were ‘inadequate and in some respects dangerous’.
Magee is far from being the only senior Irish cleric to face pressure to quit.
The most senior Catholic cleric in Ireland, Cardinal Seán Brady, stands accused of enforcing a code of silence on victims of paedophile priest Fr Brendan Smyth, a silence that allowed Smyth to continue sexually assaulting children unknown by state authorities for almost 20 years. Smyth assaulted over 100 children in Belfast, Dublin and the United States and is suspected of other attacks in Wales and Italy.
Brady’s involvement, thus far known to be administrative in function, points to a wider systematic policy of silencing the abused – and shielding abusers from justice which has been replicated across Ireland – and possibly elsewhere.
Two other bishops have been accused of shielding abusers.
Late last week the Belfast Telegraph newspaper reported that the Bishop of Derry, Seamus Hegarty, was involved in a deal with a woman who was abused by a priest and sworn to secrecy as part of out-of-court settlement in 2000. The case involved a woman who claims to have been sexually assaulted by an unnamed cleric since 1979 when she was eight years old.
Last Sunday, the Sunday Business Post, a national newspaper published in Dublin, published allegations that the Bishop of Clogher, Joseph Duffy covered-up numerous instances of child abuse. The newspaper said Duffy confirmed his prior involvement in church investigations into sexual abuse by priests in which children and parents were ‘made to sign oaths of non-disclosure.’
The allegations date back to 1989.
The diocese of Clogher covers counties Fermanagh, Tyrone, Monaghan and Donegal, straddling the Irish border.
Monsignor McFaul who works with Bishop Duffy told forth that the report was wrong.
‘The Sunday Business Post sent us two queries and they got the answers wrong to both of them,’ he said. ‘It’s [the claim in the article] an untruth.’
In addition the report stated that Duffy also confirmed he had been party to a civil settlement against the diocese which resulted in a non-disclosure agreement.
‘That was an untruth as well,’ said McFaul.
Further revelations
The revelation of the secrecy Brady, then a priest, handled the allegations against one of Ireland’s most notorious paedophiles with comes at a bad time for the church, coinciding with allegations made by the Suddeutsche Zeitung newspaper that Pope Benedict XVI himself knew about child abuse as a cardinal in his native Germany which, if proven to be true, threaten to rock the church to its core.
As a result, Ireland has become a litmus test for the Catholic church worldwide.
Last October the Murphy Commission, an Irish government investigation into child abuse in the Dublin archdiocese found swearing to secrecy were a common feature in church investigations into abuse and that the Gardaí failed to pursue cases.
In 1960 British police contacted then-Garda Commissioner Daniel Costigan with photographic evidence of sexual abuse. Costigan failed to investigate a priest who photographed children in ‘sexual positions’ while working as a chaplain at Crumlin Children’s Hospital. The priest sent the images for processing in Britain but the processing laboratory contacted the British police, who in turn contacted Costigan.
Rather than investigating, Costigan handed the case over to Archbishop John Charles McQuaid. The priest continued to abuse and was finally convicted and jailed 27 years later in 1997. The report found Costigan breached his duty.
Cardinal Brady is currently being sued both as head of the Irish church and in a personal capacity by a woman who claims she was abused by Fr Brendan Smyth.
The Brady case illustrates the bizarre defence adopted by clerical respondents in the High Court.
Shortly after Brady’s role was reported last weekend, it emerged that the facts of the story had originally been revealed in a report in the Sunday Mirror newspaper in 1997.
Despite this the woman’s solicitor has encountered church obstructions in attempts to obtain documents linking Brady to the 1975 internal investigation into Smyth’s activities. The church has refused to cooperate for a full thirteen years, refusing to hand over any documents to the complainant’s legal team, ignoring two high court orders.
Documents subpoenaed from Irish police a June 1995 affidavit from the late Fr Bruno Mulvihill, a former Norbertine order colleague of Brendan Smyth’s who was effectively hounded-out for whistle-blowing.
In 1968 he came across details of Smyth’s activities and went to the bishop of Kilmore and was ignored. In 1975 at a Norbertine celebration event he spoke to both the archbishop and the papal nuncio and claimed neither were interested. He then made a written complaint. Having been ignored he then went to the bishop, who wasn’t interested. He made another written complaint, which was also ignored according to his statement to police.
Another Irish priest, Fr James Donaghy, will face trial on April 9 at Belfast criminal court. Donaghy is accused of 15 counts of sexual abuse, attempted sexual abuse and indecent exposure involving underage boys. Fr Donaghy, formerly a priest at Most Holy Redeemer Church in Ballyholme and St Comgall’s Church in Bangor, both in Country Down, Northern Ireland, was previously accused of similar offences in 2004 but Northern Ireland’s Public Prosecution Service has decided not to proceed with any charges in 2006 citing insufficient evidence.
Donaghy, 52, stepped down from his ministry in 2004, going on to work at Belfast International Airport. He was charged by police with the offences on January 28. Despite working at the airport, Donaghy is still a member of the Catholic clergy.
The sexual offences are alleged to have been committed between 1983 and 2000. His alleged victims included boys aged under 16 years of age. The age of consent in Northern Ireland is 16 but during the period of alleged offences was 21 for homosexual sex, lowered to 17 in 2000 and 16 in 2008. Male homosexual acts were illegal in Northern Ireland until 1982.
Institutional abuse
The Catholic sexual abuse scandals have been rocking Ireland and disgracing the church since allegations were first made against Fr Brendan Smyth in 1994 but this most recent series of revelations has become particularly confused due to conflicting press reports and confusion over which case is which. Smyth died in 1997.
One former Catholic clergyman, renegade Bishop Pat Buckley, says there is a lot more to come out because the church’s attitude to sexuality is the root of the problem.
‘Only three per cent of priests are paedophiles,’ said Buckley, citing research by American clinical psychologist, sociologist and former priest Richard Sipe. ‘Of course, it’s particularly horrific when priests abuse their trust.’
Buckley says the problem isn’t a vast number of paedophile priests but the church’s repeated cover-ups allowing them to offend again. There are approximately 6,000 priests in Ireland, divided between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.
Bishop Buckley, an openly gay clergyman who recently entered into a civil partnership, says the majority of Irish priests – 80 per cent, he claims – are involved in sexual relationships at some point in their career, both heterosexual and homosexual, some abusive, some not.
‘I think that a minimum of 40 per cent of today’s Catholic priests are gay and are sexually active. A young priest in England said to me last week that the Catholic priesthood, in England, is now a gay profession. He has now left the priesthood because of the number of priests, bishops and cardinals who sexually seduced him while he was in Rome.
‘So, on the one hand you have the pope and the hierarchy of the church in Rome condemning homosexuality and yet the Vatican is probably one of the places in the world where homosexuality is most practiced,’ he said.
Allegations of abuse are not confined to same-sex activity – or to male members of religious orders.
Buckley told forth that the morning he spoke to forth he had met with a woman who was sexually abused by a priest while at school – with the connivance of nuns.
A priest at a convent school in Newry, County Down, Northern Ireland is alleged to have inserted what he claimed was a piece of ‘the true cross’ into the vagina of a 16 year old girl, masturbating her. He allegedly told her he was sanctifying her. The girl, now a woman in her 60s, has not given her name yet but Bishop Buckley is encouraging her to go to the authorities.
Buckley says that afterward a nun said to her: ‘How did you like that?’ and also that nuns would deliver children to the notorious paedophile Fr Brendan Smyth and pick them up afterwards.
Bishop Buckley was ordained in 1976 and worked as a Catholic priest for a decade before being removed from his duties. He has never been formally removed from the Catholic church and his consecration as bishop is considered ‘valid but illicit’ by the Vatican.
Buckley says the church attempted to silence him by buying him off at least twice.
‘When Cardinal Cahal Daly came to the disocese of Down and Conor [as bishop] he didn’t really like my way of working, the amount of social work I did with people and my criticism of the church structures in the media, so he offered me a parish in California and £10,000 [sterling] to get there – which I declined.
‘In July of 1986 he removed me as the parish priest – curate – of Larne and I’ve operated independently ever since.’
The second incident had more sinister undertones as Buckley tells it.
‘In 1998 a barrister approached me in Belfast and offered me £250,000 [sterling] to go away for five years, at the end of which I would be given an important job,’ he said.
Asked on whose behalf this offer was made, Buckley told forth: ‘He told me it was on behalf of the whole hierarchy, it wasn’t just the bishop of Down and Conor it was the whole Irish Catholic hierarchy.
‘So, basically, what they wanted me to do was go away for five years and they would pay me £50,000 a year and I would be given an important job when I got back. The condition was that during the five years I wouldn’t speak about anything to do with the Irish church or the Catholic church in general,’ said Buckley.
Buckley says an alleged victim of clerical sex abuse came to see him two weeks ago and he put him in touch with the Police Service of Northern Ireland that day. The alleged perpetrator, Fr Sean Cahill, has been asked to step down from ministry while the investigation is going on. The alleged abuse is alleged to have occurred in Nazareth Lodge orphanage in Belfast.
‘On the day he came here I made two phone calls: one to the police and one to the bishop of Down and Conor, Noel Trainor. Bishop Trainer removed Fr Cahill,’ he said.
Buckley has ministered to paedophiles in his church but with the full knowledge and co-operation of the congregation for child protection, he says.
Buckley says the church’s failed internal investigations and codes of silence stem from a belief that the church is above the law.
‘The Catholic church regards itself as God’s kingdom on earth and it [therefore] regards canon law as the law of god’s kingdom and [as] God is superior to the civil authorities therefore canon law is superior to civil law.
‘That can’t be and shouldn’t be tolerated in civil society,’ he says. ‘Until such time as we have a bishop who has been seen on the television screens being taken from his palace in handcuffs to be questioned I don’t think any of us can believe that the Gardaí or PSNI are serious about priests and bishops.’
JASON WALSH is the editor of forth and a freelance journalist. He contributes to the Irish Times, Irish Examiner, Guardian and other newspapers and is Ireland correspondent for the CS Monitor.
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