Child abuse cover-up by Irish Catholic leader Brady
Irish Catholic leader Cardinal Brady continues to resist calls to resign despite being involved in the cover-up of child sex abuse in 1975.
Ireland’s Catholic Church leader has resisted calls to resign after it emerged that he was involved in meetings with child victims of sex abuse forced to sign an oath of secrecy.
Cardinal Seán Brady has faced demands to resign from his post as the most senior Irish Catholic cleric since Sunday (14 March 2010) – after it was revealed that he failed to notify authorities of sexual abuse by Father Brendan Smyth in 1975.
At the time, Brady was a secondary-school teacher, priest and part-time secretary to the late Bishop of Kilmore Francis McKiernan, and was directed to attend the meetings by the Bishop. The Catholic Church was investigating sex abuse complaints against Smyth – whose activities later led to the collapse of Albert Reynold’s coalition government in 1994.
In these meetings, two victims were forced to sign an oath of secrecy and Smyth was removed from the ministry. However, he then went on to abuse further children until he was imprisoned in 1994 – dying of a heart attack one month into his 12-year sentence.
He pleaded guilty to 74 charges of sexually assaulting 20 victims over a period of 35 years. If he had been convicted in the 1970s, many of the children involved would have been saved from this terrible abuse – and it is this knowledge that is angering so many, and making them call for Brady’s immediate resignation.
Today, Cardinal Brady said on broadcaster RTE’s Morning Ireland of the calls to resign, that “I’ve heard those calls, I don’t think it was a resigning matter.” In an RTE interview in December 2009, he said he would resign if he ever found children had been abused as a result of any failing on his part while a bishop or a manager – referring to this he commented: “Well, 30 years ago, 35 years ago, I was not a bishop, I was not a manager, I was a full-time secondary teacher and I was there taking evidence.”
Yet in his very being a teacher, he should have shown even more responsibility and concern for the welfare of children, regardless of his authority or status. He has said a number of times that the interviews formed the basis of the action taken to remove Smyth from the pastoral ministry, and that he was not the “designated person” to report the issue to the civil authorities.
It is difficult to comprehend this decision-making from a man whose life and vocation is based around religion. It is not a matter of whose job it was to report it – it simply needed reporting and the man responsible for such awful crimes putting away in prison so he could not hurt any more children.
Yet the Catholic Church appears to operate on a different level, as Mary Rafferty describes in The Irish Times: ‘What lies at the heart of the church’s failures is not, as many people assume, the vow of celibacy – it is, rather, that of obedience.
‘And obedience is writ large over the latest scandal to hit the church. Cardinal Seán Brady is at pains in his statement yesterday to emphasise that his involvement in the meetings at which victims of serial child rapist Brendan Smyth were asked to swear an oath of secrecy was “at the direction of bishop McKiernan”, his then boss as bishop of Kilmore. Later in the statement, he adds that “as instructed”, he passed all information to the bishop.
‘The strong implication in this is that the cardinal is somehow relieved of his personal duty to act as a responsible citizen, to report a crime and to protect children, is breathtaking to those of us who live by and believe in the rules of the State.
‘But then, remember that different drum that promises obedience – it beats a tattoo that says obey your superior, subjugate your will to his, do not question or hint at distrust, and above all do not ever place your own views or opinions above his. As the Irish Catholic Conference of Diocesan Vocation Directors tells us: “Obedience is really…a willingness to let go of one’s own agenda”.’
However, as much as this culture of obedience goes some way to explain Cardinal Brady’s lack of action, his behavior does not stand in the secular world where we have a responsibility as citizens and human beings to protect our children from evil.
Whether directly or not, Brady’s actions led to the abuse of children by a man who should have been removed from society at the very instant he was proven to be guilty – and for that, surely there can be no question of a resignation from a man who has condemned others who have failed to act.
In December 2009, he said of Bishop Donal Murray’s resignation following the Murphy Report, “I apologise again to all who were abused as children by priests, who were betrayed and who feel outraged by the failure of Church leadership in responding to their abuse. Their suffering must always be the primary consideration in any assessment of past failings, as a Church and as individuals.”
Perhaps Brady needs to revisit these sentiments when assessing his own past failings.
Do you think Cardinal Seán Brady should resign? Let us know.
Loading ...
The pope’s empty words to Ireland
Feb. 19, 2010
NATIONAL CATHOLIC REPORTER, U.S.
By Sr. Maureen Paul Turlish
http://ncronline.org/news/accountability/popes-empty-words-ireland
Pope Benedict’s repetition over and over again that the sexual abuse of a child is “a heinous crime” and “a grave sin which offends God and wounds the dignity of the human person created in his image,” in country after country may, to use Bishop Diarmuid Martin’s words, “even be empty.”
I agree with Michael O’Brien of Right to Peace in Ireland, who said, “It’s unbelievable what we heard today from the pope, this is the man who is in charge of the Catholic church worldwide and he hadn’t even the gumption to say he was sorry for what happened to us.
“All he’s done now is to add salt to the wounds, and this is very hurtful,” he added. “We were expecting something and we got nothing.”
While the Roman Catholic church in Ireland has its own variation of child abuse perpetrated by clergy and religious, the underlying causes are much the same in Ireland as they are in the United States, Canada, Australia and Germany as well as other European and African countries.
The problems are endemic and systemic to the hierarchical and governmental systems of the Roman Catholic church. They are certainly not peculiar to Ireland.
It is not as if Pope Benedict XVI as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, head of the Holy Office, does not have the most extensive background in the history of the church’s sexual abuse problems involving children, young boys, girls and vulnerable adults which also includes women religious and younger members of religious communities like the Legion of Christ.
Unlike his predecessor, Benedict does not have to depend on others for the facts, because he already has much of that information because of his previous position.
The problem was and continues to be the unbridled abuse of power and authority by an episcopacy that put what was the good name of an institution before the well being of its most vulnerable members.
Until or unless Pope Benedict acknowledges and addresses the governmental structures and policies that led to this terrible abuse of power by the bishops and other church authorities, an infinite number of words of sympathy or shock will not be enough to assuage what those victim/survivors have suffered at the hands of abusers while others continue to suffer because of what they have learned about the criminal and immoral actions of the episcopacy.
The cover-up of the physical, sexual, psychological and spiritual abuse of children did not happen in a vacuum in Ireland any more than it happened in a vacuum in the United States, Canada or Australia.
The abuse happened. That’s factual and cannot be disputed. In the United States, for example, it wasn’t caused by the permissive attitude of the people in New England. It cannot be dismissed as an American problem, and it was not caused by the presence of homosexuals in the priesthood. Homosexuality does not cause the sexual abuse of children any more than heterosexuality causes the sexual abuse of children.
Rather the question that has to be asked and answered is what is wrong with the underlying governmental structures of the institutional Roman Catholic church that gave bishops license to act with such utter abandon of its most vulnerable members in countries worldwide?
What flaws in the fabric of the church contributed to the bishops actually enabling further abuse by transferring priests from place to place over many years while threatening and intimidating victims and their families? What allowed this conspiracy, this collusion to happen in country after country and on such a scale?
There should be some outline, a paradigm of reform and renewal included in the pope’s expected pastoral letter to the People of God in Ireland.
Such a letter from the pope will be read very carefully by peoples around the world who expected something more substantive than just the words of sympathy and concern they received when the pope visited their countries, especially the United States where not one bishop was removed from office or criminally prosecuted because of his part in covering up for abusive clerics and enabling their continued abuse over long periods of time.
It appears now that such a pastoral letter to Ireland will not be forthcoming and that will be a tragedy because the People of God did have hope.
They expected more from those they considered leaders.
[Maureen Paul Turlish, a Sister of Notre Dame de Namur, is a victims' advocate and writes from New Castle, Delaware in the United States. She may be reached at - maureenpaulturlish@yahoo.com]
March 15th, 2010 at 2:57 pm“The Roman Catholic Church is headed by a mediocre Bavarian bureaucrat once tasked with the concealment of the foulest iniquity, whose ineptitude in that job now shows him to us as a man personally and professionally responsible for enabling a filthy wave of crime. Ratzinger himself may be banal, but his whole career has the stench of evil—a clinging and systematic evil that is beyond the power of exorcism to dispel. What is needed is not medieval incantation but the application of justice—and speedily at that.” Christopher Hitchens March 15, 2010
March 15th, 2010 at 6:43 pm