Official Report Says Irish Bishops Covered Up Church Child Abuse Cases

11/26/09-by Paula Brooks
The Commission of Investigation into the Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin has released a report that has detailed how the Dublin Archdiocese, other church authorities and Irish government officials covered up clerical child abuse. The Commission findings, released today, followed a parallel report published in May into five decades of rape, beatings and other cruelty committed by Catholic orders of nuns and brothers across Ireland in church-run schools, children’s workhouses and orphanages from the 1930s to mid-1990s.

The 720-page, three-volume report, found that “the structures and rules of the Catholic Church facilitated that cover-up” and that “the State authorities facilitated the cover-up by not fulfilling their responsibilities to ensure that the law was applied equally to all and allowing the Church institutions to be beyond the reach of the normal law enforcement processes.” The investigation also said Bishops of the Roman Catholic Church in Dublin covered up decades of child abuse by priests to protect the church’s reputation.

Eleven priests convicted of child abuse are named in the report, but 35 others were only referred to by aliases because some of those have criminal cases that are about to begin in Dublin courts.

The commission, set up in March 2006, looked into allegations of child sexual abuse made against clergy in the Irish capital and covered a period from 1975 to 2004.

The report,as well, rejected the churches claim that it was ignorant of both the scale and criminality of priests’ abuse of children and said the primary loyalty of bishops and archbishops is to the Church and not to the victims of the abuses.

Three Dublin archbishops, John Charles McQuaid (1940-72), Dermot Ryan (1972-84) and Kevin McNamara (1985-87), says the report, did not tell police about clerical abuse cases, instead opting to avoid public scandals by shuttling offenders from parish to parish and even overseas to U.S. churches, the commission found.

In addition, investigators also documented how the Dublin Archdiocese negotiated a 1987 insurance policy for future legal costs of defending lawsuits and compensation claims. The report says, at the time, bishops knew of at least 17 priests linked to abuse cases and “the taking out of insurance was an act proving knowledge of child sexual abuse as a potential major cost to the archdiocese.”

The report also said that, “The Dublin archdiocese’s pre-occupations in dealing with cases of child sexual abuse, at least until the mid 1990s, were the maintenance of secrecy, the avoidance of scandal, the protection of the reputation of the Church, and the preservation of its assets.”

The investigators, led by a judge and two lawyers, said that while it was not their job to confirm the scale of abuse cases, they had no doubt that the 46 priests abused many more than 320 children.

“One priest admitted to sexually abusing over 100 children, while another accepted that he had abused on a fortnightly basis during the currency of his ministry which lasted for over 25 years,” said investigators.

The Investigators spent three years poring over 60,000 previously secret Dublin church files, among those files, were more than 5,500 that retired Dublin Archbishop Cardinal Desmond Connell, tried to keep locked in the in his private vault. The investigation noted that it was not until 1995 when then-Archbishop Connell allowed police to see church files on 17 clerical abuse cases kept in a secret, locked vault, though at the time Connell also had records of complaints against at least 29 other priests he kept secret from Irish Law enforcement officials, the report says.

Commission investigators also condemned Senior Irish Police officials involved in the cases, saying they enjoyed a special relationship with the Church and did not enforce the law. The report said Police “clearly regarded priests as being outside their remit” and handed “complaints to the archdiocese instead of investigating them.”

The report was released this afternoon by Irish Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern, whose department commissioned the report, said in a statement there would no hiding place for those who commit crimes against children and said the state would renew efforts to prosecute more of the 46 priests in the report, as well as police officers that the investigation found colluded with church authorities to suppress complaints.

“No Government can’t guarantee that in the future there won’t be evil people who will do evil things,” said Ahern, “But the era where evil people could do so under the cover of the cloth, facilitated and shielded from the consequences by their authorities, while the lives of children were ruined with such cruelty, is over for good, the bottom line is this: a collar will protect no criminal”.

Today’s report comes six months after the publication of the Ryan report last May, which took depositions from 2,000 people who said they had suffered physical and sexual abuse while in the care of Catholic-run institutions. The Ryan report also found church leaders knew that sexual abuse was “endemic” in boys’ institutions.

Commission of Investigation,Dublin Archdiocese, Catholic Diocese of Cloyne.

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