It’s almost as if nobody wants to talk about it. Society concentrates on the political impact of the Fr Brendan Smyth case but recoils from the religious consequences. Fianna Fáil have been driven in disgrace from government, Albert Reynolds and Harry Whelehan have resigned and other political and legal heads are on the block, yet, so far, the lone clerical casualty is the Abbot of the Norbertine Order.

Even the Catholic Church admits that it’s going to get worse. The hierarchy’s spokesman, Bishop Flynn of Achonry, despairingly admits that the Church could be facing 200 cases of child abuse. And as the victims finally find the confidence to speak out, every news organisation seems to be investigating a child abuse case of its own.

It is the gravest crisis the Catholic Church has faced this century yet the media still seems timid about thinking it through, more interested in the affairs of government. Might that be because the scale of this crisis is so unprecedented? To paraphrase Lord Denning, is the Catholic Church facing its own “appalling vista”?

For the issues at stake go far beyond the immediate and shocking scandal of sexual abuse. The real and fateful questions concern the Church’s own authority and accountability and why the offending clergy apparently felt so secure and invulnerable, so confident that their crimes wouldn’t be reported.

So, complicity becomes the key question.

Let me concede that Catholics are no more likely to be sexual abusers than atheists or members of other faiths. But can the same complacent comparison be made between Catholic and Protestant clergy? No, because Protestant ministers are accountable to their congregations in a way that Catholic clergy aren’t. Child abuse festered and flourished within Irish Catholicism exactly because of its innate secrecy.

Of course, guilt can be mitigated by ignorance and/or other reasons. Society – and not just in Ireland either – only began to appreciate the nature of child abuse in the mid-Eighties. A balanced perspective can accept that priests could have misread the signs and so not suspected offending colleagues. These crimes were beyond our social experience and imagination; parents, too, may not have believed the accusations of abused children. And even if it can be definitely argued that Irish paralysis in these matters was often due to obscurantist Catholic sexual doctrines, individual human actions or inactions can be judged less harshly. Moreover, priests who were suspicious of their colleagues may not have known how to substantiate their fears. Outing abusive clerics involves evidence as well as moral courage.

Or, at least, that defence of the Church could have been made if we were only dealing with a few isolated cases from before the Eighties. But we now know we aren’t and a pattern of institutional complicity and denial instead emerges. Far more clerics did know much more than they have yet admitted – but they looked the other way.

The Church consistently favoured the abuser instead of the victim. Abusers were moved on with impunity while victims were leaned on and encouraged to be silent for the greater good of the Church. Both psychologically and institutionally, the Church controlled the play.

It still does. However slowly, the facts of what happened in the Attorney-General’s office regarding Fr. Smyth are emerging. We may never know the full and final truth but we are definitely moving down that road. Both the Dáil and the media are compelling some accountability.

Contrast that with the response of the Catholic Church. We have no knowledge of how and why the Church sheltered abusers, nor are we likely to get it. Fianna Fáil ministers have at least been compelled to submit to a Dail inquiry on their disastrous misjudgement whereas the Church still hides behind its clerical skirts. Instead, it calls on the laity’s faith and charity. Trust and forgive us, it says, and then refuses to offer further explanations.

In the process, the Church’s identity also conveniently changes. It shape-shifts from a monolith to an octopus that doesn’t know what its tentacles are doing. Bishops, who even their critics believed were at least efficient bureaucrats, suddenly plead they didn’t know what was going on. The head disclaims the actions of the hands.

There is a further convenience in this denial. It works both ways up, and down the hierarchy. According to the Irish pyramidal system, bishops claim they weren’t given unwelcome news but priests will insist they weren’t informing bishops because they would have been ignored and possibly shunted off to a less congenial posting. It is a perfect Catch-22 bureaucratic snafu that discouraged candour in everyone’s interest except that of the victim.

So the Church defends itself by baffling its accusers through the arcane details of Canon Law. Suddenly and conveniently we learn that bishops have no authority over religious orders. Are we to accept that if a nest of abusers existed within any religious order, the hierarchy were effectively powerless?

Certainly that’s the logic of what is said in Eamonn McCann’s account in this issue. Abuse was always conveniently somebody else’s problem. In these matters, the Church’s often harsh disciplinary writ somehow failed to run. Contrast that with how Church authorities have often abruptly sacked teachers with extra-marital relationships that failed to meet its standards. For its own, the Church insists on self-serving double standards of charity and mercy.

This point was reinforced by Nell McCafferty in her Irish Press column of December 8 in which she wrote: “In Derry city, where priestly child abuse has been revealed this past fortnight, some Catholic schools have held crisis meetings of all teachers. The chairmen of all Catholic school boards are priests. It is the priests who appoint the teachers.”

In other words, the Church holds a monopoly on power. The clerical owners can sack any whistle-blowing teacher; teachers and parents have no power over priests who either abuse or cover up. Likewise in Catholic orphanages and other homes for the disabled, disadvantaged or difficult children.

Of course it may be conceivable that neither Cardinal Daly nor senior bishops knew the full extent of clerical abuse throughout the island. A bishop in Belfast may have been too embarrassed to share scandalous secrets with his counterparts in Cork or Kilkenny. But the Irish Church already had the example of America with its clerical abuse cases. Nobody seems to have realised that new standards and procedures were required.

Nor was the Church alerted as it should have been by the Casey affair. It didn’t realise its media immunity was over. Then the Church spoke mild words of conciliation and contrition and realised it couldn’t preach so sternly on sexual morality but gave no ground on the internal matters of celibacy and its authority. The priesthood would continue to police itself; the laity weren’t to interfere.

Priests retained privileges; the laity, even those sexually abused, had no inalienable rights. Celibacy probably is a relevant factor but the real issue of clerical sex abuse in the Catholic Church is that it’s an abuse of authority, a rite of power exercised by the invulnerable on the defenceless.

Again the laity weren’t to interfere. Catholic congregations had no mechanisms for inquiry. But then the Roman Catholic Church is unreformed. The interests of the institution override the rights of the individual. In matters such as this, it acts as a clerical conspiracy against the laity. There are no means by which a congregation can remove a sexually delinquent priest . . .

So, in keeping with its traditions, the Church gave no complete explanations. Just like Albert Reynolds excusing the failures of the Attorney-General’s office, we are told there was a ‘systems failure’ and invited to leave it at that. Even in criminal matters, the Church places itself above and beyond the law.

Few seem to understand how medieval this concept is. For reasons both good and ill, kings from the Middle Ages onward fought against the Catholic clergy’s immunities in the secular courts of law. And yet in matters of sexual abuse, at the end of the 20th the Catholic Church is still claiming 13th Century immunities from the Irish state.

Of course, the Church has eventually submitted to the civil law. But reluctantly and not before it has done the utmost to safeguard its own institutional interests. Interests within it have stonewalled, not facilitated inquiry into abuse cases. By trying to manage matters within its own domain, it has come very close to acting as an accessory.

Nor can the Church reform itself. Or at least not while Pope John Paul II reigns. Even Irish bishops and priests who understand the dimensions of this crisis and the need for reparation and regeneration are paralysed by this Papacy.

For the Polish Pope and his supporters, authority is all. Whatever the threat of scandal, authority must neither be diluted nor shared. Only those who favour his Roman orthodoxies can be promoted.

The result, of course, is that the Irish Catholic Church is now almost irreformable. The appeals of the Irish laity are subordinate to the demands and strategies of Rome. New energies and ideas are not to be tolerated. No new focus will be allowed for the regeneration of the Irish Church.

So the Church isn’t in denial just about sexual abuse, it’s also in denial about its own crisis. The fear of Rome has created paralysis. The Church’s more aware members know the problems and some of the solutions but they’re constrained from preaching any new gospel to the Irish. The clerical soutanes won’t be unbuttoned in truth.

There’s also something passing strange in how public anxiety isn’t being articulated. Have the Irish people now decided to take their Catholicism a la carte, a religion for display only on the family occasions of baptism, marriage and funerals?

It is a very strange stalemate. Society fights for concessions from the Church, ignores it when it disagrees with it but refuses to make the final break, almost as if the generation under 40 doesn’t want to offend its parents. But those under 40 will have little hold on their own children. When that transitional generation become grand-parents, the Church may be at its most vulnerable.

Certainly there are those, not only Catholic conservatives among them, who fear this would leave a moral and spiritual vacuum at the heart of Irish life. The Church can point to a record of support for social justice. What happens if and when its influence declines? Is this the question nobody can bear to face?

Irish identity has been so entangled with Catholicism that losing this prop must cause dislocation and pain. Many would be queasy should Ireland follow the path of England towards a society of unbridled consumerism. So perhaps the Irish people won’t divorce the Catholic Church. Instead they may prefer to continue in a formal marriage with a familiar partner that allows both lee-way. We are a people that has always mixed its morality with a certain cunning. Even liberals – or some of them – fear the abyss.

Of course, Conservative Catholicism and an atheism of anarchy aren’t the only two available choices. Progressive Christians can still be Protestants. But even liberals and the lapsed are still marked by their Catholic schooling. They still don’t understand that the Reformation happened for reasons which are similar to those that have caused the present crisis in Irish Catholicism. In the 16th Century, German burghers had ceased to be subservient peasants, resented the privileges and sexual scandals of the clergy and refused to accept the diktats and the financial demands of Rome. Essentially, the Reformation recaptured the Church for the people.

But that model still isn’t understood in Ireland. Instead Irish liberals wait in vague expectations of a regenerated Catholic Church remodelled by the Polish Pope’s successor, a revolution from the top not the roots. They may wait in vain. Then may come the deluge.

Last week, Cardinal Daly issued a lengthy statement about his own role in the Fr. Brendan Smyth affair. From one angle, he seems in the clear. In 1987, when Bishop of Down and Conor, he says he was informed by social workers of a generalised threat of sexual abuse in his diocese. Following their advice, he says he responded promptly to ensure that priests and social workers under his authority acted properly.

Cardinal Daly insists that when, on February 23rd 1990, the Smyth case erupted, these new procedures worked. A social worker in the Catholic Family Welfare Society was informed of Fr. Smyth’s activities, immediately told the RUC and also advised the family to contact the police. Bishop Daly – as he then was – was informed of the case and approved the actions taken. He telephoned the Norbertine Abbot Kevin Smith, told him of the complaints and within three weeks of the family reporting the incidents, he met with the Abbot on March 12th when the Abbot “undertook to take prompt and appropriate steps to deal with the matter.”

So far, you might think, so good. The procedures were followed and – if we take the Cardinal’s statement at face value – in no sense was Fr. Smyth sheltered from the civil law. Unfortunately matters then get murky. Responsibility for Fr. Smyth vanishes in a jurisdictional chasm between the Cardinal and the Norbertines. First, Cardinal Daly doesn’t outline what those “prompt and appropriate steps” agreed by himself and Abbot Smith were. Secondly in the nine months between March and December, before Daly left Down and Conor to become Archbishop of Armagh, did he or his staff trouble to keep informed of the affair? Cardinal Daly’s statement mentions no such contacts.

Let us here be kind to the Cardinal and accept that, as one senior figure in the Church to another, he trusted the Abbot’s assurances. But in February ’91, the family wrote to Cardinal Daly with further complaints about Fr. Smyth. Again the Cardinal says that he contacted the Abbot “strongly emphasising the need for him to take firm action to deal with Father Brendan Smyth.” On March 8th, Fr. Smyth “presented himself for interview by the RUC in connection with these complaints.” Crucially, according to the Cardinal’s statement, Fr. Smyth then “made admissions of wrongdoing.”

Again the Cardinal looks in the clear. If there was any foot-dragging by the Norbertines, the Cardinal’s statement can be read as if he firmly indicated to the Abbot that he should do his duty by the law. But again, there are gaps in the record.

In other words, Fr. Smyth should then have been disciplined and certainly permitted no contact with the Belfast children he had abused. But in both August ’92 and October ’93, the family again complained to the Cardinal. The question must be asked: who, if anybody, outside the Norbertines was monitoring the situation?

In paragraph 13 of his statement, Cardinal Daly makes this breath-taking admission: “At no time was I aware, nor was I made aware of, Fr. Brendan Smyth’s long history of paedophile crimes. This history became known to me only through the media this year.”

By this account, Abbot Smith didn’t volunteer the information, an omission which would in itself be sufficient cause for his resignation. But why didn’t Cardinal Daly ask? Or seek professional advice on the matter?

After all, he proudly claims to have been a leader in the field. In 1987, he claims to have installed social workers who understood sexual abuse in Belfast; surely they could have told him that there was a very high probability that abusers like Fr. Smyth had a long history of offending. And what happened to the diocesan social worker who first knew of the case and informed the RUC? That individual vanishes from the Cardinal’s account. Did Daly and his officials not maintain contact?

So by Cardinal Daly’s account, he continued to accept the increasingly unreliable assurances of Abbot Smyth and initiated no independent investigation. In looking at this, it is important to remember that he was not some minor cleric. As Primate of All-Ireland and Cardinal Archbishop of Armagh, he had only to pick up the phone to get the best advice available.

So if we are to believe the thrust of the Cardinal’s statement, no advisors were summoned and no investigation begun. At no point was he determined to get to the truth. At no point was he the responsible and effective chief executive, demanding “tell me the worst.” In March ’90, such omissions just, just might have been pardonable as human error. After the second set of incidents in ’91, such excuses simply cannot convincingly be made.

But of course the Cardinal’s statement can be given another interpretation, for it is most remarkable for what it excludes. Were moves made that he can’t or won’t mention because they are too embarrassing for the Church?

Cardinal Daly also claims that he had “never any jurisdiction at any time over Father Brendan Smyth.” Under Canon Law, this may be broadly correct. However it misses the point. Doesn’t the Cardinal Archbishop of Armagh have the clout to tell the Norbertines to get their act together? Didn’t such an experienced administrator as Cardinal Daly know what levers to pull in Rome and elsewhere?

Furthermore from March ’91, he knew that Father Smyth had admitted his guilt to the RUC. There were no reasons for confusion, no reasons to protect a man innocent till proven guilty. Surely he should have continued to check that Fr. Smyth was being appropriately disciplined and, more particularly, controlled.

There had been earlier inconsistencies in the Cardinal’s account of events. One emerged in Alison O’Connor’s Irish Times report of October 18. These relate to the sequence of calls to the Cardinal in October and November. According to O’Connor’s report, a “22-year-old woman, who claims she was sexually abused by Smyth since she was six . . . says she tried to telephone Cardinal Cahal Daly a number of times last November but her claims that he refused to take her calls were strongly rejected by the Cardinal in Rome last night. He said he was ‘absolutely clear’ that the woman had not attempted to contact him at any time.”

But on October 28, Jim Cantwell of the Catholic press and information office backtracked in a letter to The Irish Times. Cantwell now accepted the woman had rung the Cardinal’s office but claimed her calls were a source of confusion. There was an identification problem since the woman called under her married name, which was unfamiliar to the Cardinal’s office. Also, wrote Cantwell, the “caller didn’t give sufficient information to the Cardinal’s secretary to enable the Cardinal to identify Fr. Smyth as the subject.”

Yet again, the explanation takes the breath away. Confusion of identity is possible over the first call but surely not the second. And didn’t the Cardinal’s secretary, or whoever took the calls, have the commonsense and Christian compassion to get the fullest information from the stricken woman?

After all, in 1987, Cardinal Daly states that he had “advised my priests that children who report incidents of this nature should be presumed to be telling the truth and should be treated very sympathetically.” Six years later, this doesn’t appear to be the policy of the Cardinal’s secretariat.

On December 8, the Irish Press reported further developments. According to Mr. Pat Eastwood, solicitor for the woman, she “had written to the Cardinal last October looking for information about the affair, but has yet to receive a reply.”

“When she contacted his office about the matter on the day Cardinal Daly issued his 16-point statement she was told she was ‘in his thoughts’ - the same reply she received when she contacted his office two weeks earlier looking for a reply to her letter.”

Mr. Eastwood also requested the Cardinal to answer the “serious questions” left unanswered in his recent statement. Apparently the Cardinal had already written a letter to the family in which he indicated he had already received complaints about the priest. According to the Irish Press, the solicitor then called on the Cardinal “to clarify when he had received those complaints and to explain why he had not alerted the R.U.C. to them.”

Here, there is potentially a possible and major conflict of evidence. How does this letter to the family square with the Cardinal’s statement that he had no knowledge of Fr. Smyth’s history of abuse?

In the last paragraph of the report, the Irish Press carried a response from a Catholic Church spokesman who said “A reply to the issues raised by the solicitor would also take long consideration,” and added “that the Cardinal would not be commenting further on his statement.”

Against this background, none of Cardinal Daly’s statements read anything like a complete disclosure of the facts. Of course, one can try to place a more favourable interpretation on his lack of frankness and refusal to answer many vital questions. The family are now suing the Cardinal, Fr. Smyth and Abbot Smith. He may have been advised that he has legitimate and not necessarily dishonourable legal reasons to withhold certain information before the case comes to court. Probably there are also other issues of high ecclesiastical politics yet to surface.

But it really doesn’t wash. Cardinal Daly’s statements are far from the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God. We are waiting . . .