Suffer the children

The Catholic Church in Ireland has been guilty of the most appalling crimes against children. Any lingering doubts that people may have harboured in this regard were blown away last week by the RTE Prime Time documentary, which examined the performance of the Dublin archdiocese in relation to child sex abuse.

The terrible facts about the scale of this scandal have been emerging, bit by bit, over the past number of years. Since the infamous case of Father Brendan Smyth brought down Albert Reynolds’ government in the mid 1990s, the reality of clerical abuse of children, and the way in which it was effectively facilitated by those in positions of power in the Catholic Hierarchy, have been a matter of record.

Gradually, the law began to catch up with men who are best described as serial rapists. Father Ivan Payne, who was a key official in the Dublin Diocesan Marriage Tribunal; Father Sean Fortune, a close aide of Bishop Brendan Comiskey, who ran amok over a number of years in the Ferns diocese and bullied anyone who attempted to trammel his predatory sexual activities in the most flagrant manner; Father Paul McGennis, who used his position as Chaplain in Our Lady’s Hospital for sick children in Crumlin to abuse Marie Collins – and who knows how many others?; Father Noel Reynolds, who admitted to having abused over 100 children; Father Bill Carney and Father Frank McCarthy – the latter a convicted abuser who is currently working in the Diocesan Communications Office in Drumcondra.

The list goes on. Among the strangest cases is that of Monsignor Michael Ledwith. In the early 1980s, a number of seminarians at the college went to the Bishop trustees of Maynooth College, where Ledwith worked, to complain about the sexual harassment of younger seminarians by the Monsignor, who was the Vice President of the college at the time. Their complaints were dismissed. They then went to the senior dean, Father Gerard McGinnity, who took their case to the Bishops for a second time.

Far from being acted upon, the complaints were again ignored. For his trouble, McGinnity was sent on a sabbatical year and then transferred away from the college. And in a demonstration of just how endemic the culture of abuse is within the Church, Monsignor Ledwith was rewarded by being promoted to the Presidency of the College – one of the most prestigious positions in the Church in Ireland.

Despite all of this, the blame for what had happened tended to be placed on the shoulders of the individuals. The hierarchy crept around making apologetic noises just to the degree that they thought would not put them at any greater risk of being sued by the victims. And they repeated the spurious and disingenuous claim that all of these things had happened at a time when neither they nor anyone else understood the nature of paedophilia.

It beggars belief that they were able to lie their way through all of this effectively enough to convince a lot of people of their relative innocence. However in the light of the Prime Time revelations the degree of complicity in the ongoing abuse of children on the part of some of Ireland’s most senior Church men can no longer be hidden. Cardinal Connell, the Archbishop of Dublin, is the one most immediately in the spotlight, and he rightly stands accused of, in the words of one victim, at best incompetence, and at worst deliberately shielding the perpetrators of a ghastly crime.

But there are other Bishops who also neglected either to do enough to safeguard children, knowing as they did about allegations of abuse against certain priests, or to involve the State authorities when they should have.

It seems quite clear that Desmond Connell should resign his position as Archbishop – no matter how you look at it he has failed grossly in his obligations to those who put their trust in him and in his church. I can understand if the victims of abuse feel that it should go further, and that he should be the target of a Garda investigation. I have little stomach for any kind of witch-hunt, but it is easy for me to say that.

Certainly, there is no longer any excuse for the Government to shy away from a full-scale Tribunal of Inquiry into the handling of sex abuse cases in the Dublin diocese. Only through that mechanism – and hopefully the payment of massive damages – can those who have been brutalised achieve any sense of closure.

There is another deeper question that does need to be addressed here. Why is it that the incidence of sexual abuse of children is far higher in the Catholic Church than it is in other Christian religions? There are a number of factors that converge. One, undoubtedly, is the authoritarian nature of the Roman Catholic Church, with its centralised power structure, and the deference to the ruling cadre in the Vatican that flows from that. Can a priest do any wrong? No was the assumed answer – and even if he can, and even if he does, the first rule is that you never admit it.

It is this which makes the Catholic Church a rotten institution, all the way from the top down.

But there is another factor, which is arguably of even greater importance. It is the fact of clerical celibacy. This twisted doctrine – and the associated assumption that to forswear on sex somehow represents a higher calling – has been at the heart of the moral sickness with which the church has poisoned the body politic wherever it is powerful, but especially here in Ireland.

The result of this is that either (a) people of dubious sexuality are drawn to the Church and its cult of male supremacy; or (b) the pressure to remain celibate subverts the sexuality of individuals who might otherwise be sexually balanced, in a way that turns them into the kind of monsters who prey on children.

It is time to challenge the Catholic Church, and its rotten view of sex and sexuality, at the deepest level, and to rout its influence on Irish society. The victims of sexual abuse will have their own feelings about what might be done with the Bishops who colluded in their suffering and I wouldn’t care to argue with whatever is the consensus among them.

But rather than delivering the heads of particular clergy on a plate, my own view is that the best possible response would be to finally make the institution pay by consigning the special position it has had in Ireland and in Irish society to the dustbin of history.

It does not deserve our allegiance. It does not deserve our respect. Let us leave its malign influence behind and embrace a better way of looking at the world.