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What I did not realize, however, was how effective the black propaganda was against Brady in even depriving him, as Oddie points out, of his moral authority as Primate of All Ireland. It is a sad indication of how the majority of Irish Catholics have bought into the media narrative painting the Church in Ireland and its bishops as hopelessly irredeemable and untrustworthy. It is a most undeserved ending to the ecclesiastical career of a bishop who was widely hailed as one of the biggest stars in Benedict XVI's star-studded second consistory in November 2007. In fact, he caught my attention at the time because the reporting about, even in the Irish and British press, was so effusive and glowing!
Cardinal Brady now has a coadjutor and
will almost certainly retire early,
after a wholly undeserved media
witch-hunt, incited by the BBC
He has suffered a profound injustice: and
the BBC now has yet another reason to be ashamed of itself
By William Oddie
Monday, 21 January 2013
It has been announced that Mgr Eamon Martin has been appointed Archbishop coadjutor of Armagh. That means that when Cardinal Seán Brady retires, he will succeed him as Primate of all Ireland. Cardinal Brady would have come to his normal retirement age in August 2014, and in theory he could carry on until then.
But under the circumstances everyone knows that he will almost certainly retire at some point later this year, finally driven out by the storm of controversy that broke over his head after a BBC documentary last year (in my opinion an utterly scurrilous piece of work) “revealed” that when he was a priest, he had the names and addresses of children abused by the paedophile priest Brendan Smyth, but did not pass them on to the police.
The fact is that it was not his responsibility, nor did he have any authority, to do anything of the kind; nor was it a requirement of the Irish law at the time that he or anyone else should do so. The BBC’s “revelations”, however, led to a media and political furore which greatly weakened the cardinal’s credibility and, inevitably, his moral authority as head of the Irish Church.
My own reaction can be summarised in the headline of an article I wrote in this column at the time: “Cardinal Brady’s situation is now irretrievable, and he would be wise, therefore, to retire; but the storm beating down on him is wholly undeserved. [Benedict XVI apparently did not think Brady should resign summarily, because it took him more than two years to act on Cardinal Brady's own request back in 2010 to have a coadjutor bishop named for Armagh.]
I had come to hope that I had got it wrong, and that it might be turning out that he was in fact re-establishing his authority: it seems now that he, from the storm’s epicentre, had come to the same conclusion that I and others had from its periphery, and that he had asked the Holy Father for a coadjutor.
I cannot let his retirement be announced, however, without one more effort at least to set the record straight: for, already, history is being rewritten. According to today’s Irish Times, for instance, the then Fr Brady actually himself conducted the inquiry into allegations of paedophilia against Fr Brendan Smyth; the Irish Independent simply says he was, as a young priest and canon lawyer, “made aware in the 1970s of abuse by Smyth – but did not inform the police or the abused children’s parents”.
The general composite version is that he was in charge of the inquiry and didn’t inform the police of its findings as it was his duty to do: in some versions, this put him in contravention of the Irish law, even though it was only much later that the Irish law was changed to make informing the police a requirement, not simply for the Church but for everyone else (contrary to popular opinion, there was at the time plenty of paedophilia in Irish civil society at large, as there was in our own).
It became generally believed last year that it was because of something the young Fr Brady had actually done, or failed to do, that Brendan Smith carried on abusing children, as though Fr Brady had episcopal responsibility even then.
But he wasn’t the bishop, he was the bishop’s secretary. Wait, Mr. Oddie. I have to check back, but as I understand it from what the cardinal said, he was a high-school teacher at the time and was asked by the bishop to come in and record the answers to what was supposed to be an SOP interrogation of a child claiming to be a victim of a priest's sexual abuse. This was not at all part of his regular duties then.]
As he said at the time, in response to the BBC’s deplorable (but all too successful) essay in character assassination, “the commentary in the programme and much of the coverage of my role in this inquiry gives the impression that I was the only person who knew of the allegations against Brendan Smyth at that time and that because of the office I hold in the Church today I somehow had the power to stop Brendan Smyth in 1975. I had absolutely no authority over Brendan Smyth. Even my bishop had limited authority over him… As Mgr Charles Scicluna, Promoter of Justice at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, confirmed in an interview with RTÉ this morning, it was Brendan Smyth’s superiors in the Norbertine Order who bear primary responsibility for failing to take the appropriate action when presented with the weight of evidence I had faithfully recorded and that Bishop McKiernan subsequently presented to them."
As Cardinal Brady said then (though no one allowed anything he had to say in his own defence to spoil a rattling good witch hunt in full cry). the documentation of the inquiry describes the then Fr Brady simply as the “notary” or “note taker” of the proceedings. He did not formulate the questions asked in the inquiry process. He did not put the questions. He simply recorded the answers.
I end now as I ended then, in May last year: “There is much more that could be said in defence of Cardinal Brady: but who would listen? I fear that his position is now irretrievable, and that for the good of the Irish Church, it would probably be wise for him to ask for the Holy Father’s permission to take early retirement. It seems to me, nevertheless, that he has suffered, at the hands of the [BBC] This World programme, a profound injustice … and that when he finally does bow before the storm, as he almost certainly must, it should be well understood that this is one of those resignations for the greater good which have nothing to do with any culpability on the part of the person resigning.”
The BBC now has its own paedophile scandals, one of which includes its attempt to blacken the character of Lord MacAlpine — another false accusation which was at least authoritatively denounced in such a way that Lord MacAlpine’s reputation was quickly restored, and a very senior head, that of the BBC director general, duly rolled.
That was the MacAlpine affair: this should come to be called the Brady affair, and BBC heads should roll over this one, too. They won’t, of course, it’s too late, and anyway, who cares about justice for Catholic prelates? But would the BBC have attempted the same kind of character assassination today? Would they not now have to be more careful? It’s an interesting question.
One must not forget that the very first vicious and shamelessly unscrupulous black propaganda launched against Benedict VXI early in his Papacy was a BBC documentary about sexual abuses by priests, in the autumn of 2005. It was so titillating - to those who get their cheap thrills this way - that an Italian TV channel bought the rights and rebroadcast it in Italian two years later, provoking a media storm in Italy at the time.
In effect, the documentary directly accused Cardinal Ratzinger of having instructed all the bishops of the world to cover up any sex offenses by their priests, and to do this, they absurdly attributed a 1960s document issued in Latin by the then CDF Prefect - of which the BBC provided a deliberately distorted translation to 'prove their point' - to Joseph Ratzinger, who, at the time, was a German university professor and would have had no business issuing any document from a Curial office that he would happen to come to head fully two decades later!
But the BBC never retracted their lies, much less made any apologies. The lying was on the magnitude of Irish Premier Enda Kenny's personal rant against Benedict XVI on the floor of the Irish Parliament in 2010. The most that can be said for BBC is that they did not dare resurrect that evil and malicious documentary at the time of the Pope's state visit to the UK. Perhaps by then, they realized they had milked it all they could, and to resurrect it would only highlight the malicious lies they propagated.
In both of the BBC black propaganda pieces - against B16 and against Brady - the ultimate recourse must be factual. What did the 1960s CDF document actually say? what did Cardinal Ratzinger say and do about the sex abuse problem at the CDF and later as Pope? In the case of Brady, go back to the actual documentation made at the time of the event. But as Oddie says, who will care? No one cared about easily verifiable facts when Soviet propaganda all but blamed the entire Holocaust on Pius XII's alleged 'silence', as though Hitler and the Nazis had no role in it at all. And the black legend has persisted four decades now.
If there were an iota of truth in the BBC hatchet job against Benedict XVI, it would have been enough to 'destroy' him, but since even the rest of MSM - as gloatingly as they passed on the errors (not, of course, labeled as such) of the BBC with impunity since they were only reporting on the documentary - could not go on to seriously build any case on a document issued in the 1960s which was, moreover, falsely translated! (Not even the AP nor the New York Times, in their furious frenzy in 2010 to pin any accusation that would show Benedict XVI had anything to do with covering up sex abuses before he became Pope, dared refer to the BBC lie. Much easier, however, for BBC to impugn Sean Brady for what appeared to be an entirely random association with Brendan Smyth - who would gain notoriety two decades after the event, and who has become the emblem of everything that was wrong with the way the Church in Ireland handled the sex abuse problems before 1994.
P.S. In case anyone is interested, here's a report I posted on the Forum in May 2010 at the time Cardinal Brady first asked for a coadjutor bishop to be named for Armagh.
benedettoxviforum.freeforumzone.leonardo.it/discussione.aspx?idd=8593...
It includes a statement by him on the state of fighting priestly abuse and safeguarding childre in the diocese, and is a surprising gesture of fairness from the usually belligerent Irish Times (one of those who headlned the recent appointment of a coadjutor as if it were stinging slap at Brady from the Vatican!
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 21/01/2013 21:31] |