Distressing news in the Year for Priests! Obviously, things like these are infinitely more painful to the Holy Father than his temporary disability! Let us pray for all bishops and priests.
Ireland report shows
'horrific acts of depravity'
By SHAWN POGATCHNIK
DUBLIN, July 22 (AP) — A new report by investigators into the Catholic Church's cover-up of child abuse in Dublin details "horrific acts of depravity" that went for decades without prosecution, Ireland's justice minister said Tuesday.
The report to Justice Minister Dermot Ahern comes two months after publication of an even bigger investigation into how scores of church-run schools, orphanages and reformatories harbored child abusers in religious orders from the 1930s to 1990s.
Irish taxpayers have already paid out nearly euro1 billion ($1.4 billion) to more than 12,000 victims from that system.
Ahern said he would publish the new report, which probes how the Dublin archdiocese's bishops dealt with scores of priests accused of child abuse from 1975 to 2004, after Attorney General Paul Gallagher vets it for legal problems.
The justice minister suggested that the government might be advised to censor details involving criminal cases against three Catholic priests expected to face trial in Dublin next year. The Justice Department said the review could take several weeks.
"I am anxious that the matters dealt with in the report are put into the public domain as quickly as possible," Ahern said.
The Dublin report took three years to produce under the direction of a Dublin High Court judge, Justice Yvonne Murphy.
It covers the cases of 46 priests implicated in abusing hundreds of children — and, in almost all cases, being transferred to new parishes by bishops who didn't tell police or other child-protection authorities about the crimes or dangers. The 46 cases were drawn from a much larger pool of priests suspected of harming children.
Several of the cases are already well known to the Irish public, thanks in part to a former altar boy, Andrew Madden, who in the early 1990s became the first abuse victim to sue the church in Dublin for protecting sex-abuser priests. The Dublin archdiocese paid him a confidential out-of-court settlement — but he went public with the deal after church leaders claimed they had admitted no wrongdoing in his case.
The priest who raped Madden, Ivan Payne, was convicted in 1998 of raping at least eight boys and removed from the priesthood.
Madden predicted that the Dublin report would fire a new wave of anger at the church.
"The thing that will really shock people this time is simply seeing how many senior church people in Dublin knew exactly what was going on," he said in an interview. "They had so much evidence of the dangers these priests were posing to children, but they just kept moving them on to new parishes."
In Madden's case, the priest who sodomized him was sent to a different part of Dublin — where he was placed in charge of that parish's altar boys.
Catholic abuse scandals have done exceptional damage to the Church's standing in Ireland, a once-devout nation where Mass attendance has slumped over the past two decades.
Second child abuse uproar
engulfs Church in Ireland
by David Sharrock
July 22, 2009
A report detailing the alleged sexual abuse of 450 children by Roman Catholic priests in the Archdiocese of Dublin was handed to the Irish Government yesterday.
It is the second one this year to examine the extent of abuse perpetrated by members of the Catholic Church in Ireland and will undermine further its position in a country that only a few decades ago conformed rigidly to standards set by the Vatican.
The Report of the Dublin Archdiocese Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse was delivered to Dermot Ahern, the Justice Minister, who must decide if and when to make its findings public.
Two priests named in the report are facing prosecution and publication may prejudice their trials.
When the Ryan commission report found systematic sexual, physical and emotional abuse of hundreds of thousands of children in institutions run by the Christian Brothers, Sisters of Mercy and other religious orders, there was national anger.
Dr Diarmuid Martin, the Archbishop of Dublin, has already acknowledged that this is likely to be repeated once the latest report is published. Dr Martin handed over 66,583 documents to the commission, which is presided over by Justice Yvonne Murphy.
In a television documentary, he said that
since 1940, more than 400 children had been abused by at least 152 priests in the Dublin area. In April the Archbishop told his congregation that the report’s revelations would “shock and horrify us all”.
He said: “It is likely that thousands of young people across Ireland were abused by priests in the period under investigation and the horror of that abuse was not recognised for what it is.”
The commission was established in 2006 and has investigated how allegations of child sex abuse made against a representative sample of 46 priests were handled by 19 bishops in Dublin from January 1975 to April 2004.
The report is likely to produce
evidence of how bishops sought to cover up the activities of paedophile priests by moving them from diocese to diocese, thereby facilitating the abuse of children over a wider area.
[Sounds distressingly familiar from the US experience!]
The arrest in 1994 of Father Brendan Smyth, who was convicted of abusing children in Dublin, Belfast and the US over 40 years, led to the collapse of the Irish Government.
Last year Cardinal Desmond Connell, who was replaced as Archbishop of Dublin by Dr Martin in 2004, abandoned a lengthy legal challenge to his successor’s transfer of tens of thousands of church files to the commission.
The cardinal, who retired under criticism for his handling of clerical sex abuse allegations, had argued that the files were legally privileged.
The commission investigated nineteen bishops, seven of whom are dead. Its report is expected to name fifteen priests, eleven of whom have been convicted.