Following a nine-year investigation and a devastating 2,600-page report, Dublin Archbishop Diarmuid Martin slammed Irish Catholic orders Monday for concealing their culpability in decades of child abuse. Archbishop Martin is a veteran Vatican diplomat who also believes more money, a considerable amount, needs to be provided to compensate the victims of this abuse.
The report, which was released last week, details abuse in church-run industrial schools in Ireland from the 1930s to the 1990s. Yes, that’s right. A 60-year gap, in which these crimes were not just committed, but covered up. And even more shocking, the findings won’t be used for criminal prosecutions, due in part to the Christian Brothers having successfully sued the commission in 2004. No real identities, either of victim or perpetrator, even appear in the final document. And so the cover up continues.
Documents uncovered include those which show the Vatican had knowledge that the pedophiles were serial attackers. Yet church officials shielded them to protect their own reputations. Least they forget what they preach, pride does go before the fall.
Archbishop Martin, whose archdiocese has over 1 million of the island’s 4 million Catholics, goes on to say in an Irish Times column that the church in Ireland has “lost credibility because of its weak response to 15 years of revelations of chronic child abuse within its ranks”, and that church leaders remain “in denial” even with the report documenting beyond any doubt “church institutions where children were placed in the care of people with practically no morals.” Investigators were overwhelmed by the consistent and in many cases still close to the surface trauma these men and women endured, concluding, “A climate of fear, created by pervasive, excessive and arbitrary punishment, permeated most of the institutions and all those run for boys. Children lived with the daily terror of not knowing where the next beating was coming from,”
Hiding behind religion and self-righteousness the system treated these children like prison inmates with no legal or human rights. And even within this 2,600-page report the Vatican faces off with impunity. Certainly apologies have been offered. Such as this one from Cardinal Sean Brady, the leader of Ireland’s 4 million Catholics and religious orders at the center of the scandal, “I am profoundly sorry and deeply ashamed that children suffered in such awful ways in these institutions. Children deserved better and especially from those caring for them in the name of Jesus Christ,”
The Sisters of Mercy, which ran several refuges for girls where the report documented chronic brutality, said in a statement its nuns, “accept that many who spent their childhoods in our orphanages or industrial schools were hurt and damaged while in our care.”
I guess there are no right things to say in this situation. Oh wait, there are. The names of those who “hurt and damaged” those children. Culpability is not the only thing needed here though. In a 2002 agreement with the Irish government over compensation for the victims, those who accept the state settlement must waive their rights to sue either the church or the government. Many of the alleged victims have refused the offer and sued church and state authorities, with mixed results.
Archbishop Martin is a pillar in a pile of salt (yes, biblical reference implied) He is outspoken both about naming names and about due compensation to the victims. He has advocated that the orders of nuns and Catholic brothers who ran the workhouse-style schools drop their refusal to renegotiate an intensely criticized 2002 agreement with the Irish government over compensation for victims.
In perhaps one slim ray of light Ireland’s national police force, the Garda Siochana, announced Monday that a senior detective would study the report to see if it provided any new evidence for prosecuting clerics for assault, rape or other criminal offenses. But again, the report did not identify any abusers by name thanks to the unbelievable right-to-privacy lawsuit by the Christian Brothers order.
Colm O’Gorman, one of Ireland’s most prominent abuse victims, is demanding more, “Let the Vatican, one of the wealthiest institutions on the planet, come in and underwrite this awful lack of accountability.”