Report: Irish bishops hid abuse for decades
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: November 26, 2009
"... 'They were wrong, and children were left to suffer.''
...There was a similarly shocking investigation into decades of unchecked child abuse in Irish schools, workhouses and orphanages run nationwide by 19 Catholic orders of nuns, priests and brothers.
That report in May sought to document the scale of abuse as well as the reasons why church and state authorities didn't stop it, whereas Thursday's 720-page report focused on why church leaders in the Dublin Archdiocese -- home to a quarter of Ireland's 4 million Catholics -- did not tell police about a single abuse complaint against a priest until 1995.
By then, the investigators found, successive archbishops and their senior deputies -- among them qualified lawyers -- already had compiled confidential files on more than 100 parish priests who had sexually abused children since 1940. Those files had remained locked in the Dublin archbishop's private vault.
The investigators also dug up a paper trail documenting the church's long-secret insurance policy, taken out in 1987, to cover potential lawsuits and compensation demands. ...
Thursday's report detailed ''sample'' cases of 46 priests who faced 320 documented complaints, although the investigators said they were confident that the priests had abused many more children than that. They cited testimony from one priest who admitted abusing more than 100 children, and another priest who said he abused a child approximately every two weeks for 25 years. ... " read full report here
The answer to the WHY here in this article by AP "... report in May sought to document the scale of abuse as well as the reasons why church and state authorities didn't stop it ..."
"The 1962 Vatican doc spells out that secrecy is required under penalty of excommunication." --William F. McMurry. And, further explained in detail by William in The Unbreakable Child's Afterword.
Response Statement on article: by Barbara Blaine of Chicago, Founder and President of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests November 27, 2009
"... One sentence says it all: "The most senior figures in the Irish hierarchy did not report these crimes. . .because of an obsessive culture of secrecy and a desire to preserve the power and aura of the Church and to avoid giving scandal to their congregations."
… In our view, perhaps the main reason so many children were so severely violated and so many Catholic employees hid the crimes can be summed up in just a few words: the rigid, secretive, all-male monarchy that is the church hierarchy. Sadly, despite all these crimes and revelations that structure and culture remains fully intact.
Let's keep in mind that while the report said "the structures and rules of the Catholic Church facilitated (the) “cover up" of child sex crimes, merely changing church rules is insufficient. It's the centuries-old secretive and monarchical culture of the church that needs reforming. Church rules are largely irrelevant, because given the nearly limitless power of bishops, there's rarely any real recourse when bishops break such rules.
Let's remember that when wrong-doing goes unpunished, wrong-doing is rewarded and repeated. History, psychology and common sense tell us that one effective way to deter others from hurtful misbehavior is to punish those who engage in hurtful misbehavior. It's not vengeful to insist that those who harmed kids - directly by abuse or less directly by cover ups - face criminal prosecution. It's right, just and caring."
