The Cloyne Report

When Irish society first became aware of the child abuse scandals within the Catholic Church there was a readymade plea in mitigation. It was that back in the dark days of the 1930s and 1940s people didn’t really know much about that stuff.

The argument went that society wasn’t aware of the reality of paedophilia back in the day. The lack of scholarship on the nature of the paedophile would be offered up when examining the historical cases around the institutional abuse in places like the Letterfrack Industrial School and Golden bridge children’s home.

It was of another age and people in Ireland just weren’t aware of these dangers to children.

Similarly with physical abuse it could be argued that this was merely, within the mores of the time, over chastisement.

As a qualified Social Worker I never bought these explanations fully. However there was an element of truth to some of them. The western world had been on a steep learning curve since the 1970s about the dangers posed to children by such men. I knew this from my own academic training that the body of knowledge among public agencies tasked to protect children was lamentable as late as the eighties.

People WEREN’T fully aware of the nature of paedophilia. Hence the policy of the Catholic Church in moving suspected priests from parish to parish was explained as “taking him away from temptation”.

That may have been true, it is certainly the explanation given by many apologists for the church.

However the ignorance of those in management positions within the Catholic Church was the basis of the apologia that followed in the wake of the Brendan Smyth case in 1994.

That was a one off excuse. After Brendan Smyth   all was changed, changed utterly.

After this moment of epiphany in Catholic Ireland no one in the church could claim ignorance of the reality of the mind of a paedophile.

After this moment of epiphany in Catholic Ireland no one in the church could claim ignorance of the reality of the mind of a paedophile.

Now we have the Cloyne Report.

The most depressing aspect of this report is that it is dealing with allegations of abuse made in the County Cork diocese between 1996-2009. Therefore the “Brendan Smyth defence” does not apply.

The three most recent reports into clerical abuse in Ireland have highlighted some common themes:

(1)    Clerics enjoyed extensive “careers” as abusers as they were moved from parish to parish.

(2)    The Church focused on the welfare of the perpetrator rather than his victims.

(3)    The withholding of vital information from the state authorities by senior Churchmen.

There is no evidence that a Catholic priest is more likely to be a paedophile than say a scout leader or the nice man next door. What is at issue here is the behaviour of the Catholic Church AS AN ORGANISATION and  its failure of corporate responsibility.

The Church has not only failed those children whose lives were ruined by appalling abuse. It has also failed the vast majority of decent men of the cloth who  have had their reputation and their lives of service to others called into question

Max Weber stated that modern rational-legal state could not tolerate within its borders anybody that assumed those state powers to itself.

The Catholic Church in Ireland has historically shown little respect for the laws of this state. When pressed about its conduct in dealing with complaints of abuse by its clerics it has continually made reference to “canon law” as if this is some form of diplomatic immunity in Ireland.

Perhaps in times past in Ireland it was. What must happen now, finally, is for this Republic to assert the primacy of state law over everyone, including “Mother Church”.