Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of 
The United States is not the only country where the Catholic Church spent decades covering up the sexual abuse of children by priests. The government of Ireland has released a massive new report on the issue in their own country that shows the exact same behavior in that country by church officials. Though the church was notified of more than 300 complaints against 46 priests after 1975, it did not report a single case to the police, according to the New York Times:
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.
But the church knew about hundreds more cases of abuse by their priests:
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. Dublin church leaders publicly denied the existence of the problem for a decade afterward -- but since the mid-1990s have paid out more than euro10 million ($15 million) in settlements and legal bills.
Even worse, when some reports did make it to the police, Catholic officers sometimes refused to do anything about them, allowing the church to handle it themselves:
The report cited documents showing how church officials learned about some cases only when devoutly Catholic police received complaints from children or their parents -- but handed responsibility back to church leaders to sort out the problems themselves.
And the church handled it the same way they did in America, but just moving the priest to a new parish where they could find new victims, without ever bothering to inform anyone - and worse yet, tried to hide the evidence they had from the police.
Three Dublin archbishops -- John Charles McQuaid (1940-72), Dermot Ryan (1972-84) and Kevin McNamara (1985-87) -- did not tell police about clerical abuse cases, instead opting to avoid public scandals by shuttling offenders from parish to parish and even overseas to U.S. churches, the commission found.It was not until 1995 that then-Archbishop Connell allowed police to see church files on 17 clerical abuse cases. At that time, Connell actually held records of complaints against at least 29 priests, the report found. Connell later pursued a lawsuit against the investigators in an abandoned bid to keep them from seeing more than 5,500 files documenting the church's knowledge of abusive priests.
The report said all four archbishops sought ''the maintenance of secrecy, the avoidance of scandal, the protection of the reputation of the church, and the preservation of its assets. All other considerations, including the welfare of children and justice for victims, were subordinated to these priorities.''
Archcbishop Connell, if he is still alive, should be in prison. So should Cardinal Law of Boston and a whole bunch of other bishops and archbishops who covered up child molestation by those under their command and failed to report their crimes to the police. They are accessories after the fact, at bare minimum.
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They were only following the official church policy as specified in Crimen Sollicitatiois, instructions from the vatican itsself that not only order priests *not* to report accusations to abuse to police, but states that they may be excommunicated for violating the seal of the confessional if they do.
This is truely an institutional policy, going from the lowest levels of the church right up to the Pope himself - both the current pope and his predecessor.
Posted by: Suricou Raven | December 1, 2009 9:22 AM
I've been following this over the while, it's worth pointing out Archbishop Connel only allowed police to see church files inn 1995 after Ivan Payne was exposed as a paedophile. The catholic church in Ireland has been doing pretty much everything it could get away with to delay or impeed this investigation.
This whole saga makes me ashamed to be Irish, but proud to be an ex-catholic, and very proud of the abuse victims who had the courage to shatter the churches wall of silence. I hope it leads to the prosecution of those involved in the cover-up, and the seperation of church and state in Ireland (in particular an end to church control of state schools) but make no mistake about it even with these new revelations that will not be an easy task.
Posted by: Paul Browne | December 1, 2009 9:26 AM
So, Bishops on both sides of the Atlantic decided to react to similar problems in similar ways. Why? Some possibilities....
1) Deliberate, co-ordinated conspiracy. Listed because the possibility is obvious to a paranoid (I just finished Destroyer of Worlds last night), but it's not likely.
2) Lateral meme transfer; which is to say, a priest familiar with such resolutions in one archdioscese is transferred across the Atlantic, subsequently promoted, and who uses the solution he knew of. Possible, but only a little more likely than the first.
3) Quasi-independent evolution: working with no knowledge of other instances, multiple bishops came up with and identified roughly same solution as "best". This last seems the most likely of the options I can picture.
Presuming it is indeed (3), then the root of the problem is not any single human, but rather some damning flaw in the culture of the Catholic Clergy. In which case, these admissions and apologies are merely addressing the symptoms of the problem, but not directly dealing with the yet-unidentified root problem.
Posted by: abb3w | December 1, 2009 10:35 AM
In the interests of reducing our carbon footprint, I think it would be prudent to recycle the apologetics for the Irish Catholic school sexual abuse scandal here.
And to point out that this was not rape, it was as consensual as consensual can be with 13-16 year olds. And hardly any of them were girls. And the Church admits it has a problem with gay priests, hates the sin but loves the sinner, and why are you complaining about our humane rehabilitation for ecclesiastical pederasts, they are your constituency and at least we are praying for them.
And we will pray for you, too.
Posted by: Pat Donohue's Dad | December 1, 2009 10:37 AM
Suricou Raven--
Is it actually Catholic Church/Vatican policy that all accusations of rape or sexual abuse against a priest are treated as under confessional seal even if the accusation is made outside of confession, say, by a child or their parent walking into a church office to file a complaint? (I can see how someone might stretch "the priest had sex with me" to count as "confession" because it's a description of non-marital sex, but how can they stretch it to "Father So-and-So raped my child"?)
Posted by: Vicki | December 1, 2009 11:14 AM
I smell insurance fraud in this as well. The report states that the Irish church had a secret insurance policy. How is hiding the extent of the liability from the insurer not fraud?
The catholic church clearly doesn't respond to the evil done the name of the church. Jail seems unlikely for the bishops covering up the abuse. The only recourse I see is for the church to pay and pay huge sums even to the point of bankruptcy. Pay up and/or go away.
Posted by: MikeMa | December 1, 2009 11:46 AM
Vicki, I think the Church's position is that they became aware of the problem, in most cases, through the pederast's, err ummm, priest's own confession. Im not sure, but they may additionally be applying a "fruit of the poison tree" approach to all subsequent knowledge.
Posted by: Dave | December 1, 2009 11:48 AM
MikeMa @ 6:
It's my understanding that the Catholic Church in terms of its legal entities is many individual entities in order to protect the church as a whole from the misbehavior of its grass roots priests. This is why its so imperative that law enforcement prosecute bishops and cardinals with conspiracy charges and whose positions are more elevated than these entities, which they've essentially failed to do in any country.
Posted by: Michael Heath | December 1, 2009 1:35 PM
It would have been much, much better if they'd just bought that damn island to ship these predators off to, as one of the priests in charge of treating the "sinning" priests had suggested back in the 60's.
These are men who were practically guaranteed to re-offend, and they send them off to tiny little places where they are the *only* authority (esp in Alaska), and anyone expected them to stop? That's not hoping for a miracle, that's somewhere between stupid and evil.
Noting good can possibly come of these people, why does anyone insist on giving them any respect at all?
Posted by: JustaTech | December 1, 2009 1:50 PM
" but it's not likely."
No? The Irish and American churches aren't completely independent. There's the church hierarchy.
The most likely scenario I think is that Archbishops in various locations consulted with the Vatican, and that's why their actions were similar around the world.
Posted by: Jon H | December 1, 2009 2:13 PM
"1) Deliberate, co-ordinated conspiracy. Listed because the possibility is obvious to a paranoid (I just finished Destroyer of Worlds last night), but it's not likely."
Paranoid, but supported by evidence. The Crimen Sollicitatiois to which I revered, written by the church in 1962 (later updated in 2001) specifies exactly what the response to accusations of child abuse by the clergy should be.
Made brief, the incriminating sections say that:
- All such incidents are to be subject to the internal investigation and diciplinary process of the church, rather than regarded as under the jurisdiction of secular authorities.
- Regarding these church trials, they are to be considered absolutly confidential - all involved are forbidden, underpenalty of excommunication, to speak of them to anyone not involved with the trial regardless of the outcome.
If you want the details, you can find the document easily enough on google.
Posted by: Suricou Raven | December 1, 2009 2:23 PM
I think its time for a clerical nuclear option- ending or reducing the priest-penitent privilege to the point that priests are required to report serious crimes, or at least crimes that are being confessed to repeatedly. Personally, I think it should be dispensed with almost in its entirety, but I don't something like that would fly.
Posted by: History Punk | December 1, 2009 5:27 PM
History punk:
If Church rules directed the concealing of child abuse from authorities, then wouldn't it also be reasonable to issue an arrest warrant for the Pope and a few other senior officials in the Church. Hell, if you want a nuclear option, you could use those delightful conspiracy laws you have against the entire Catholic Church.
Posted by: James K | December 2, 2009 12:02 AM
An interesting sidebar to this is what I heard from an Irish friend of mine. He says that the Irish church couldn't pay all the claims, and so the Roman Church agreed to pay them, but the price for doing so was the new law in Ireland against blasphemy.
I don't have anything to back up what he says... anyone else have any confirmation or debunking on it?
Posted by: Mary A. Axford | December 2, 2009 12:30 PM
Sickening that this openly pedophile culture forces itself into secular discussions and legislative debates about same-sex marriage and reproductive rights.
These are clearly men who have extremely severe adult intimacy limitations, and as such these crap-weasels should be prevented from setting the tone for those of us who aren't so criminally-impaired.
http://jonathanturley.org/2009/12/02/cardinal-no-gays-go-to-heaven/#comment-94432
Posted by: Deb Spilko | December 2, 2009 9:51 PM
Why is it so hard to get a full list of all priests under invesigation of child abuse, as a parent I feel we have a right to know who and what we are dealing with, also these men should be named and shamed. It is important to remember that there are indeed some good and genuine priest out there and it is unfair that they are left under this cloud
Posted by: mag | December 27, 2009 5:56 PM