Mass child sex abuse: ‘the structures and rules of the Catholic Church facilitated the cover-up’
From Cranmer(Clip)
The Report of the Commission of Investigation into the Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin covered a period from 1975 to 2004. The scrutiny of just these past 30 years has revealed a cesspit of depravity and a sewer of corruption on a scale one could scarcely believe. God alone knows what might be uncovered if the previous 30 years were examined, or the 30 before that.
The report states: ‘The Dublin archdiocese's pre-occupations in dealing with cases of child sexual abuse, at least until the mid 1990s, were the maintenance of secrecy, the avoidance of scandal, the protection of the reputation of the Church, and the preservation of its assets.’
Clergy were able to molest hundreds of vulnerable children because of a ‘systemic, calculated perversion of power’ that put their abusers above the law. They refused to pass information to the police, and evidence was kept inside a secret vault in the archbishop's Dublin residence while the paedophile priests were shunted from parish to parish to prevent the allegations being made public.
And the State was complicit, as the Gardai ignored the complaints from victims, effectively granting priests immunity from prosecution. The inquiry found that church authorities nurtured ‘inappropriately close relations’ with senior police officers.
Cranmer is struck by the observation that ‘the structures and rules of the Catholic Church facilitated that cover-up’, for it is a theme to which the Archbishop of Canterbury referred last week in Rome when he repudiated ‘the language of rule and hierarchy established by decree, with fixed divisions between teachers and taught, rulers and ruled’. Power corrupts, and unaccountable power facilitates collusion and cover-up, placing institutions beyond the reach of the normal law enforcement processes.
Quite incredibly (and Cranmer is sincerely shocked by this), the inquiry heard a defence from the former bishops that they did not know sex abuse was a crime.
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