Pressure was today piling on the Bishop of Derry over his involvement in an alleged compensation cover-up.
After revelations in the Belfast Telegraph yesterday over a settlement to an abuse victim, Dr Seamus Hegarty has confirmed that his diocese facilitated a confidentiality clause in an out-of-court settlement in 2000.
Dr Hegarty was one of three priests named in a confidential civil settlement after an eight-year-old girl was abused over a decade from 1979.
Read the rest of the article. Why now? Why the years of silence after the series of revelations of child abuse and cover-up by Roman Catholic clergy in the US? I left the Roman Catholic Church 14 years ago because of the local stories of child abuse and cover-up in my diocese of Houma-Thibodaux. With scant national media coverage, the story stayed under the radar for several years until stories of child abuse began to surface all over the US.
Why the several intervening years of relative quiet before the stories of abuse come to light in Europe, years during which the powers in the church were able to say that the abusive behavior was mainly confined to the US? I'm truly puzzled by the years-long gaps.
From several days ago in the Guardian:
Ireland's most senior Catholic cleric tonight faced down calls to resign after revealing that he was at a secret tribunal where sex abuse victims were made to take an oath of silence.
Cardinal Sean Brady said that he had attended two meetings in 1975 concerning Father Brendan Smyth, a notorious paedophile, where two of Smyth's victims signed an affidavit promising to discuss their claims only with a specified priest.
....
"Frankly I don't believe that this is a resigning matter," Brady said.
The tribunal was held behind closed doors in 1975. Smyth was accused of sexually abusing two 10-year-olds, but the church did not inform the gardai about the allegations at the time. It was only in 1994, after a documentary about Smyth, that the church admitted it had known about his paedophilia and moved him around Ireland, Britain and the US, where he continued to abuse children.
Eight and ten year old children! I want to let this story go, but I can't. It was no small thing for me to leave the church in which I had spent the greater part of my life, but I could not stay. When I went to mass, I was agitated to such an extent that I had to stop attending. I could not pay my tithe. When I went to write a check, my hand froze. I don't want this post to be all about me. What I suffered is nothing compared to the horrors that the children and their families suffered. So why do I go on about the matter? To show that the damage does not stop with the children who were abused and their families? To vent? I don't know, but a sense of horror akin to the horror I felt when the story of the abusive behavior first broke in my diocese wells up within. A flashback, one might say.
Lord, have mercy on us all!
It is, indeed, a church in deep crisis.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad you do go on. It's easy for the enormity of what happened to get lost, trivialized, and even satirized - and for us to become numb. Thanks for keeping the reality in front of us.
ReplyDeleteThis may be terribly inappropriate...but here goes:Why do I keep thinking that one way through this horrible mess is if someone became the Simon Weisenthal of this generation. Where are all these guys? Would being under the threat of being exposed (NPI)do anything here? Sometimes all I can think of is how exposed and 'blasted' the victims must feel. Why not the perps? I am just sayin'.
ReplyDeleteamyj
My WV is ackasigh....yep.
Mimi, I was not raised in the Roman Catholic Church but I do know the sense of loss that one feels when having to walk away from the church in which you are raised, when you no longer belong, when you ideals the church's ideals are so far apart you can no longer bear it. However, I, did not leave my church because children where sexually abused. I read stories and hear the news of the unfolding story of child molestation in the RC church but I do not see the hierarchy of the RC church exhibiting the kind of horror that you and I feel. Where is their sense of outrage that they should feel at a child being harmed much less thousand of children. Where is the mourning for those children that were hurt. I don't see anyone in charge rushing to protect children. They seem to trying to protect each other and their assets. I think that is the most horrifying part.
ReplyDeleteWhy to they persist in handling each new eruption as an isolated incident? They still cannot or will not recognize it as yet another symptom of a rottenness that lies at the heart of their system?
ReplyDeleteAmy, some of the abusers are dead. One priest whom I know is in prison for life.
ReplyDeleteThere are groups, such as SNAP, who document the abuse as reported by those who have been abused. Some of the cases are from years ago, and the abusers are dead. In some, instances the statute of limitations has kicked in.
Two Auntees, there are more safeguards now in the RCC to guard against abuse. The earlier thinking within the hierarchy seems to have been that the institution needed protection more than the children. Appalling, I know.
agree with Mary-Cauliflower - I am glad you are talking about this. The more people talk about it, the better. The more people leave the RCC over it, as you have, the better.
ReplyDeleteIt seems obvious to me that one of the main reasons you keep returning to the subject is your sense of justice, pure and simple. Justice needs to be done.
Lapin, the rot is institutional, and yet good priests and good people remain in the RCC. I can't ignore that. I know them. I know the works that they do. They live the Gospel in spite of their leaders.
ReplyDeleteCathy, I can't seem to leave the subject alone. The person that I am today was formed by my 16 years of RC education and my many years beyond my schooling within the church.
However, my years in the Episcopal Church have been a great blessing to me. I suppose all things come their proper time.
I realize that, Mimi, and was not intending to condemn the RC Church lock, stock & barrel. Do think that the continuing institutional inability to face up to the magnitude of the problem is inexcusable. Cardinal O'Malley, Law's successor at Boston, seems to have done a decent job. Reading his Wiki entry I see that "At the time of his elevation into the College of Cardinals, he joked that the scarlet robes ...... would be useful in the case he was invited to go quail hunting with Vice President Dick Cheney."
ReplyDeleteMimi
ReplyDeleteit's important that people like you don't leave the story alone.
Just imagine the horror if these reports came out and nobody would bat an eyelid, nobody would be horrified, nobody would feel the need to write about it.
Could you imagine the effect that would have on the abused, their friends and families, many of whom are bound to feel just like you but without your skill for giving it voice?
Thank you Mimi! I sit every month in SNAP meetings and hear the pain and often inarticulate anguish which victims and their loved ones feel and express. ... and the oppressive helplessness against a formidable, wealthy adversary. These survivors feel forgotten and discounted! But finally ... a little bit of vindication. Until the public and average Catholic tires of feeling "icky".
ReplyDeleteI counted 18 lines addressed to victims and their families in the whole 8 1/2 page opus from BXVI to the Irish Church. What's up with that?!
It's STILL all about the hierarchy and the clergy, the peons will always play second fiddle, until they get sick and tired of being sick and tired.
John
Thanks to all of you for your kind words. As you see, I've done another post on the subject, and I'm working on yet another now. Feel free to call me obsessed. ;-)
ReplyDeleteYou are a victim too, and you have a right to tell your story and be heard. Keep going.
ReplyDelete