Vincent and the Visitation, or Confusing Correlation with Causation

I feel uncomfortable commenting on Vincent Browne's article in today's Irish Times, because I've not read Marie Keenan's Child Sexual Abuse and the Catholic Church: Gender, Power and Organisational Culture. It's clearly an important book, and one I'll need to read. 

I've read mountains of statistical data and other research on abuse over the years, with special reference to Ireland and to the Church, but also more broadly, and it does seem to me that this is essential reading. I must know at least a couple of people who have copies, so perhaps I'll see if I can borrow one of theirs at some point.

That said, if Vincent Browne's representation of the book is fair, it seems to have at least one utterly colossal failing. Vincent's article consists of, in the main, two things: a potted summary of Marie Keenan's book, and a completely misguided criticism of the summary report of the recent Apostolic Visitation of the Irish Church. I'll quote his summary of Keenan's book at length:

'Clerical sexual abuse is inevitable given the meaning system that is taught by the Catholic Church and to which many priests adhere.

Contradictions in that system lead to failure, increase shame and a way of living that encourages deviant behaviour.

This is the thesis of a revealing book on sexual abuse within the church by an Irish academic and therapist who interviewed, at length, nine priests and brothers convicted of child abuse, who counselled several other clerical abusers and who undertook extensive research on the issue for her book Child Sexual Abuse and the Catholic Church: Gender, Power and Organisational Culture. The author is Marie Keenan of the school of applied social science at UCD.

[...]

The culture inculcated in Catholic clergy is that they are separate from other human beings because of their special “calling” from God, because of their sole capacity to administer the sacraments, to turn bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus Christ, because of their power to forgive sin and administer the last rites.

From the moment of their ordination they are apart, apart in the minds of other convinced Catholics and apart in their own minds. And they are also celibate, because of that “calling”. Abjuring intimate sexual relations, sublimating their sexual urges and widely admired in the communities they inhabit on account of that sublimation.

Keenan says this theology of sacrifice eclipses all human considerations. She says her argument is not that clerical celibacy is the problem but a Catholic externally-imposed sexual ethic and a theology of priesthood that “problematises” the body and erotic sexual desire and emphasises chastity and purity, over a relational ethic (how as human beings we should treat each other).

She says this theology of sexuality contributes to self-hatred, shame and a sense of personal failure on the part of some priests.

This tension is often exacerbated by a sense of powerlessness on the part of many priests within a hierarchical, authoritarian church, subject to the authority of bishops or heads of religious orders, often allowing them with little sense of being in control of their own lives. And this is further added to by loneliness.

Some priests cope with this by easing off on the celibacy bit. Some ease off the celibacy bit with guilt, some with a sense of doing their best with their human frailties.

According to Keenan it is often the priests who aspire to priestly perfection and are hugely conflicted with the demands of such perfection that resort to child sexual abuse, usually, she says, not opportunistically, but consciously and deliberately over time. And this seems to be confirmed by other research.

Moreover, in many ways, the release of the confessional – the opportunity to dispel guilt in a secret ritual – compounds the problem. The “external” imposition (by the church) of the priestly ethic, rather than the cultivation of an internal ethic, also contributes to the propensity to abuse; for the construction of an internal ethic involves reflection on the impact of one’s conduct on the lives of others and that seems to have been missing in the make-up of many of the clerical abusers.'

While I've no doubt that there is something to this analysis, I don't see that it can possibly make sense. The statistics don't allow for it, as two considerations should make clear.

Firstly, clergy seem to abuse at a rate that is no higher and that may be significantly lower than the general male population. Yes, we all know that abusive clergy and those who've protected them and callously or naively facilitated their activities have done a nightmarish amount of harm, but the fact remains that in Ireland, clerical abuse is but the tip of a massive national iceberg of sexual abuse. The 2002 SAVI report found that for every person abused by a priest, 59 people were abused by people who weren't clergy. As Fintan O'Toole has said, the sex abuse scandal in Ireland has nothing to do with Catholicism.

Secondly, insofar as Catholic clergy have abused children, they don't seem to have abused at a more-or-less uniform rate. In America it seems about 4% of clergy have been subject to credible abuse allegations, and according to the first Murphy Report, accusations may have been levied at as many as 6% of priests who served in Dublin from the 1940s on. Damning though these figures are, it's striking that accusations seem only to have been levied at 0.6% of Catholic priests in England and Wales; given that the theology of the priesthood is no different in England than in Ireland, one wonders why Irish clergy seem to have been ten times more likely to abuse, or be accused of abuse, than their English brethren. 

It really looks to me as though Marie Keenan's book, at least as represented by the likes of Vincent Browne, eschews statistics for anecdotes, begs a few questions, and above all confuses correlation with causation.

On the Visitation

As for the rest of Vincent's article, well, it seems as though he rather missed the point of the Visitation, which was never intended to focus on the precise issue of abuse. Rather, it's worth revisiting how Benedict first announced plans for the Visitation, in his 19 March 2010 letter to the Catholics of Ireland:

'Furthermore, having consulted and prayed about the matter, I intend to hold an Apostolic Visitation of certain dioceses in Ireland, as well as seminaries and religious congregations. Arrangements for the Visitation, which is intended to assist the local Church on her path of renewal, will be made in cooperation with the competent offices of the Roman Curia and the Irish Episcopal Conference.'

The purpose of the Visitation was to help the Irish Church towards  renewal. It would hardly within the remit of the Visitation to consider how society treats priests who had been found guilty of abuse or to have weighed up how the theology of the priesthood contributes towards a culture of abuse when the statistical evidence suggests it does no such thing. 

It should be recognised, though, that the Visitation clearly looked into the Church's current safeguarding procedures and found that they're up to scratch now. Of course, we know that; the Cloyne Report found that the Church's child protection policies are superior to those of the State, and on the basis of the various reports Ian Elliott had conducted into how those procedures are being implemented, it seems that Cloyne had been the weak link in an otherwise -- if belatedly -- strong chain.

That said, it is hugely unfair of Vincent to have said, as he did:

'In general there seems to be little interest in why this clerical abuse has occurred and what it is within the Catholic culture that has engendered it. The dismissive explanation that it is all due to the "flawed" personalities of the abusers ignores the cultural and formative factors that at least contributed to the phenomenon.'

Over the last day or so I've heard no shortage of snorting and sneering about the summary's focus on seminaries and the issue of fidelity to the teaching of the Church. The fact is that these are crucial to ensuring that the Church is renewed in Ireland and that abominations like the abuse scandal don't happen afresh. It's clear that both selection and priestly formation must have been deficient in the past, and there is widespread dissent from the teaching of the Church, not least among the clergy.

There's a sense in which there's a straightforward equation at work. Careful selection and better formation should lead to better priests, and better priests will be less likely to abuse, better equipped to deal with allegations of misconduct of whatever form, and better able to minister to their people.

The Visitation also addresses the issue of clericalism when it talks of a new focus on the role of the laity; it's asking ordinary Irish Catholics to step up to play a responsible, faithful, informed, and active role in the Church, rather than being passive figures.

The Summary should be recognised as being but a summary; it deals in broad brush strokes when it says that if we want a better Church we need a better clergy and a better laity, and while it hints at how these can be achieved, it doesn't dwell on detail. We can assume the detail is, has been, and will be a matter of serious discussion. Matters will become more clear.

In the meantime, we shouldn't be criticising the Visitation's summary for not being something it was never meant to be.

Ireland's Grey Lady is long past her prime...

It seems Patsy McGarry’s up to his old tricks again. Hardly a column of his goes by without me staring in astonishment. I know I should be used to it by now, but I'm hope over experience personified; it means I spend a lot of my life in a state of profound disappointment.

Look at today’s, and start with the title.

‘Lack of Vatican Co-operation over Child Abuse led to Closure of Embassy’

Interesting, isn’t it? It seems Patsy has embraced the growing consensus that rejects the Irish Government’s claim that economic motives were behind the decision to shut the embassy to the Holy See.

Granted, I don’t think that’s quite what he says in the column, but he’s not far off it, and Patsy’s editor can be forgiven for thinking that was his point. After all, columnists rarely get to decide the titles that head their work; this would have been an editorial decision. Of course, that invites the question of whether the Irish Times editorial team thinks the Government are lying. 

Patsy, as you’d expect, isn’t happy that people aren’t pleased about this. Perhaps he doesn’t see the value in the State having a real diplomatic presence in one of the nodal points of global diplomacy. Perhaps he doesn’t think the State should be seeking to enlist the help of the Holy See and some of the world’s largest NGO’s in achieving our supposed foreign policy aims regarding development, debt relief, conflict resolution, justice, and the environment.  Perhaps he just doesn’t care. 

It’s nonsense for Patsy to wheel out Malta as an example of a country that doesn’t have a resident embassy to the Holy See; he might be right, but only if he thinks our ambitions shouldn’t exceed those of a country barely a third of the size of County Louth and with far fewer people than County Cork.

Criminality?

Undermining our global diplomatic aims is fully justified, Patsy seems to be saying, because the Holy See undermined two Irish national investigations into criminality in the Irish Church. 

He’s referring to the two Murphy reports, of course, into how allegations of clerical child abuse were handled by the institutions of the Church and the State in the Archdiocese of Dublin between 1975 and 2004 and in the diocese of Cloyne between 1996 and 2009.

If you’ve read the reports even half as thoroughly as me, you’re probably blinking in astonishment.  Was either the Dublin Report or the Cloyne Report an investigation of criminality? If so, why on earth haven’t there been any prosecutions of the various bishops, priests, policemen, or staff of the national health service who the reports described as mishandling abuse allegations*

Is Patsy saying that these were investigations into criminality, and that no evidence of criminality was found? Is that the Irish Times’ line on this? 

The Cloyne Report doesn’t even consider the question of whether the law of the land was broken. With reference to the Church, the Murphy Commission examined whether abuse allegations received by the diocese of Cloyne between 1996 and 2009 were handled in regard to the diocese’s own internal rules.  Internal rules, mind, not the law of the land. Criminality wasn’t under investigation into any sense.

If McGarry genuinely believes that it was, and if the Irish Times does likewise, then I think it’s time to acknowledge that the title ‘Ireland’s Newspaper of Record’ is up for grabs.

Myths about Rome...

Aside from falsely claiming that the Murphy investigations were investigations of criminality, McGarry goes on to repeat a couple of long-discredited canards. 

Firstly we hear of how the Holy See refused to cooperate with the Murphy Commission's Dublin inquiry. As has been established for some time, the Holy See did nothing of the sort. The Commission wrote to Rome asking for assistance, and Rome contacted the State asking for communications on this matter to go through the usual diplomatic channels.

Accepting that the Holy See was fully entitled to ask that this request be handled properly rather than in an ad hoc way, the State informed the Murphy Commission of Rome’s response, and the Commission decided not to pursue the matter. Rome subsequently asked the State whether its message had been passed on, and was told that it had been. 

Rome was quite willing to cooperate; it was the Murphy Commission that chose not to avail itself of whatever help Rome could offer. If Rome didn’t know that the Murphy Commission couldn’t use the normal channels because it was also investigating the State – a dubious assumption on the part of the Commission – this was because neither the Commission nor the State informed them of this. The fault, on this, lay entirely with us.

Then we hear of the Nunciature refusing to cooperate with the Cloyne inquiry. Nonsense again. Murphy wrote to the Nunciature asking for whatever documents it held on matters relating to abuse allegations in Cloyne. The Nunciature replied saying that it held no documents as it did not deal with such matters, but that the diocese would have all relevant data and was bound to comply with the law on this.

It’s completely true that the Nunciature doesn’t deal with abuse allegations, and thus couldn’t be of assistance in supplying documents. As for the diocese, the Cloyne Report acknowledges that unlike the HSE, it handed over everything, including legally privileged copies of documents that were sent to Rome.

That’s important to note, conspiracy theorists and paranoid anti-Catholics: Rome doesn’t have secret files on abuse cases; it has copies of files that are held in dioceses, and it only has them if the dioceses bother to send them to Rome. 

As the substance of both the Dublin and Murphy reports makes clear, for far too long, dioceses tended to avoid submitting anything in connection with abuse to Rome, preferring instead to handle or mishandle allegations at a local level. 

The Cloyne Report mentions only a handful of allegations ever being passed on to Rome, all bar one of those being submitted in the month before Bishop John Magee, after a quiet private discussion with then then Nuncio, ‘resigned’. The only report submitted to Rome before this – which happened to be in connection with the only Cloyne priest ever found guilty of any form of sexual abuse, for which he received a two-year suspended sentence – is dealt with comprehensively in the Report because the diocese cooperated fully, as the Nunciature had said it would.

How does McGarry characterise the actions of Rome in all this?

‘That was how the Holy See treated two inquiries set up by our government to investigate the gravest of abuses of thousands of Irish children by priests. It ignored them.’

Firstly, it didn’t ignore the investigations. Secondly, neither inquiry investigated even one case of abuse. The remit of the two investigations was, quite simply, to investigate how abuse allegations had been handled. It had no remit whatsoever to consider whether any abuse actually took place.

 

It did, obviously, and on a terrible scale in Dublin as shown by the Dublin report. But the abuse of thousands of children? No, Patsy, not even close. Hell, despite all the claims in the Cloyne Report, only two priests cited in it were ever charged in court. One pleaded guilty to acts committed with a teenage boy, and received a two-year suspended sentence; the other has been acquitted twice.

There’s no sense in which the Holy See can credibly be said to have obstructed the Murphy investigations, neither of which were into criminality. Things have got to a bad place when a still fairly well-regarded paper perpetuates such myths and does so with such determination.

And there's the subtitle...

And then, of course, there’s the most poisonous part of the whole article, with Patsy saying that now the furore over Cloyne has died down, craven defenders of the indefensible  are crawling out of the woodwork:

‘Then there are the usual suspects, lay voices who make a living from defending the institutional church when it is safe to do so, when outrage is settling after the Cloyne report.

It was the same after the Ferns, Ryan and Murphy reports. Their immediate reaction is practised horror. Then, with time, they’re back to their slithering ways, diluting truth, minimising the wreckage, playing it all down.’

Ironically, much the same thing could be alleged about Patsy, to judge by his comments at the time Father Kevin Reynolds' innocence was established, hanging his head on behalf of his too keen media colleagues, only for him but moments later to stick on the same scratched record he's been playing for years. Indeed, the line about lay Catholics making a living from defending the Church is a bit rich coming from an agnostic who paints himself as an expert on the Church and who as far as I can see makes a living out of attacking it  Perhaps most importantly, it’s also demonstrable nonsense. 

Who could he possibly mean? David Quinn? John Waters? Breda O’Brien, who he so shamefully defamed on national television a couple of months back, such that he should count himself lucky he wasn’t taken to court? The staff of the Irish Catholic?

Patsy’s surely not referring to these, all of whom were prominent in the media at the time of the Cloyne Report, condemning child abuse in Ireland while at the same time advising people to read the Cloyne Report to see what it actually said, because an injustice was being done to the Church as a whole because of the actions of John Magee and Denis O’Callaghan. 

But who, then? Who are these ‘usual suspects’? They allegedly have form for doing this. They’re people, clearly, whose names we should all know.

Why wouldn't he have named them? 

Could the Irish Times legal people have advised him against doing so, as for him to have done so would surely have constituted defamation?

Was he just rattling something off at speed, with nobody at all particularly in mind?

I honestly can't figure this one out.

You might have a better explanation. If you do, I’d be glad to hear it.


-- An edited version of this was subsequently published in The Irish Catholic, 1 March 2012

_______________________________________________________________

* I'm not disputing the reality of the vast majority of allegations detailed in the reports, of course; what happened was monstrous, and it was spectacularly mishandled in disastrous ways, ways that made matters so much worse in Dublin, if not in Cloyne. I'm just saying that the reports weren't into the abuse itself, solely into how allegations were handled.

Does John Cooney Want An Apology From Ronan Fanning?

I realise two posts in one day may seem a bit extravagant, but given how I've read that John Cooney's looking for an apology from Cardinal Connell for the then Archbishop of Dublin having rubbished the more lurid claims in Cooney's 1999 biography of Connell's predecessor, John Charles McQuaid, I think it's worth pointing out that Cardinal Connell was hardly alone in doing so.

Here, for instance, you can see how Ronan Fanning, then Professor of Modern Irish History in UCD, began a review of Cooney's book the following year:

'No work of Irish historical scholarship has been launched with such a sensationalist fanfare as John Cooney's long-awaited biography of John Charles McQuaid. It therefore comes as little surprise that the author's journalistic instinct to prefer the sensational sexually-charged interpretation to the dispassionate presentation of objective historical truth intermittently flaws what is otherwise a fine book.

The most outragerous example is the now notorious account of Dr McQuaid's alleged paedophile encounter with a publican's son in Drumcondra which formed the first of the extracts serialized in The Sunday Times. Mr Cooney adduces absolutely no evidence for his allegation beyond a piece of fiction cast as fantasy entitled "A Virgin Island", which was written by Dr Noel Browne and based upon the hearsay evidence of an unnamed Department of Education inspector concerning an episode which had allegedly taken place thirty years before. Although Dr Browne must be regarded as a hostile witness -- McQuaid had effectively destroyed his Ministerial career during the Mother and Child controversy in 1951 and his own autobiography is charged with bitter animosity towards his former adversary -- Browne himself believed that "A Virgin island" should not be published for the compelling reason that the allegations could not be substantiated. It would have been better for Mr Cooney's reputation as biographer and historian if he had respected Dr Browne's wishes.

Another example of how Mr Cooney's historical judgement has vitiated by his weakness for the sensational occurs in the introduction in a series of gratuitous references to instances of the sexual abuse of children by priests who served in the Dublin archdiocese and to the sexual and physical abuse of orphans in Artane and Goldenbridge. Again, Dr McQuaid is smeared by association without any evidence being adduced; that he was Archbishop when these terrible things happened in the Dublin archdiocese is, apparently, evidence enough.

Yet these and other passages in which Mr Cooney indulges his propensity for sexual interpretation take up only a very small proportion of his book and it would be a pity if would-be readers were deterred for the salaciousness which has surrounded its publication. For this is a book which should be read by all who have an interest in the history of the Catholic Church in Ireland or of church-state relations since independence.

The present Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Desmond Connell, placed all historians in his debt when he realised the extraordinarily rich archive of the McQuaid papers -- not the least of the damage done by the sleazy controversy triggered by the Sunday Times is that his less enlightened and more timorous episcopal colleagues will scarcely be encouraged to follow his example -- and Mr Cooney is the first to publish the fruits of his labours in such a bounteous vineyard.'

Onward Fanning goes, commending Cooney's otherwise comprehensive analysis of McQuaid's reign. It's significant that Fanning has no problem in general with Cooney putting the boot into McQuaid; his concern is purely due to the sensationalist and blatantly ahistorical nature of Cooney's allegations of paedophilia. 

As I've said, if Cooney turns out to have been right on this, he's only right by accident. In the meantime he should either seek apologies from rather more people than Cardinal Connell, or should have the good grace to keep silent. 

I see, incidentally, that the matters raised about McQuaid have indeed been passed on to the Guards. This, of course, is line with the practice of the Archdiocese of Dublin. I've no idea why the Commission omitted this. Given that the Guards are already looking into the matter and will doubtless be in possession of the facts, One in Four's call for a statutory inquiry looks both redundant and hysterical.

Smoke Alarms Ring Even When There's No Fire...

So, there are alarm bells ringing about McQuaid again, are there? So the Irish Times reports anyway, in connection with a supplement to the Dublin Report that was published online back in July.

Before anybody starts jumping to conclusions, they should do three things.

• Firstly, they should keep in mind that Archbishop McQuaid died in 1973, and thus is no position to answer any allegations. Innocent till proven guilty is a wise and fair precept, and no less so when speaking of those who are incapable of responding to claims dating back forty or fifty years, if not further.
• Secondly, they should understand that allegations that McQuaid had been a paedophile were first raised in John Cooney's 1999 book, John Charles McQuaid, Ruler of Catholic Ireland, parts of which were published in advance in the Sunday Times. This is a vital part of the story. Keep that publication date in mind, and note how such historians as John A. Murray, Ronan Fanning, and Dermot Keogh roundly dismissed Cooney's claim at the time as having been ill-founded and deriving from sources both biased and unspecified.
• While on the subject of 1999, they should look into how it was reported that year that there had once been a Garda investigation into allegations that related to McQuaid, with McQuaid being cleared of all involvement. The important thing probably isn't that he was cleared so much as that there were stories about McQuaid in circulation in 1999.
• Thirdly, they should read the supplement to Yvonne Murphy's Dublin Report for themselves, rather than relying on secondhand summaries. It's only two pages long, after all. There's no excuse for relying on churnalistic paraphrases on this one.

The supplement, as you'll see, is structured as a narrative, explaining how the Commission came by new information, followed it up, and said it was a matter for the archdiocese to look into now. The supplement doesn't give McQuaid's name and uncharacteristically for the Dublin Report there are no details whatsoever given of what is alleged to have happened. This is more peculiar than it might at first seem: if you've read the Report you'll remember that Murphy doesn't like to skimp on details, however horrific. It's almost as though this time Murphy's saying that there's nothing to report, and this is merely being covered for the sake of completeness.

Telling thetale from the point of view of the Commission makes for an interesting story but is misleading. The Commission's remit concerned how allegations of clerical abuse were handled by the institutions of Church and State within the Archdiocese; it makes far more sense to retell the story in the order relevant to the bodies under investigation. Only that will give us any indications whether things have been handled properly.

The story from the perspective of the protagonists...

At an unspecified point -- we're not told when -- a letter was sent from an unnamed source to the solicitors for the Archdiocese; this letter indicated that people were aware in 1999 that concerns had been expressed about McQuaid. Given that 1999 was the year in which Cooney published his biography of McQuaid and in which it became public knowledge that there had once been a Garda investigation in relation to the then Archbishop, this is hardly surprising. It's quite likely that Cooney's researches would have caught people's attention even before his book was published. Taking all this into account, it would have been rather more surprising if concerns hadn't been expressed!

In 2003, some years after Cooney's book had publicly made dubious allegations about McQuaid, a man complained to the Eastern Health Board that he had been abused by McQuaid decades earlier. This complaint seems to have gone nowhere, for reasons that Murphy doesn't divulge. It may simply have been that the complaint was not credible, or that the Eastern Health Board felt it couldn't do anything in response to an unproven allegation about a man who'd been dead for thirty years; we cannot say.

When this complaint came to light several years later, the Health Service Executive did not pass this complaint on to the Murphy Commission. Again, we cannot for certain say why, but the Commission is satisfied that this was simply due to human error.

In May 2009, the HSE passed the complaint to the then Director of Child Protection in the Dublin Archdiocese, who informed Archbishop Martin, who immediately informed the Murphy Commission. This would seem to have been exactly what the diocese ought to have done, and I'd hope nobody would fault it for that.

The diocese conducted a further search of diocesan files, finding the letter which related to concerns that were abroad in 1999, and passing that on to the Commission, which was due to submit its report and unable to deal with such new information. Having examined the matter since then, it recognises that the Archdiocese had never been in a position to have responded to the concern, knowing neither the details nor the source of the matter, and with Archbishop McQuaid long dead.

In 2010 Archbishop Martin informed the Commission that he had received another complaint about his predecessor. As the Murphy Commission's remit had extended only to complaints received between 1975 and 2004, this was of no concern to the Commission, which recognised that Archbishop Martin had been under no obligation to report this matter to them.

Or to sum it up...

In short: sensationalist and unsubstantiated claims that Archbishop McQuaid had been a paedophile were publicly made and widely reported in 1999, and in the twelve years since these claims have been common currency two people have claimed to have been abused by him. We know nothing whatsoever about these claims, which may not have been remotely credible; the fact is that we just don't know.

In its July supplement, the Murphy Commission broke with its normal practice and gave no information on either allegation, save to say that on both occasions the Archdiocese came forward and reported the matter as soon as it was aware of the allegations, in one case when it was under no obligation whatsoever to do so. The Commission says nothing either way about whether these two complaints have been passed on to the Guards, that being practice in Dublin Archdiocese but not being required in law, it doesn't fault the Archdiocese's actions in the slightest, and it says that any further investigation of the matter is for the Archdiocese.

If there's a story here it should be that the Church responded in an exemplary fashion to reports of abuse having been committed by the most influential cleric of twentieth-century Ireland. Does anyone really think that'll be what happens?


Update: I gather John Cooney is looking for an apology from Cardinal Connell for his having poured scorn on Cooney's allegations. Presumably he's looking for apologies from Ronan Fanning and other historians too? Given that there's still no publicly accessible historical evidence to support his allegations -- Murphy evidently having deemed the allegations not worth publishing -- this is rather rich. After all, even should there turn out to be some merit to the complaints, it wouldn't change the fact that Cooney's allegations were based in large part on an unpublished short story which was written by a man who hated McQuaid. If he's right, he's right by accident.

Answering the Grem: Part III

Over the last couple of days I've been trying to answer, as best I can, the questions posed here, itself a response to this post of mine.I don't think I'll try anything so comprehensive as this again, as it's been difficult, especially given that I'm both busy and teetering in the no-man's land between a dying virus and a rising cold. It's not been a fun couple of weeks here at Gargoyle Garret.

On Tuesday I quickly dealt with Enda Kenny's 20 July speech, about which I've written several times in the past, to show that he didn't say that Rome had directed that abuse in Ireland should be concealed. Enda had alleged that there was a lack of sympathy in Rome for those who reported abuse, though this seems belied by the Cloyne Report, and claimed that the Report revealed an attempt by the Vatican to frustrate an enquiry by the State at some point since 2008, though it's still not clear what he meant by this; these apparent calumnies aside, he never actually said that Rome was responsible for the covering up of abuse in Ireland.

That dealt with, I thought it important to dispell a misconception that obscures and bedevils the vast majority of attempts to discuss the issue of clerical abuse, by pointing it that from an administrative point of view, the Catholic Church is not an institution. It is, instead, a loose network of thousands upon thousands of largely autonomous institutions, all in communion with each other. Insofar as Rome exercises authority and jurisdiction over these institutions, it does so in a manner almost wholly reliant on the receipt of accurate information from them and dependent on their co-operation. 

Yesterday, then, saw me dealing at length with the question of whether there had ever been a centrally-orchestrated cover-up. I don't believe that this happened,  not least because all the evidence we have shows that abuse cases simply weren't reported to Rome, such that until quite recently Rome seems to have been wholly unaware of how extensive the problem was. 

Instead the problem seems to to have been a widespread but localised tendency to cover up reports of abuse. In part this was simply typical human behaviour of the sort that's allowed abuse to become incredibly frequent in society at large, but it may also have been exacerbated within the Church by an often well-intentioned tendency towards secrecy, such that bishops often wouldn't pass on important information even to parish priests or fellow bishops.

Occam's Razor, you see. Don't invent complicated explanations if you don't need to, and don't imagine that there must be evidence to support complicated explanations, especially if a simple explanation does the trick and is supported by the evidence.

Certainly, there has never been a directive that abuse cases should be concealed from the civil authorities in countries where abuse took place; on the contrary, canon law presumes that civil law should be followed, save when the civil law itself is gravely immoral, in which case one may be bound to disobey it on grounds of conscience.

And with that, on to question three.

3: The Financial Cost

The Grem says:

'The price in human misery of the abuse and even more so of the cover up is incalculable. The cost of the investigations would have been much reduced if the Vatican had co-operated fully and in particular been willing to disclose the files of the CDF. Here was a chance for the Vatican to live up to the moral standards which it teaches, a chance which it rejected out of hand.'

I absolutely agree that the price in human misery of the abuse is incalculable -- the whole thing is horrendous -- though I'm far from convinced that the cost in human misery of the widespread tendency to conceal or deny the reality or effect of that abuse was worse that the cost of the abuse itself. Still, that the combination of abuse and the mishandling of abuse has had an absolutely catastrophic effect on the wellbeing of thousands of people is something that I think needs to be accepted, and that the vast majority of Catholics do accept and deeply regret.

That said, I think the Grem is completely wrong to claim that the cost of the Irish abuse investigations would have been much reduced if -- as he says -- the Vatican had co-operated fully. There have been four Irish abuse investigations to date, their total cost coming to just shy of €134 million, almost all of which was due to the €126 million the Ryan Report into abuse in Ireland's industrial schools had cost. 

The Vatican was never approached in connection with the Ryan Report, for the simple reason that the industrial schools were supervised by the Irish State and were not even notionally monitored by the Vatican; this is why the Ryan Report is utterly damning of how the Irish State allowed horrendous abuse and why it never criticises the Vatican in even the slightest respect.

That leaves the Ferns, Dublin, and Cloyne Reports, all of which concerned how allegations of clerical abuse were handled by dioceses, and which together cost the State €7.8 million. I'm not going to wade through the Ferns Report now, as I've only got it as a series of old-style PDFs which I can't search quickly, but looking at the Dublin and Cloyne Reports we can say the following. 

• First, the Murphy Commission recognises that the dioceses fully cooperated with the Commission and handed over all relevant documentation, including those that were legally privileged, which necessarily entailed handing over copies of all communications sent to or received from Rome. As the Nuncio informed the Commission in connection with the Cloyne Report, dioceses are obliged to comply fully with all civil laws and requirements, and it's clear that both Dublin and Cloyne did just that.
• Second, as we've seen yesterday, hardly any cases seem ever to have been reported to Rome. In the case of the four cases which appeared on the Roman radar in connection with Dublin, two were sent to Rome because the priests accused of abuse had requested that they be laicized, and two because the priests accused of abuse were appealling against local decisions. In the case of Cloyne, only one case was actually dealt with by Rome during the period covered by the investigation, with Rome upholding the decision that said priest should remain barred from ministry.

In short, we have no evidence whatsoever that suggests that further Vatican co-operation would have saved the State even one cent. We might wish to presume this was so, but there's no evidence at all to support such a presumption.

4: Influence on Countries

In connection with a request from me that he explain what he meant when he said that Ireland and other countries must decide for themselves how much influence the Vatican should be allowed in future, the Grem replied:

'My comment regarding Vatican relations with other countries stems from my support for democracy which is not just about a few seconds in a polling booth once every four or five years. Democracy is about people having a say in how they are governed and it is maintained only  by an eternal vigilance of educational arrangements and of interest groups, be they banks, cults, pressure groups or churches. Maybe especially a Church which also claims to be a "State"'

I agree that democracy should be about far more than an occasional vote; I believe that a real robust democracy requires checks and balances, constant vigilance, and a vigorous civil society. I believe we should be able to hold our religious institutions to account, just as we should our political, judicial, financial, educational, journalistic and other institutions. And yes, I fully agree that the Irish people should be allowed decide for themselves how much influence the Vatican should be allowed have in Ireland. 

I would, however, point out that such a decision should be made in light of the guarantees of religious freedom expressed in the Irish Constitution, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and in the European Convention on Human Rights. These say that people should have the freedom to profess and manifest their own religious beliefs, subject only to whatever limitations are both lawful and necessary. I'd hope you'd agree.

4 i: Distinctions

For what it's worth, the Church isn't a State, and it might be important to grasp that the Church, the Holy See, and the Vatican are not the same things; people often don't realise this.

The Church is, as we've discussed, a huge network of institutions, almost all of which are effectively autonomous in most regards. It is best understood not as an institution, contrary to popular belief, but as a communion of institutions. There are more than 180 such institutions in Ireland, these being run by Irish people and for Irish people; historically they have been a manifestation of Irish society, reflecting the nature of Irish society in general.

The Holy See is, for want of a better phrase, the government of the Church, insofar as the Church is governed at all. It is not a state, though it is a sovereign entity and has been recognised as such since the medieval period, long before most current states even came into existence. It is with the Holy See that the Irish State has diplomatic relations, and not with the Vatican, although in colloquial speech the two terms are interchangeable.

The Vatican City is indeed a state, albeit the smallest in the world in terms of both size and population. The Holy See has operated from the Vatican City since the Vatican City was established as an independent entity in 1929; prior to that it had operated from the Papal States for many centuries, barring most of the fourteenth century when it operated from Avignon, a few years during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic period, and 1870-1929 when it operated from the Kingdom of Italy.


4 ii: Bishops and Schools
So. The Vatican has no influence on Ireland; the question, rather, is whether the Holy See does. It would be very easy to answer that this is obviously the case, in that most Irish people are at least nominally Catholic, and Catholic doctrine is defined by the Holy See, in accordance with Tradition, Scripture, and Reason. Fine: I don't think any reasonable person would challenge that kind of influence, in that it's entirely voluntary, as our identity as Catholics is defined in large part by our being in communion with the successor of Peter, and nobody is forcing us to be Catholic.

The question, I think, is whether the Holy See has an inappropriate influence in Ireland, the kind of influence that's improper in a republic that guarantees freedom of conscience and the free profession and practice of religion to all its citizens, subject to the demands of public order and morality.

This takes us to the subject of Ireland's educational system, which is far too complex to delve into properly here, save to say this: the majority of Ireland's schools -- more particularly the overwhelming majority of Ireland's primary schools -- exist under the patronage of the Irish Church, in some sense. Almost all primary schools are national schools, controlled by a board of management under diocesan patronage, with many of them having a local priest on the board.

There's a strong case to be made, therefore, that Ireland's bishops have an excessive influence on education in Ireland. Fine. Does this mean that Rome has such an influence? Certainly, that would seem to be the view of Fintan O'Toole:

'The Vatican, in its refusal to deal with the Murphy commission on child abuse in the Dublin diocese, made it clear that it wishes to be regarded, not as a church organisation, but as a foreign state. Which raises the rather stark question: why do we allow a foreign state to appoint the patrons of our primary schools? If some weird vestige of colonial times decreed that the British monarch would appoint the ultimate legal controllers of almost 3,200 primary schools in our so-called republic, we would be literally up in arms. Why should we tolerate the weird vestige of an equally colonial mentality that allows a monarch in Rome to do just that?'

Let's not get bogged down in the fact that the Holy See did not refuse to deal with the Murphy Commission, instead informing the Irish government that it would prefer if the Commission approached it through normal diplomatic channels, and that it would co-operate if it did so.*

It is true that Ireland's bishops are appointed by the Holy See, but despite having been appointed by Rome, they don't really answer to Rome. Remember what the Ferns Report said. Bishops don't act as vicars, delegates, or representatives of the Pope. They're not funded or in any way financially dependent on Rome. What's more, they can't even be removed from office by the Pope, save when they've committed an ecclesiastical crime -- that being a clear offence against a defined provision of canon law. Incompetence and poor judgement aren't grounds for their removal from office, though their resignation can be quietly recommended, as surely happened in the case of John Magee. The bishops should not be understood as ambassadors of what Fintan describes as 'a foreign state'. In Ireland, under normal circumstances, only the Nuncio is an ambassador of the Holy See.

Is it a problem that Irish schools are under the patronage of Irish bishops, when the vast majority of Irish people still identify themselves as Catholic? Maybe, but if this is so, it is and has always been an Irish choice. It's a bit like how people claim that we're compelled to do things by Europe: we're not. As the German Supreme Court has ruled, the national parliaments are, and have always been, masters of the treaties. We could leave if we wanted to. Doing so wouldn't be without repercussions, but we could still do it.

Likewise, yes, most Irish schools are under the patronage of Irish bishops, and those Irish bishops are appointed by the Holy See. If we have a problem with this, it's our  problem. Rome doesn't require the Irish State to have Irish bishops as patrons of Irish schools; it's possible that Irish people might do that, though. I think most people would agree that the current system needs rebalancing, but I'm not convinced that the Irish people voted last February for a halving in the number of schools under diocesan patronage.


4 iii: Why Choose to Reduce our Influence?
None of this, of course, has anything to do with what I've said about the folly of our decision to shut our embassy to the Holy See, which was something on which I'd asked the Grem to expand.

Rome has no selfish interest in Ireland maintaining a specially designated embassy to the Holy See in Italy; our doing so has always been a straightforward matter of our own national self interest. As Tim Fischer, the outgoing Australian ambassador to the Holy See, puts it:

'Being on the ground means more networking, more contact, more momentum, and more profile for Australia in this hub -- this incredible hub -- of the Eternal City of Rome.'

There are reasons, after all, why the United Kingdom and the United States have been seeking to boost their presence in Rome and have been working to enhance the profile of their embassies there. It's hard to see why a small country entirely dependent for its international influence upon the Irish ability to talk with people should choose to walk away from what is one of the most important nodal points in global diplomacy. There's no realistic political reason for it to have done so: it's clear that it was intended as a snub, and one carried out for crude ideological reasons. The Irish Labour party, the junior party of government, is worried about its left flank, and financially incapable of fulfilling its electoral promises, it's seeking to maintain support through cheap anti-Catholic demagoguery and petulant gestures.


To Conclude: Turf Wars and Transparency
It's not true to say that it was in an 'unguarded moment' that Benedict described as 'filth' those abusive clergy who've disgraced the Church. On the contrary, he said this when standing in for the dying John Paul II in the Way of the Cross on Good Friday 2005, just weeks before he was chosen as Pope. It's worth reading some of his public meditations that day, and not merely that publicly proclaimed at the ninth station:

'What can the third fall of Jesus under the Cross say to us? We have considered the fall of man in general, and the falling of many Christians away from Christ and into a godless secularism. Should we not also think of how much Christ suffers in his own Church? How often is the holy sacrament of his Presence abused, how often must he enter empty and evil hearts! How often do we celebrate only ourselves, without even realizing that he is there! How often is his Word twisted and misused! What little faith is present behind so many theories, so many empty words! How much filth there is in the Church, and even among those who, in the priesthood, ought to belong entirely to him! How much pride, how much self-complacency! What little respect we pay to the Sacrament of Reconciliation, where he waits for us, ready to raise us up whenever we fall! All this is present in his Passion. His betrayal by his disciples, their unworthy reception of his Body and Blood, is certainly the greatest suffering endured by the Redeemer; it pierces his heart. We can only call to him from the depths of our hearts: Kyrie eleison ­ Lord, save us.'

In his prayer at that station he lamented the soiled garments and face of the Church, saying how they throw us into confusion, such that we see the Church as more weeds than wheat. He prayed that God should sanctify and save the Church. This was not an unguarded moment. Rather, acting in the place of the Pope in such a way that the attention of the world was on him in a way it had never been before, the then Joseph Ratzinger publicly recognised the corruption that blights the Church, our need to remain true to God , and our need for God to purify us and his Church. And it was just a few weeks after the then Joseph Ratzinger publicly prayed this that he was chosen to succeed John Paul II in the Petrine Ministry.

Since then, of course, he has condemned abuse time and time again, while practical steps have been taken on the ground in order to combat this scourge. His determination in this regard should not be in question. And I have a good feeling about his having appointed someone who'd worked closely with him in the CDF as the new Nuncio to Ireland.

Are there those in the Vatican and in the Irish Church who don't get Benedict, who deny the reality of abuse, and who are opposed to Benedict's programme of renewal? No doubt there are. The Vatican's not a monolith, after all. The question, then, is a simple one: do we support the successor of Peter, who is seeking to cleanse and renew the Church, or do we deny him our support and leave the field to his opponents?

I know what where I stand.



_____________________________________________________________________________
* Judge Yvonne Murphy was advised of this, but decided against using the instruments of State in this way, as she supposedly felt it would be inappropriate to do so, given that the State itself was also under investigation. The Holy See asked whether its response had been communicated to the Murphy Commission, and was advised that it had been, but it was apparently not advised of Murphy's unwillingness to follow things up. In the aftermath of the Dublin Report's publication the Holy See was widely criticised for its failure to cooperate. Given how it had been Yvonne Murphy's decision not to use diplomatic channels to seek co-operation, and how her reasoning had not been passed on to Rome, such criticism seems, at the very least, misplaced.

Answering the Grem: Part II

I know, I should really be talking about the six diocesan audits that came out today, but yesterday's post was too big and needed splitting, and I've been busy and rather poorly of late, so I've not had time to read them all properly yet -- insofar as I've had time, I've been too tired to plough through the documents. 

That said, just based on glancing and looking at the early reactions my general feeling about them is that if we resist the temptation to flatten out the timeline and instead look at trends, with a particular view to the question of whether the Irish dioceses have been following their own guidelines over the last fourteen years, we'll see an encouraging picture at last. It may well turn out to be the case that Cloyne was indeed by some distance the worst of the dioceses in this regard, that Ian Elliott was right to have so damned the handling of abuse in Cloyne in the so-called Elliott Report, the findings of which seem to have led to the last Papal Nuncio 'suggesting' that Magee resign.

I trust Ian Elliott on this stuff, and for all the fears that people have of whitewashes, I'm pretty sure he'd walk if his audits were interfered with or edited such that the final published versions in any real way diluted or concealed whatever he'd discovered.

That said, I'll try to talk about them in another day or two.

So, continued from yesterday...



2. Was there a Cover-Up, and if so was it locally- or centrally-directed?

I don't think it's right to speak of 'the Cover-Up' or even of 'a Cover-Up'. What there seems to have been was a tendency towards Cover-Up, and one that has manifested itself everywhere. In what was, I think, a flawed but hugely perceptive article in the Guardian in March of 2010, Andrew Brown wrote:

'Instead of one centrally ordered cover-up, there were hundreds of little local ones. They didn't require special regulations. They grew quite naturally out of the clerical culture. They worked by silence and omission rather than anything more obviously sinister. The scandal is going to be much worse as a result.'

This is terrifying, but I think Brown's right, and indeed it seems to be borne out by all the evidence we've seen, including the Irish reports. If we look at Yvonne Murphy's Dublin and Cloyne reports, for instance, we see hardly any dealings with Rome at all. Cases that manifestly ought to have been passed to Rome weren't passed there; it's not merely that the dioceses were hiding things from the State, they were hiding them from Rome too. 

What's more, when we look at the phenomenon of priests who'd been accused of abuse having been moved around in a manner akin to abusive school teachers in the American system, we find exactly the same practices at work. It tended to be the case that when abusive priests moved to a new diocese -- sometimes in other countries -- the authorities there were rarely told the truth about their new priest, and often parish priests weren't told things they ought to have been told about their new curates. There seems to have been a deep-seated culture of secrecy at work, such that information simply wasn't shared.

Why was this? I think a few factors were at work. The Dublin Report found that at least until the mid-1990s, the preoccupations of the Archdiocese of Dublin had been the maintenance of secrecy, the avoidance of scandal, the protection of the reputation of the Church, and the preservation of its assets. I think this is a fair summary, though these points need unpacking.

2 i: Unpacking Murphy's findings in the light of Irish society

I've talked in the past of how sexual abuse appears to be -- or at the very least to have been -- endemic within Irish society, such that it seems more than a quarter of Irish adults are survivors of abuse, and that almost half of those survivors had confided in people about their experiences, but not told the authorities. This means, of course, that it seems likely that hundreds of thousands of Irish people haven't reported instances of sexual abuse that they're aware of.  Back in the summer I wrote:

'Irish society does its damnedest to cover up the scourge of abuse in our country, but in most cases, I don't think it does this through malice or a cynical desire for self-preservation. I think that most people, on hearing of abuse -- especially abuse that happened long ago -- hope the problems have already been sorted out or will be sorted out, continue to trust people they've always trust, and hope that harm can be undone, sickness can be healed, and wickedness can be reformed. But of course, when we're wrong we allow abusers to continue in their wickedness, and doing so we allow them to continue ruining lives.

Mercy, hope, forgiveness, and love -- the very best qualities we have -- can actually facilitate further harm.'

Aside from how this works in families, it really shouldn't be hard to see how this would work in a clerical context:

• A conviction that the Church mattered and was crucial to the souls of the faithful would have made it imperative to suppress knowledge of terrible deeds committed by clergy, not out of a cynical sense of self-preservation, but out of a sense that the faithful in general had to be protected from things that could cause them to lose faith in the Church. In this sense it's absolutely correct to say that the bishops were obsessed with preventing scandal; scandal is something which leads another to do evil, and driving people from the Faith would be a grave instance of such.
• A loyal and close clerical culture that encourages priests to see each other as a 'band of brothers' could act to create a sense of denial, such that allegations weren't easily believed, or were rationalised away, or were regarded as having done minimal damage.
• A hope that problems with one child might have been anomalous would have encouraged bishops to give priests fresh starts elsewhere, especially after counselling and therapy, things the Church tended to put a lot of faith into during the 1970s and 1980s. 
• A belief that true forgiveness required people's records being unblemished, with people being entitled to their good name, such that information of prior offences simply wasn't shared with those who needed to know.
• A determination to be a true community of love may well have been the most decisive factor of all, as the Church in the era after the Council strove to shed its image as a rigid, authoritarian, disciplinarian body; the days of the Inquisition were to be left far in the past, and mercy was to be the watchword of the Church.

I really do think that in most cases the Irish bishops acted in ways that they thought was for the best and did so for what they believed to be the best possible reasons. And I also believe that they were terribly, tragically, devastatingly wrong, and that their virtues combined to form the most poisonous of cocktails. And, what's more, I think these factors would have existed everywhere. We don't need to envisage a grand conspiracy directed from Rome. The simplest explanation, which is that these problems arose naturally from clerical culture, seems to be the best.

After all, as I've said, this is what people do. People don't want to believe terrible things about their spouses, their brothers, their sons, their neighbours, or their co-workers. They make excuses, and they rationalise things, and they convince themselves that whatever harm has been done is trivial and will fade with time. They hope that the problem was an aberration, perhaps an unhealthy but unique obsession, and they hope that it'll pass, perhaps of its own accord over time, and perhaps following professional help.

Remember the facts. More than a quarter of Irish adults have been abused. Half of them have told people of their abuse, but hardly anybody has officially reported it. Many thousands of people walk among us who have sexually abused children, and hardly any of them are priests.

It won't wash to say 'this is different - those are individual cases, but the Church is an institution'. We've talked about this yesterday. The Church is not an institution. Even the Irish Church isn't an institution. It is, in fact, more than 180 institutions. 

2 ii: And what about Rome?

That said, Rome's involvement needs looking at. In looking at it we need to keep in mind a number of things not least the following five documents:

• Crimen Sollicitationis, a 1962 modification issued by Cardinal Ottaviani of a 1922 document. A badly-translated version of this appeared online in 2003, but a more accurate translation can be examined in the Holy See's own website. Primarily intended to deal with instances where priests might have used confession to solicit sex, article 73 of this -- in a section entitled 'the foulest crime' -- also covered instances where priests were accused of perpetrating gravely sinful obscene acts upon pre-adolescent children (impuberes). It's been mischaracterised by some elements in the media as proof that the Vatican directed bishops to cover-up abuse, but even Tom Doyle, one of the most outspoken critics of how abuse was handled within the Church, says it was no such thing.
• Sacramentorum  Sanctitatis Tutela, a 2001 apostolic letter from John Paul II, article 4.1 of which reserved to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith the authority to investigate allegations of sexual misconduct by priests with minors under the age of eighteen years.
• De Delictis Gravioribus, a 2001 letter from the then Cardinal Ratzinger, updated Crimen Sollicitationes in light of the 1983 Code of Canon Law and Sacramentorum Sanctitatis Tutela. It recognised a ten-year statute of limitation on the sacramental abuses which the CDF could investigate, but in the case of people alleging abuse it extended that statute of limitation to ten years after the eighteenth birthday. The Pope subsequently in 2002 granted the CDF the power to derogate from this limitation period on a discretionary basis.
• Guide to understanding Basic CDF Procedures concening Sexual Abuse Allegations,  a 2010 guide, in layman's language, to how allegations are investigated at a local and a central level. It reflected not merely the rules established in 2001, but also broader and more fundamental principles of canon law.
• Normae de Gravioribus Delictis, a 2010 revised version of De Delictis Gravioribus, which among other things introduced measures to speed up disciplinary processes and extended the statute of limitations to twenty years after the eighteenth birthday with the possibility of further discretionary extensions.

So, given these, let's start by looking at the Grem's concerns, of which there seem to be four. One concerns the role of the CDF in things, one concerns sanctions for the likes of bishops who've failed in their duties, one concerns secrecy, and one concerns cooperation with the civil law.


2 iii: The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith
The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, as we all know, is the Vatican dicastery which before 1965 was known as the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office. Between 1981 and 2005 it was headed by the then Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, who is of course now Pope.

The CDF deals primarily issues of belief; its role is the promotion and protection of Church doctrine on faith and morals, such that while its main concern seems to be ensuring that those who claim to teach on behalf of the Church actually reflect Church teaching, it also has duties regarding to things that threaten the Church in other ways, notably abuses of the sacraments of the Eucharist and Reconciliation, and the sexual abuse of minors, the youngest and most vulnerable members of the Church.

As we've seen, prior to 2001 Crimen Sollicitationis was at least theoretically in force, requiring bishops in certain situations to report the abuse of prepubescent children to the CDF; in 2001 the remit of the CDF was expanded greatly under Sacramentorum Sanctitatis Tutela, such that henceforth all vaguely credible abuse allegations in connection with adolescents up to the age of 18 were to be reported to Rome.

The problem, as anyone should see from this, is that the system was and indeed is wholly dependent on abuse being reported to it.  Until recently it seemed that this just didn't happen. Monsignor Charles Scicluna, who is Promoter of Justice at the CDF and possessor of the 'gimlet eyes' of which Enda Kenny so provocatively spoke in the summer, heads a team of nine people and acts as chief prosecutor whenever abuse cases are reported to Rome. He says that between 1975 and 1985 the CDF seems not to have received even one report of child abuse.

Lest we be inclined to doubt this, it's worth thinking of what the Dublin and Cloyne inquiries have revealed, bearing in mind that the Murphy Commission accepts that the Irish dioceses had cooperated fully with its investigations, handing over all relevant documentation including communications with Rome. The Dublin Report shows that that Rome was involved in four cases in total: two of these were responses to requests by priests that they be allowed leave the priesthood, and two were appeals against decisions made by the Dublin archdiocese; in other words not even one abuse complaint had been passed on to Rome prior to 2001. Likewise, if we look at the Cloyne Report, we'll see that although Cloyne sent four cases to Rome, none of these cases were submitted prior to the issuing of the new norms in 2001. It seems, putting it bluntly, that abuse was basically never reported to Rome. Everything was mishandled at a local level.

Whatever the motivations of the Irish bishops -- and I doubt they were radically different from the motives of most Irish people in such situations -- we can't get away from the fact that the failure to report or properly handle abuse was their fault. It won't do to blame Rome for the mishandling of stuff locally. The situation on the ground was hidden from Rome, and Rome was in no position to be sending out people to find out what was going on.


2 iv: Sanctions for Inadequate Bishops
The Grem raises an interesting and important question about the bishops when he asks :

'They have had for decades an instruction to report all cases of abuse directly to the CDF. Are they all guilty of ignoring those instructions and if so what sanctions have been imposed?'

Okay, so we know it's not true that the bishops have decades been obliged to report all cases of abuse to the CDF, as that's only been the case since 2001. Still, it certainly seems to have been the case for a long time that there's been an obligation to report some cases of abuse -- those of prepubescent children, and those occurring in connection with an abuse of the Sacrament of Reconciliation -- to Rome. It seems not to have been the case that such reports were expected to be submitted, in the main, with a view to Rome handling the matter: rather, most reports would have been for information purposes only, with it being expected that the crimes would have been dealt with locally. Decisions could be appealled to Rome, of course, and cases were to be referred to Rome if it proved impossible to deal with them locally.

We all know that most cases of clerical abuse were instances where the victims were adolescents; the John Jay Study, for instance, indicates that 67.4 per cent of abuse victims in America were aged twelve or older. The vast majority of these -- unless they'd specifically reported being abused in the context of confession -- would have been outside the remit of Crimen Sollicitationis, and thus something to have been dealt with locally.

Was abuse within confession a common phenomenon? I don't know, but just looking at the Dublin and Cloyne reports, it seems that it wasn't: the Dublin report covers 46 priests, just one of whom reportedly committed abuse in connection with confession, something he seems to have regularly done; the Cloyne report itself never mentions abuse in the context of confession save with reference to an alleged victim of one 'Father B', that being the Father Duane who's twice been tried and twice been acquitted of abuse.

Still, even if only a third of abuse cases ought to have been passed on to Rome, even just for information purposes, that still suggests a widespread tendency not to pass things on, doesn't it? A widespread tendency to ignore Rome, even?

Well, it does and it doesn't. It's worth taking a depressing look at sections 13.6-11 of the Dublin Report, which describes the reactions of Archbishop McQuaid and his auxiliary, Bishop Dunne, to the discovery in 1960 that a priest of the diocese had taken obscene photographs of young girls in his care.

'Archbishop McQuaid immediately referred the case to his auxiliary bishop, Bishop Dunne. It is clear that the Archbishop was using the procedures outlined in the 1922 instruction (see Chapter 4). Bishop Dunne expressed the view that a crimen pessimum (the worst crime, which includes child sexual abuse) had been committed.'

I'm still not entirely sure what this is doing in the Dublin Report, given that it predates the remit of the report by fifteen years, but still, not the important point: Murphy believes that McQuaid and his auxiliary had in 1960 followed what must have been the 1922 procedures, assuming they were essentially the same as their 1962 version. Murphy goes on to explain how McQuaid subsequently met with the priest, Paul McGennis, and received a risibly false explanation that McQuaid accepted.

'Archbishop McQuaid and Bishop Dunne then agreed that there was not an objective and subjective crime of the type envisaged in the 1922 instruction and consequently that there was no need to refer the matter to the Holy Office in Rome.'

Murphy takes the view that this was unreasonable and contrary to common sense, and I agree, but what's important in the context of the Grem's question is this: the directive to report cases of prepubescent abuse to Rome does not appear to have been ignored, but instead appears to have been considered and found not applicable. I suspect this happened all too often, for whatever reasons.

Making matters worse would have been, I think, a huge sense of confusion in the decades after the Second Vatican Council. Yes, Cardinal Ottaviani issued a directive in 1962 that basically restated the policy from 1922, but it seems that this document -- of which only 2,000 copies were ever printed -- to have quickly become forgotten and left to moulder in diocesan libraries, at least in most dioceses. It seems that in the turmoil of the 1960s, which so much changing in the Church, this one document from a Church body that was itself replaced in 1965 was effectively lost in all the goings-on of the era, such that when it was brought to light less than a decade ago, most canon lawyers said they'd never even heard of it.

In truth, canon law itself fell out of fashion in the years after the Council such that numerous seminaries ceased teaching it altogether; many felt that the Church should be a community of love, rather than one of law, and that rules hindered the Church in spreading its message. Meanwhile, it had been accepted in Rome that a new and comprehensive code of canon law was needed, and while work was being carried out on that, the practice of canon law fell apart everywhere; old rules seemed obsolete and nobody knew what the new rules would be. When the new code was issued in 1983, it failed to cover the areas dealt with by Crimen Sollicitationis, such that it was unclear which of the most serious crimes were reserved to the CDF.

It was only in 2001, as the scale of abuse in the likes of Ireland and American became clear, that this matter was clarified.

It seems, then, that bishops weren't, as a rule, ignoring directions from Rome. Many if not most had never been aware of the directions, others felt they were inapplicable, and others still were confused by the situation. I've no doubt there'll have been a handful of bishops who knew about the directions and just didn't care, but I wouldn't like to guess at which few they'd have been.

The nearest I can get to seeing an instance of a bishop who seems to have behaved in just such a nonchalant manner is John Magee in Cloyne, who was certainly aware both of the Irish bishops' own agreed guidelines, to which he supposedly subscribed and was supposedly implementing, and  of Rome's two guiding documents on the matter from 2001.

As we know, Ian Elliott's report on the handling of abuse in Cloyne was followed in the Irish Church by a dispute over whether Magee ought to step down, which he was clearly loath to do. During the course of this debate, Magee had a meeting with the then Papal Nuncio, after which he requested that he be relieved of duty.

It really doesn't take a genius to work out what happened there.


2 v: Secrecy
One of the things the Grem homes in on is how Church investigations were conducted in absolute secrecy. Child victims of abuse, he says, were bound by an oath of silence, the same oath signed by victims in different countries. It's worth quoting here the Vatican's own chief prosecutor on the subject:

'A poor English translation of that text has led people to think that the Holy See imposed secrecy in order to hide the facts. But it was not like that. Secrecy during the preliminary phase of the investigation served to protect the good name of all the people involved; first and foremost, the victims themselves, then the accused priests who have the right – as everyone does – to the presumption of innocence until proven otherwise. The Church does not like showcase justice. The norms on sexual abuse were never understood as a ban on denouncing [the crimes] to the civil authorities.'

The secrecy required in these matters -- and still required, as far as I know -- was required in order to allow witnesses to speak freely, knowing they could do so in absolute confidence, in order to protect the good name of the accused, as it's a basic principle of natural justice that suspects should be regarded as innocent until proven guilty, and to allow victims and other witnesses to come forward without exposing themselves to publicity.

It was certainly not the case that this requirement for secrecy was intended to ensure abuse wasn't tackled. On the contrary, Crimen Sollicitationis demands that victims of solicitation denounce the crime, with a failure to do so punishable by excommunication, and the oath of secrecy was only administered with regard to the trial process and not to the crime. Furthermore, the obligation to secrecy only kicked in once a case began; there was nothing to stop a bishop from reporting a crime before beginning a canonical investigation. The Church's secrecy requirement in no way blocked or blocks people from reporting crimes to civil authorities.

I would add, too, that I'm not convinced that a universal oath was required of those reporting abuse; while the 1962 Crimen Sollicitationis indeed gives the formulae for oaths to be sworn by those handling abuse cases, it does not detail what abuse victims should say.  It seems that the wording of oaths must have varied from place to place; in the case of the two teenagers whose testimony was taken by the then Father Sean Brady in 1975, they swore as follows:

'I ... hereby swear that I have told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and that I will talk to no-one about this interview except authorised priests. So help me God, and these holy Gospels I touch.'

2 vi: Co-operation with Civil Law
This leaves the question of the extent to which canon law was required to be in harmony with civil law. In connection with this, the Grem writes as follows:

'The truth is best found following the publication in 2010 of the document Understanding CDF Procedure concerning sexual abuse allegations. It stated clearly "Civil law concerning reporting of crimes to the appropriate authorities should always be followed."

The statement was welcomed worldwide (despite the fact that, made by any other institution, it would have been stating the obvious).

But as so often with the Vatican all was not as it seemed. The Vatican website which carried this "news" had no papal authority. All was revealed three months later when the Pope published the "New Norms" (de gravioribus delictus) which did not impose on Bishops any duty to report child sex abuse to civil authorities. Fr. Lombardi made clear that a duty to report had been discussed - and rejected. The media and thousands of ordinary Catholics had been misled and not for the first time.'

Now, I think it's worth looking at what exactly Father Lombardi, the Pope's spokesman, said on the matter:

'One point that remains untouched, though it has often been the subject of discussion in recent times, concerns collaboration with the civil authorities. It must be borne in mind that the Norms being published today are part of the penal code of canon law, which is complete in itself and entirely distinct from the law of States.

On this subject, however, it is important to take note of the Guide to Understanding Basic CDF Procedures concerning Sexual Abuse Allegations, as published on the Holy See website. In that Guide, the phrase "Civil law concerning reporting of crimes to the appropriate authorities should always be followed" is contained in the section dedicated to "Preliminary Procedures". This means that in the practice suggested by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith it is necessary to comply with the requirements of law in the various countries, and to do so in good time, not during or subsequent to the canonical trial.'

In other words, although this wasn't officially stated in either the old or the new procedures, this was expected practice. Father Lombardi most certainly did not claim that a duty to report had been discussed and rejected. Canon law assumes that civil law should be followed save in cases where to do so would be gravely immoral, and just as that had been the case prior to the issuing of the new norms, so it remained the case afterwards. The Guide said that civil law should always be followed, and Father Lombardi said this was indeed the case: so it should.

One might ask why this is but a recommendation, rather than an absolute obligation. The answer's something I said back when I outlined my Rough Guide to the Cloyne Report:

'Canon law is really just the name we give to the Church's own internal rulebook. The Church, existing throughout the world, needs a universal set of rules than can apply as effectively in Cuba and China as in Ireland and the Philippines. These rules need to take account of the fact that while freedom of religion is accepted in countries like the United States and Germany, it is seriously curtailed in countries like Saudi Arabia and North Korea. Back when the Murphy Report on the Dublin Archdiocese was issued in 2009, there was a lot of talk about canon law, but what the Murphy Report made clear was that canon law was never the problem in Dublin. The problem was that canon law wasn't applied.'

The key issue here is that canon law is universal, and needs to be universally applicable. The Church can hardly rule that civil law must always be followed, wherever the Church might be. The Catholic Church, after all, is universal: it's found everywhere in the world. A hard and fast rule on complying with the law of the land in all circumstances might work well in modern Ireland or America, but could be profoundly dangerous for all Catholics in places where the Church is threatened, and there are no shortage of such places in the modern world.

As a simple example, imagine what would happen if a Muslim family in Iran had converted to Catholicism, and that it was later found that a Catholic priest had abused a member of the family. If this were reported to the priest's bishop, ought he to pass the matter onto the authorities, knowing that were he to do so he would endanger the whole family, notably the parents who could be executed for apostasy? Ponder that a while, because that's what an absolute requirement to comply with civil law would mean.


I'm going to leave that with you for now. This post has been a monster, so I'll wrap up the rest of the response tomorrow.