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| Spin, Spin and More Spin, Cardinal Brady Fights to Dodge Responsibility Colm O'Gorman March 15, 2010 http://colmogorman.com/?p=647 IRELAND -- Yesterday when it was revealed that he had been a church appointed investigator into complaints by two children that had been abused by Fr Brendan Smyth, Cardinal Sean Brady told RTE that he had been following his Bishop's orders and there were no guidelines for dealing with such investigations at that time. A statement released by the Cardinals office said: At the direction of Bishop McKiernan, Fr Brady attended two meetings: in the Dundalk meeting Fr Brady acted as recording secretary for the process involved and in the Ballyjamesduff meeting he asked the questions and recorded the answers given.Note the two references to "the process" and "the information gathering process". It was clearly a formal catholic church process of investigation in which Cardinal Brady, as an expert canon lawyer, played an important role. He recorded the evidence gathered from both child victims and also questioned them as part of the "process". This is acknowledged by the Cardinal himself. Both of the child victims questioned by Sean Brady and his clerical colleagues were required to sign a formal undertaking, under oath, that they would not disclose the meetings or their complaints to the church to anyone. The Sunday Times reported earlier today that the hearings with the two children: …were presided over by three canon lawyers and examined formal complaints that Smyth had sexually abused a teenage girl and, separately, an altar boy during church-related activities. Smyth was accused of sexually assaulting the boy, then aged 10, while on holiday in west Cork. The girl said the priest first abused her around Easter 1970, when she was 14.All of this sounds very much like the process laid down in Crimen Sollicitationis, the 1962 Vatican document found by the Ferns Inquiry to be church policy on how to deal with clerical child sexual abuse. It is clear that Brady and his co-inquisitors who investigated these cases were following a formal process and it seems clear that this process was not remotely concerned with the protection of children. No report of Smyth's crimes against these two children was made by Sean Brady or the church to any civil authority. Today Brady has tried to defend his behaviour by suggesting that the investigation did result in action being taken against Smyth. Link here. He said that he had acted – by being part of a process which resulted in Fr Smyth having his licence to practice as a priest removed. Cardinal Brady said that three weeks after he had submitted a report to the then Bishop of Kilmore, Bishop Francis McKiernan, Smyth was suspended from practicing as a priest in the Diocese of Kilmore and throughout the country. I have to say that I find myself unsure about which might be worse; that Cardinal Sean Brady might actually believe this self-serving nonsense or that it might be no more than cynical spin and misrepresentation designed to dodge responsibility for a gross failure to protect children. Whatever the case by any reasonable standard Brady and all others involved failed utterly to ensure that children were protected from a now known paedophile. In 1975 Sean Brady knew that Brendan Smyth was a paedophile and knew that he had abused these two children. His silence at the time and in the almost twenty years that followed is unforgivable. In 1997, Berndan Smyth pleaded guilty to 62 charges of sexual assault on girls and boys between 1958 and 1991. He also pleaded guilty to 12 charges of sexual assaults on boys and girls between 1991 and 1993. He committed the assaults in nine counties spread over the four provinces of Ireland. Sixty one of his victims were girls and thirteen were boys. Cardinal Sean Brady's personal failure to report Smyth to the Gardai or to Social Services is part of the gross failure by the Church which allowed so many young lives to be torn apart by acts of sexual brutality. There is no way to spin these established facts which can allow any rational human being to come to any other conclusion. When asked earlier today why he had not contacted the relevant statutory authorities, Cardinal Brady said that he was not the designated person to do so. "Not the designated person to do so"…so the obvious question has to be just who was the designated person to do so, given Brad's suggestion only yesterday that there were no guidelines in place to handle such issues? And even more pointedly, how could a highly-educated thirty-six year old man, a teacher, professor and canon lawyer, not realise that he had a clear responsibility to report what were serious crimes to the police and other authorities? Taking this forward to the current day one has to seriously question the fitness of Cardinal Brady to hold such a senior role in an organisation responsible for the education and care of many thousands of children given that he feels his conduct in 1975 was acceptable and does not amount to a personal failure. When asked if he was going to resign he said that he would not because he did not think it was a resigning matter. In December 2009 he said that he would resign if any failure on his part had led to a child being abused. That his failure to report Smyth meant that this known serial child abuser went on to rape and abuse dozens more children after Brady and his co-inquisitors washed their hands of the case is beyond dispute. Enough spin and manipulation, its time he went. |
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