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	Cardinal Sins By John Burke Sunday Business Post March 21, 2010 http://www.sbpost.ie/newsfeatures/cardinal-sins-48052.html IRELAND -- The most senior Catholic cleric in Ireland, Cardinal Sean Brady, stands accused of playing a key role in enforcing a code of silence which allowed the activities of paedophile priest Brendan Smyth to go undetected by civil authorities for almost 20 years. The secrecy with which Brady handled the allegations against one of the country's most notorious paedophiles 35 years ago suggests that fellow Churchmen may soon be implicated in similar handling of child abuse allegations. As recently as last October, the Murphy Commission, which examined child abuse in the Dublin archdiocese as far back as the mid-1970s, found that oaths of secrecy were a common feature in canonical investigations into child abuse. Brady's admission that he acted as a functionary in a canonical investigation which probed abuse allegations made against Smyth in 1975 is expected to be followed by similar admissions from other senior clerics. The Bishop of Clogher in Monaghan, Joseph Duffy, has confirmed to The Sunday Business Post that he was party to similar canonical investigations in which parents and children involved were required to sign an oath of non-disclosure as part of an internal Church probe into abuse claim made against a cleric. Duffy also confirmed that he was party to at least one out-of-court settlement in which non-disclosure was inserted in the agreement. He said confidentiality was requested by the child's parents. He said he regretted that civil authorities were not informed about the case, which first came to his attention in 1989. Similarly, twenty-two years before he was eventually jailed in 1997, two of Brendan Smyth's victims were interviewed by Brady, who was then a priest. T he then Bishop of Kilmore, Francis McKiernan, on whose instruction Brady conducted the interviews, did not refer the cases to the Gardai. The details of Brady's role emerged in affidavits that were filed in the High Court last December, in a civil action taken by a woman who suffered at Smyth's hands for five years. The Primate of All Ireland is being sued in a personal capacity, as well as in his role as head of the Catholic Church in Ireland, by a woman who Smyth sexually abused between 1970 and 1975. The statement of claim alleged that Brady failed to inform the Gardai and, in effect, denied her and others the opportunity for prompt treatment. Neither the Catholic Communications Office, nor the woman's solicitor Brian Coady of Navan firm Murphy Coady, has outlined whether the children's parents were party to the oaths of confidentiality signed, or whether they were excluded from the interviews which Brady conducted on McKiernan's instruction. The second could become an avalanche of admissions involving senior clerics emerged late last week,when the Belfast Telegraph reported that the Bishop of Derry, Seamus Hegarty, had been party to a deal in which a woman who was abused by a priest was sworn to secrecy in an out-of-court settlement as recently as 2000. The Hegarty case involves a woman who said she had been abused by an unnamed cleric since 1979 when she was eight years old. As far back as 1997, the Catholic Information Office confirmed that Brady was the part-time secretary to McKiernan in 1975 when, at McKiernan's di re c t ion, Brady attended two meetings with child victims of Smyth, who was seconded to the diocese from the Norbertine order. The complainants had signed undertakings, on oath, to respect the confidentiality of the information-gathering process, which had been a paramount feature of investigations under canon law since 1922.The complainant spent a decade attempting to establish the role played by Brady. The case illustrates the bizarre defence adopted by clerical respondents in the High Court. Shortly after Brady's role was reported last weekend, it emerged that the facts of the story had originally been revealed in a newspaper report in the Sunday Mirror as far back as 1997. In contrast to the difficulty which the woman's solicitor has encountered in the High Court bid to obtaining documents linking Brady to the 1975 canonical probes into Smyth, Brady admitted everything 13 years ago when approached by the Sunday Mirror. Hegarty's case, at first glance, appears different. The use of non-disclosure clauses in settling civil actions on the steps of a court is common. Church laws However, since the implementation of the Framework for the Church's Response to Child Abuse in 1996, and the more recent Safeguarding Children - Standards and Guidance for the Catholic Church in Ireland, published in 2009, confidentiality cannot be assured either for the perpetrators of child abuse or the victims, and the relevant civil authorities should be informed about the identity of an abuser immediately. Last October, the Murphy Commission highlighted how the Church's procedural rules regarding clerical child sexual abuse, issued by the Vatican and often clouded in mystery, promoted ultimate secrecy. The first relevant set of instructions was promulgated in 1922 and was entitled Crimen Solicitationis. It dealt with, among other things, what it described as the "worst crime"; namely child sex abuse by a cleric. This was the secret bible of prosecutory canon law, but it appears that successive Archbishops of Dublin after John Charles McQuaid - who is recorded as having "well thumbed" his copy - were never aware of it, or had never read it. The Murphy Commission heard that the then Archbishop of Dublin Desmond Connell's canon law adviser learned of the document's existence in the 1990s, after an Australian bishop had discovered the canonical memorandum and asked the Vatican if it was still valid as Church law. "An unusual situation had existed whereby a document setting out the procedure for dealing with clerical child sexual abuse was in existence, but virtually no one knew about it or used it," the Murphy report stated. Under those procedural requirements, bishops were given a clear set of instructions on what was to happen after the investigation process had closed. The entire process was permeated by a requirement of secretiveness. For example, the accuser was required to take an oath of secrecy. The penalty for breaching that oath could extend to excommunication, the Murphy Commission found. There is also the likelihood that documentation which could have been used in Garda investigations was destroyed. If a bishop was convinced during his investigations that the accusation made against a cleric was without any foundation whatsoever, he was to order that this be declared and the documents of the accusation be shredded. In contrast, if there were vague and undetermined or uncertain indications of the crime, the bishop was to order that the documents be placed in the archive, to be looked at again if anything should occur at a later date. If there were indications in relation to the crime that were quite serious but not sufficient to warrant establishing an accusatory process, the bishop had to order that the accused be warned in a "fatherly manner". Under the process which investigating bishops entered into, this material was to be kept in the archives, and the behaviour of the accused monitored. Behind closed doors The requirement for monitoring seems to have been largely ignored in favour of moving errant clerical abusers away from their accusers, although stopping short of withdrawing their ministry. "The element of secrecy in this process was very prominent," Murphy's commission discovered. For example, the "fatherly warning" to clerics suspected of serious wrongdoing was always to be given in total secrecy. "It was to be done either by or through an intermediate person. No matter how it was done, there was to be proof kept in the secret archives that it was done and that the accused had received it," Murphy found. An initial set of guidelines from 1922 were updated in 1962 to include religious orders - under which Smyth's 1975 investigation, to which Brady was a party, would have been conducted. A further instruction came from the Vatican in May 2001, entitled Sacramentorum Sanctitatis Tutela, and was generally available to diocesan officials and others. Allegations of clerical child abuse which possessed even "a semblance of truth" were thereafter to be referred directly to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) in Rome. The volume of referrals became so great that the regulation was amended to reduce the variety of allegations which should be forwarded to the CDF. There is no indication that this was a retroactive principle. By this time, Smyth had been dead for four years. The minutiae of guidelines devised in the 1980s for dealing with clerical abuse claims were, in part, based around Canon 1717:2,which requires that "care is to be taken that this investigation does not call into question anyone's good name". The Murphy Commission concluded that this seemed to be one of the reasons at least why the processes set out in the procedural rules required such a degree of secrecy. The revelation that Cardinal Brady had helped investigate Smyth 22 years prior to Smyth's conviction fell largely on deaf ears when it was first reported in 1997, it would appear. The story was published a month after Smyth had been jailed for 12 years, after he admitted 74 sex attacks on 13 girls and seven boys aged from six to 15 years of age, between 1967 and 1993. Smyth spent over 40 years sexually assaulting children in Ireland, America, Scotland and Wales. But neither his order, the Norbertines, nor the dioceses in which he was based, reported him to the Gardai. Bishop McKiernan, who was head of the tribunal for which Brady had acted as recorder, apologised two years earlier for not telling the Gardai about Smyth at the time of the probe. The tribunal, which met in Dundalk in 1975, heard a ten-year-old altar boy tell how Smyth sexually abused him while on holidays in Cork. More than 20 years later, at the time that civil proceedings were launched against Brady and Gerard Cusack and Leo O'Reilly, senior figures in Smyth's order, the male victim had moved to Britain and had two children. He alleged that the tribunal told him such abuse would never happen again, and that the Church "would sort things out". The most damning aspect of how Smyth's case was handled was the level of punishment meted out. There were numerous recommendations that Smyth receive specialist counselling, which he eventually undertook. But, following the 1975 investigation by Bishop McKiernan, Smyth was merely barred from hearing confessions. He went on to molest scores of other children.
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