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	Child Abuse by Irish Priests Leaves Churches Scouring for Money By Colm Heatley and Louisa Fahy Business Week March 24, 2010 http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-03-24/child-abuse-by-irish-priests-leaves-churches-scouring-for-money.html March 25 (Bloomberg) -- It’s been almost three decades since Pat Jackman was sexually abused by his priest, a trusted family friend who ran a youth group. Now the leader of their church in southeast Ireland is asking parishioners to help meet the bill for compensation. “It was just the sheer arrogance of it,” said Jackman, 44, a sound producer and father of two who lives in the diocese of Ferns, whose bishop requested contributions from churchgoers in the area last month. “For the moral bastions of the community to be so insensitive was a disgrace.” Pope Benedict XVI said on March 20 that Roman Catholic church leaders in Ireland “betrayed the trust” of parishioners after a series of reports in the past five years detailed the scale of abuse and efforts to cover it up. Now, the focus is on who knew what when and how the church will pay for it. The child abuse will cost the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland and the state at least 1 billion euros ($1.34 billion), according to the Residential Institutions Redress Board, which was created by the Irish government in 2002 to make awards to people abused in schools and institutions. By the end of 2009, it had made 12,929 payouts averaging 63,210 euros, the board said on its Web site. “When I and other victims went to get compensation from the church, we did it because it was the only way of holding them to account,” said Colm O’Gorman, 43, a Ferns victim, activist and author of a 2009 book on clerical abuse. “We never thought they would start asking parishioners to pay their sex abuse bills for them. It’s an extra form of abuse.” ‘Ashamed’ The pope yesterday accepted the resignation of the Bishop of Cloyne, John Magee, who on March 9 offered to stand aside over his handling of child sex-abuse cases in the diocese, which is near Cork in the south of Ireland. Cardinal Sean Brady, Ireland’s most senior Catholic cleric, is “reflecting” on his future after he said he didn’t report the activities of a pedophile priest to police. The priest wasn’t charged with sex abuse until 1994. Brady said he was instructed by church leaders to interview two of the child victims under oath of secrecy in 1975 and report his findings to them. “I am ashamed that I have not always upheld the values that I profess and believe in,” Brady told a mass at Armagh Cathedral in Northern Ireland on March 17, St. Patrick’s Day. Boston Scandal The Irish turmoil isn’t the first for the Catholic Church and may not be the last. In Northern Ireland, Health Minister Michael McGimpsey said on March 19 that the administration in Belfast should consider an inquiry into church sex-abuse of children. The government has about a month to decide on a course of action. In the U.S., a scandal broke in 2002 after claims that Cardinal Bernard F. Law of Boston covered up complaints against priests accused of abuse. Law resigned in December that year, apologizing for his “shortcomings and mistakes.” More than 5,000 priests were accused of molesting 12,000 children from as far back as 1950, according to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Last year, U.S. dioceses paid $104.4 million for settlements, therapy for victims, support for offenders and legal fees, the group said in a statement published on March 23. The Ferns Report, published in 2005, said church leaders had evidence of clerical sex abuse against children and didn’t do enough to prevent it. The total bill arising from the report for Ferns is so far about 10.5 million euros, according to Eugene Doyle, chairman of the Ferns diocese finance committee. ‘Fundraisers’ “Each diocese is responsible for paying its own bills,” Doyle said by telephone. Parishioners will have time to “reflect” on the request by the local bishop and should they decide to contribute, the money will be raised through “fundraisers,” said Doyle, a Wexford-based accountant. About 6 million euros of the bill has been in direct payments to victims, with the other 4.5 million euros from legal and administrative costs, Doyle said. About 5.5 million euros came from the so-called stewardship trust, a fund set up using one-time payouts from insurers, with other money coming from savings and the re-mortgaging of property, Doyle said. The request for donations has provoked some anger. “They have no conscience,” Denise O’Connor, a Wexford shopper in her 50s, said. “If they took some of the money from the vaults of the Vatican, it might ease some of the pain.” Vatican Response The Vatican, which relies on earnings from investments in stocks, bonds and real estate to top up donations from Catholics around the world, hasn’t said whether it will help the Irish church financially with the compensation. Irish Catholic orders are currently preparing lists of assets to hand over to the government to help meet the bills. The pope on March 20 issued an apology to Irish sex abuse victims, the first since the allegations surfaced in the early 1990s. Clergy in Ireland “must answer for it before Almighty God and before properly constituted tribunals,” he said. Jackman said he was a teenager when he was taken by the Ferns priest, Father Sean Fortune. The cleric, who was also named by O’Gorman as his abuser, killed himself in March 1999 after being the subject of criminal proceedings by the director of public prosecutions, according to the Web site of the Department of Health and Children in Dublin. Fortune had denied any wrongdoing, the Ferns Report said. It detailed how the church moved him from parish to parish, and said his appointment in Wexford in May 1982 was “extraordinarily ill-advised.” “At best” people in the diocese “feel frustration about the quality of communication,” said Jackman, who won compensation. “At worst, they feel abject anger.” --With assistance from Flavia Krause-Jackson in Rome and Fergal O’Brien in Dublin. Editors: Rodney Jefferson, Dara Doyle To contact the reporters on this story: Colm Heatley in Belfast at cheatley@bloomberg.net Louisa Fahy at lnesbitt@bloomberg.net To contact the editor responsible for this story: Dara Doyle at ddoyle1@bloomberg.net
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