By David Gibson
Politics Daily
June 1, 2010
http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/06/01/sex-abuse-scandal-vatican-names-clerics-to-investigate-irish-ch/
Pope Benedict XVI promised Irish Catholics he would send a team to investigate widespread reports of sexual abuse in the Irish church over the past decades, and on Monday he followed through by appointing several high-profile churchmen -- all of them ethnic Irish bishops and cardinals -- to undertake the mission.
The investigating commission, or what is formally known as an Apostolic Visitation, is made up of Cardinal Sean Patrick O'Malley of Boston, Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York, Archbishop Thomas Collins of Toronto, Archbishop Thomas Prendergast of Ottawa, and Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, retired leader of English Catholicism.
As Tom Heneghan of Reuters put it, the names read "like a list of grand marshals of a major Saint Patrick's Day parade."
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Yet as Heneghan noted, these men know where the bodies are buried, and how they got there:
The experience these men have gained in investigating sexual abuse cases in their own archdioceses will certainly help them in this inquiry. Their family backgrounds may be just as important. The Emerald Isle's sexual abuse crisis is based on several factors that are typically Irish, like the powerful and complex influence the Church has traditionally had in Irish society and the "don't ask, don't tell" approach long taken to scandal in the Church there. By choosing this team, Benedict has avoided having Irish bishops run the investigation of their own Church. At the same time, this line-up should know enough about the Irish Church to have an inside track on finding out the full story of what happened there and why.
Revelations of widespread and longstanding physical and sexual abuse of children by Irish clerics and others were detailed in two government reports released last year, which touched off a wave of subsequent reports and allegations that have swept across Europe and have continued to undermine Pope Benedict's credibility on the issue.
Benedict's letter of encouragement to Irish Catholics in March -- in which he promised to launch a further investigation under church auspices -- largely fell flat among his intended audience.
But there was a sense that Monday's announcement held the promise of tougher action -- action focused on bishops who covered up the abuse as well as the actual priestly perpetrators.
The English Catholic writer and church insider Austen Ivereigh writes that "as a way of drawing the sting over the intense criticism, it is an astute move."
Ivereigh also hopes that the step "will help to bolster the often lonely position of Archbishop [Diarmuid] Martin [of Dublin], who has led the attempts to move the Irish hierarchy on from the denial and collusion identified in last year's Ryan and Murphy reports."
Politics Daily profiled Archbishop Martin earlier this year, and it was perhaps no surprise that he issued a separate statement from that of the rest of the bishops conference welcoming the investigation and "in particular the announcement that the Visitation is being asked to evaluate the current response to victims and the quality of the assistance which the Church in Ireland owes to survivors."
In its statement, the Vatican said that the investigators "will set out to explore more deeply questions concerning the handling of cases of abuse and the assistance owed to the victims; they will monitor the effectiveness of and seek possible improvements to the current procedures for preventing abuse."
Each investigator will focus on one of four main dioceses, another on religious orders, and another -- Archbishop Dolan -- on seminaries. The scope and timeline of the overall visitation is still to be announced.
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