Cardinal Brady Should Resign

By Alex Massie
The Spectator
May 10, 2012

http://www.spectator.co.uk/alexmassie/7838319/cardinal-brady-should-resign.thtml


Last night, I finally watched last week's BBC This World documentary investigating the latest stage of the child abuse scandal that is destroying the Catholic Church in Ireland and, like Jenny McCartney, suspect it is time for Cardinal Sean Brady, Primate of All-Ireland, to resign his post. I don't suppose Cardinal Brady is a bad man, nor should one suppose that his resignation would draw some manner f line under the whole, sorry, rotten, scandalous affair. But it would be more than just a gesture too. William Oddie, writing in the Catholic Herald, plainly would prefer Brady to remain in office but accepts he "almost certainly" must "bow before the storm".

The BBC programme probably did, as Cardinal Brady complains, overstate the role he played in the Brendan Smyth affair back in the mid-1970s. Brady maintains he was a mere notary - that is, note-taker - when he heard evidence from 14 year old Brendan Boland that Smyth was abusing young boys. Boland even supplied the names and addresses of some of Smyth's other victims. Despite this, none of the parents of any of the five children named by Boland were told of what was happening and Boland himself was asked to sign an oath agreeing that he would keep his testimony secret and speak about it only to "authorised priests".

Brady submitted his reports and that was that. Smyth was, for a spell, subject to a "children's ban" though this did not prevent him from abusing other children. In any case, the ban, ineffective though it had proved, was formally lifted in 1984. The man who made that decision was Bishop McKiernan of Kilmore who was also Father Brady's Bishop at the time. No-one argues that Father Brady had, then or now, primary or even secondary responsibility for thwarting Smyth. Nevertheless he was, at the very least, an accessory to the failure to stop Smyth raping young boys.

Jenny McCartney puts it well:

The Church needs to grasp the nettle firmly. The people who were most betrayed by the Smyth case and cover-up were themselves Irish Catholics, many of whom have since spoken out to say enough is enough. Fr Vincent Twomey, the retired professor of moral theology of St Patrick’s College in Maynooth, said last week that “the Cardinal unfortunately has lost his moral credibility”. He said this with evident reluctance, but he disputed the dry view of “duty” to which the Cardinal adhered: “How is it that this legalistic approach, this preoccupation with law – ‘I’ve done my duty, therefore everything is OK’ – what’s behind that? Where’s the humanity? The imagination?”

Quite. And it is this "legalistic approach" to the evasion of responsibility that is crippling the Irish church. According to Cardinal Brady:

In 1975 no State or Church guidelines existed in the Republic of Ireland to assist those responding to an allegation of abuse against a minor. No training was given to priests, teachers, police officers or others who worked regularly with children about how to respond appropriately should such allegations be made.

But so what? The absence of "guidlines" scarcely redeems the Church. Nor is it good enough to say, as the Church frequently does, that "errors of judgement" were made. Missing a train because you did not leave home in sufficient time may be an "error of judgement", knowingly protecting paedophile priests is something more than a regrettable misfortune. Even allowing for the Church's determination to act as a shadow state, it failed in its duties on its own terms, never mind those of the secular authorities.

Nor, for that matter, is all this a matter of the distant past. Father Smyth continued abusing children untl 1993. And he was not the only guilty priest. In Donegal, for instance, the church authorities knew a priest was raping young boys and, far from protecting children and the communities in which they lived, the church simply moved the priest from one parish to another each time fresh allegations or reports of his scandalous behaviour surfaced. As one of the victims told the BBC: "He had the disease and the bishops spread it. As simple as A,B,C."

And there's the rub. Child abuse is hardly restricted to the Catholic Church but it is rare for child rapists to be protected by an institution that places its own reputation above the safety of the people to whom it is supposed to be ministering or that, frankly, is so immune to even the most modest standards of common decency.

Mealy-mouthed and legalistic apologies are all very well but there is a sense that, despite everything we have learned, the church still does not truly appreciate the extent to which, as a body, it is responsible. If these were rogue priests, they were protected by a rogue institution.

Of course this is not the entire picture. No-one, at least no-one with any knowledge of Ireland, doubts that whatever its other shortcomings, the church has done the Irish people some service. Many people have been comforted by it or drawn courage from its ministries. Nevertheless, the Irish church still does not appear to appreciate quite how thoroughly it betryed its flock. Cardinal Brady may be a good and decent man but he is now, however unfortunately, also a symbol of the church's turpitude and his position is now, surely, impossible. His resignation will not put an end to the scandal but it would, however fleetingly, demonstrate that someone in real authority was at last prepared to pay some personal price for the sins of the institution as a whole.