BishopAccountability.org
 
 

Abuse in Scotland: Amid More Revelations, Is the Church Making Any Progress?

By Elena Curti
The Tablet
August 16, 2013

http://www.thetablet.co.uk/blogs/647/17

Peter Stanford can't be alone in sometimes wishing that the endless flow of revelations of clerical sex abuse would just stop. It's natural for Catholics to feel dispirited that all the good the Church does is continually being drowned out by revelations of what happened to children many decades ago.

Investigative journalists who have turned their attention to Church have, without too much difficulty, been unearthing historic abuse allegations for more than a decade.

The latest case in point is Fort Augustus Abbey in the Scottish Highlands where a BBC investigative team aired one television programme, Reporting Scotland: Sins of Our Fathers, on 29 July, and will transmit a follow-up with more revelations on Monday. The school, which was run by monks of the English Benedictine Congregation, was closed 20 years ago and the abbey community was suppressed not long after that.

Yet as Stanford also points out in his Tablet column this week, these shameful stories must continue to come to light for the sake of the survivors. Many of these have been silenced by a sense of shame and/or the Church's determined efforts to wriggle out of responsibility for abuse. These attitudes have compounded what for many is a lifetime's suffering. In the circumstances, listening to the survivors and supporting them is the least we can do.

It is significant that the latest scandal has emerged in Scotland. The Scottish Church's image has already been tarnished by the allegations of sexual misconduct which obliged Cardinal Keith O'Brien to step down early as Bishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh. But there have long been signs that the Church in Scotland has been insufficiently rigorous in its response to clerical abuse.

Witness the remarks of the Bishop Emeritus Bishop of Motherwell, Joseph Devine, who told The Tablet recently that an independent investigation was unnecessary, that the majority of cases occurred more than 20 years ago, and that priests were being unfairly tarnished. This is the 'old' and wholly inadequate response to abuse allegations. The hope must be that as a new generation of bishops take office in Scotland, led by the Archbishop-elect of St Andrews and Edinburgh, Leo Cushley, a more enlightened attitude will prevail.

The Scottish bishops could do no better than look across the border to England and Wales. As Danny Sullivan, the Chairman of the National Catholic Safeguarding Commission for England and Wales, wrote in a letter to The Tablet this week, the Church south of the border has benefited from two external reviews that looked in depth at the safeguarding of children and vulnerable adults. He urged Scotland to do the same. More and more survivors in England and Wales now feel sufficiently confident to report new and historic abuse cases to the Church. There's still a way to go but this is real progress.

 

 

 

 

 




.

 
 

Any original material on these pages is copyright © BishopAccountability.org 2004. Reproduce freely with attribution.