Fr Brendan Smyth Victim Says Church’s Failure to Change Its Ways ‘disturbing’

By Freya McClements
Irish Times
April 6, 2017

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/religion-and-beliefs/fr-brendan-smyth-victim-says-church-s-failure-to-change-its-ways-disturbing-1.3037762

Fr Brendan Smyth, a member of the Norbertine Order, was jailed in 1994 for sexually abusing children. Photograph: Colin Keegan.

A woman who was sexually abused by serial paedophile Fr Brendan Smyth in the United States has condemned the Catholic Church for its “disturbing” failure to change its ways.

“It’s all nothing more than window dressing to me. They haven’t taken real action. Release the files, prosecute the predators, and compensate the victims,” said Helen McGonigle, reacting to the latest Irish inquiry reports .

She was raped and sexually assaulted by Fr Smyth in the 1960s in Rhode Island in the US, in a school, a church basement and his car, when she was aged between six and nine-years-old. He also assaulted her mother after he was sent back to the Rhode Island parish following church-ordered treatment in hospital in Ireland.

A review of four institutions by the Catholic Church’s National Board for Safeguarding Children carried out in 2015/16 was published on Wednesday.

It found that in regard to the De La Salle Brothers, the Norbertines and the Nazareth Sisters “their performance in the recent past does not demonstrate any real change from their historical behaviour in terms of ensuring good safeguarding practice or putting in place effective pastoral responses to complainants who have made allegations of abuse”.

Brendan Smyth, a member of the Norbertine Order, was jailed in 1994 for sexually abusing children.

“It’s disturbing,” said Ms McGonigle, “because you would think with all the attention that has been brought upon clerical abuse and on the case of Fr Brendan Smyth specifically and also the Norbertine Order, that they would have taken steps to change their ways over time.

“I appreciate that the National Board for Safeguarding Children has found because it is indeed the case, this is the truth, that’s what’s happening.

“If the Vatican, or the Norbertines, or the Catholic Church as a whole is not forced to change its ways then the practices and the patterns will continue.

Secrecy

“The Catholic Church has not even changed its canon that provides for secrecy, that’s still in place and that places victims under pontifical secrecy.

“They can do all the window-dressing they want and have all these reports come out which are just horrific and which state the truth for the historical record but we have to put the Vatican on notice that they’ve got to change, and it has to come right from the top.

“The window dressing of Pope Benedict and Pope Francis apologising to victims isn’t enough. There has to be action.”