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Mary McAleese will leave Catholic Church if abuse allegations were ignored
By Graham Mcgrath
[with video] Mary McAleese said that she will leave the Catholic Church if abuse claims from within a community for people with disabilities were ignored by the church. The former President of Ireland has written to Pope Francis for answers about allegations of abuse from L’Arche Community founder Jean Vanier and priest Fr Thomas Phillipe. L’Arche International is an organisation for people with intellectual disabilities and it has centres in 39 countries, including four centres in Ireland. It provides services to around 160 people at any given time through branches in Dublin, Belfast, Cork and Kilkenny. On February 22 L’Arche announced that it had gathered evidence about allegations of abuse by Vanier through an inquiry which had been established in June, 2019. It said that the evidence was ‘credible’ and had been given by six women who did not have disabilities, but said they were subjected to abuse over different periods between 1970 and 2005. Vanier died in May, 2019, while Fr Phillipe has been dead since 1993, but had been found by the Catholic Church in 2015 to have abused 14 women over his lifetime. A number of those women had been linked to L’Arche from at least the 1970s. According to the Irish Times, Mary McAleese has demanded answers from the Catholic Church and threatened to leave if the church hadn’t acted on knowledge of the abuse. A section of her letter read: ‘I have to say that this will be my final line of least resistance. ‘I could not in conscience continue to support an institution capable of such gross negligence.’
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