SCOTLAND
Herald Scotland
Sunday 10 March 2013
CARDINAL O’Brien may be long gone from public life, following the scandal surrounding his “inappropriate behaviour” with a number of priests – but if the Catholic Church thought his speedy departure, accelerated by the Vatican, would close the door on clerical scandals, then the hierarchy was wrong.
As we report today, victims who were abused by church figures as children are asking why it took just days to get rid of O’Brien, yet decades after crimes were committed against them, no action has been taken. O’Brien is guilty of being a hypocrite – he castigated homosexuals and denounced gay marriage, yet he was drawn to men himself. However, he committed no crime. He carried out no act of evil.
In contrast, the Catholic Church in Scotland has known for years about the scandal of child abuse happening under the noses of the hierarchy. Back in 2000 this newspaper ran a series of disturbing investigations into institutionalised child abuse. One report centered on a priest who carried out a series of sexual assaults and rapes against an eight-year-old boy in Lanarkshire being allowed to continue working unsupervised with children within the Catholic Church in Scotland.
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