IRELAND
Irish Independent
The Dark Box John Cornwell Profile Books, £16.99, hbk, 320 pages
15 FEBRUARY 2014
Clerical sex abuse is modern Ireland’s Famine.
Clerical sex abuse is modern Ireland’s Famine. It’s the event which has shaped and shaken the country more than any other. The who, what, when and where are slowly being excavated, but the why still remains unanswered. That’s the task which the Cambridge academic and author John Cornwell sets himself in his new book.
He has a startling and original theory to put forward, which is that the rise in child abuse by priests throughout the Catholic world was linked directly to changes in the customs around first communion and confession which came into force under Pope Pius X in the early part of the last Century.
With Catholicism “seduced and corrupted on every side by secular influences”, Pius was desperate to haul the faithful back into line. One weapon was a ruthless spy network which reported on priests with liberal views in an Inquisition-style “reign of moral terror”.
The other was a hardening of the rules around communion – which he now demanded be taken more regularly, ideally every day– and the declining practice of confession, which suddenly went from an annual to a weekly obligation.
The most radical change, introduced by Papal decree in 1910, was that confession was now required of children, not after puberty as before, but from around the age of seven. This put predatory priests in a position where they had easy access to children.
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