IRELAND
Association of Catholic Priests

Sean O’Connaill deplores the bishops’ lack of transparency on the funding and independence of the national body for child protection that they set up (the NSBCCC), and hopes for the day when bishops will be accountable to their people.

Beginning 20 years ago in 1994, the Irish Catholic church was struck by the greatest ever blow to its morale and survival – the revelation that not only could Irish Catholic children suffer life-threatening abuse from a small minority of their clergy, but (far worse) that other ordained men who carry the church’s symbol of pastoral care, the shepherd’s crook, could fail to exert their canonical power to protect those children – and could use that power instead to conceal the crime of the erring priest. In the years that followed, and especially in 2002, it became clear that this failure, and the secrecy that…