IRELAND
Irish Times
Tue, May 13, 201
The revelation in 1992 that an Irish Catholic bishop had fathered a child didn’t look then like the onset of two decades of PR winter for Catholic clergy here.
The bleakness of that winter had far more to do with revelations from 1994 that Catholic bishops could be deeply derelict in their duty of care to Catholic children.
In 2003, we learned that Irish bishops had begun insuring their church’s financial assets against liability for clerical child sex abuse in 1987 – eight years before they began taking steps to protect the children themselves. This looked like midnight.
The Ferns report of 2005 confirmed the darkest fact: at least some Irish bishops had “placed the interest of the church ahead of children”.
For the Dublin archdiocese, 2009 was darker still: the Murphy report’s revelation of the scale of child abuse there to 2004, even beyond 1994 – and of the decades of administrative concealment that had enabled so much of it – baffled all comprehension.
Catholic clergy had always claimed to know all there was to know about sexual sin. It was impossible for most lay people to fathom the fact that the “learning curve” of the same clergy had never risen to the challenge of clerical child sex abuse, or even of grasping the scale of suffering it caused.
The formation of the Irish Association of Catholic Priests (ACP) in 2010 came as a welcome glimpse of a distant dawn. So did the association’s evocation of the spirit of Vatican II – that 1960s glimmering of relevance for the church.
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