SCOTLAND
Catholic World Report
September 11, 2015
Dorothy Cummings McLean
On August 18, 2015, the McLellan Commission released a report entitled “A Review of the Current Safeguarding Policies, Procedures and Practise within the Catholic Church in Scotland”. The work was commissioned by the Scottish Catholic Bishops, and the committee was headed by Dr Andrew McLellan, a former Moderator of the Church of Scotland. A short summary of the 87-page document was released to the Scottish media, whose coverage showed little evidence that it had read the report in its entirety.
The McLellan Commission was convened in 2013, the year Edinburgh’s archbishop Cardinal Keith O’Brien resigned amid allegations he had made sexual advances to priests. In 2013, allegations also surfaced that boys had been physically and sexually abused by Benedictine monks at their school at Fort Augustus, Inverness-shire before it closed in 1993. The Commission was not asked to research Scottish Catholic clerical misconduct, but to examine the measures the Scottish Catholic bishops had already put in place to protect children and vulnerable adults.
Instead the Commission has produced a badly constructed, meandering document, the first two chapters providing a turgid and repetitive preamble which offers generalities and platitudes about abuse and Catholic shame instead of offering information. Very little context regarding the Catholic Church in Scotland is provided. It is not until Chapter 3 (paragraph 3.49) that the reader is told how many Catholic priests serve in Scotland’s 500 Catholic parishes (590). Never is the reader told how many priests in Scotland have been found guilty of sexual abuse.
In Chapter 2, however, we are told that there were 45 allegations of abuse between 2006 and 2012. “More than half” were claims of sexual abuse. Seven of these resulted in prosecution. (The Commission does not disclose the verdicts.) In 2013, a further 15 allegations of abuse—the Commission does not specify the kind—were made, six relating to events before 1990. Two of those cases are currently before the public prosecutor, and three clerics have been removed from ministry.
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