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…