BELFAST (NORTHERN IRELAND)
Slugger O’Toole
October 20, 2017
By Gladys Ganiel
[Note: The passage from the Ryan report, mentioned in this review, may be found here at paragraph 3.149.]
There is much insightful reading in a new collection of essays edited by Eamon Maher and Eugene O’Brien, Tracing the Cultural Legacy of Irish Catholicism: From Galway to Cloyne and Beyond (Manchester University Press, 2017).
Maher, who lectures in Humanities at the Institute of Technology, Tallaght, has co-edited a number of collections on Irish Catholicism in recent years – all of which have made a valuable contribution in conversations about the future of the Church.
Titles such as Contemporary Catholicism in Ireland: A Critical Appraisal (2008) and The Dublin/Murphy Report: A Watershed for Irish Catholicism (2010) were published by Columba, a popular press based in Dublin that has since folded.
* * *
Maher and O’Brien, who lectures in English Language and Literature at Mary Immaculate College in Limerick, have assembled a fascinating series of contributions. In most chapters, the writing and argumentation are accessible to both popular and academic audiences.
Maher and O’Brien ensure that all the contributions are read in light of the clerical abuse scandals.
The scandals are emphasised not only in the subtitle of the book but also in their Introduction. So in the opening pages of the book, they contrast the ‘euphoria’ of Pope John Paul II’s visit to Ballybrit Racecourse, Galway, in 1979 at a special mass for young people, with how priests and religious were abusing children across the island.
They reproduce a particularly harrowing passage from the 2009 Ryan Report on Child Abuse, detailing abuses at St Joseph’s Industrial School, Ferryhouse, Clonmel, about events that happened on the same day as the Pope’s visit to Limerick (p. 3):
The other boy was sent for, and Fr Stefano described how ‘the two boys sat in my office and unfolded to me a most horrific story of what had been happening to them.’ The boys told Fr Stefano story after story of cruelty and abuse. The worst, as far as he was concerned, was the abuse of one of the boys during the Pope’s visit to Ireland in 1979. The whole school went to see the Pope in Limerick, except for one of the two boys who was not allowed to go because of his record of absconding. Br Bruno volunteered to stay back and supervise him. The boy told Fr Stefano that, when the rest of the boys left, ‘this Brother came and raped me in my bed’. (Ryan, 2009: II, 2, 87; italics in original)
Maher and O’Brien then comment:
Therefore, while the Pope was speaking about the value of children in the Catholic world view some forty miles away, a Rosminian brother was raping two boys who had been placed under his care by both the Catholic Church and the State.
Maher and O’Brien’s Introduction is followed by a chapter by the Irish Times’ religious affairs correspondent, Patsy McGarry, which delves in greater detail into the scandals. It also explores the role of the media, including a succession of television documentaries, in unravelling an authoritarian Catholic culture.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.