IRELAND
The Telegraph (United Kingdom)
This is no ‘witch hunt’: Cardinal Brady has lost his moral authority over the paedophile priest cases
Jenny McCartney
My column calling for Cardinal Sean Brady to resign from his post as Primate of All Ireland has prompted a great deal of discussion, in particular from the distinguished commentator William Oddie in this week’s Catholic Herald, in which he suggests that my words exemplify a mood that “may well be nearer to the phenomenon we call today a ‘witch hunt’ than to a common understanding based on an equitable understanding of the reality of the situation.”
Since my comprehension of a “witch hunt” is that it is a highly public effort to uncover wrongdoing, but one based on flimsy or negligible evidence, I would argue the opposite: in fact, my view is founded in the facts of the case surrounding the late Fr Brendan Smyth, the notorious paedophile priest, and in what Cardinal Brady has said and argued about it since.
I will not restate the detail of the then Fr Brady’s involvement in the Smyth case, which I set out in the original column. But Mr Oddie – feeling that the Cardinal had been unjustly maligned – asked if anyone had bothered to read the full text of his response to the BBC Two This World programme. I had of course read it closely, and it was this text which disturbed me. It referred to the question of who in the Church at the time had the “authority” to stop Brendan Smyth in his rampant abuse of children – children whose horrifying evidence, incidentally, the 36-year-old Fr Brady fully believed.
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