Former bishop John Magee has been given a damning assessment in the long-awaited, 400 page Cloyne report into clerical abuse.
Retired
Bishop John Magee has been singled out for failing to follow Church
rules on reporting clerical sex abuse in an Irish diocese as recently as
three years ago.
A fourth damning inquiry into the
church lays the blame for the mishandling of allegations with the
former Vatican aide who served as personal secretary to three popes.
The
judge-led investigation into his inadequate attempts to deal with
abusive clerics launched a withering attack on the former Bishop of
Cloyne in Co Cork for attempting to blame subordinates for his
failures.
The long-awaited report also found his
second-in-command Monsignor Denis O'Callaghan did not approve of the
Church's protection guidelines, in particular the need to alert the
police, and "stymied" child abuse policy.
"It is a
remarkable fact that Bishop Magee took little or no active interest in
the management of clerical child sexual abuse cases until 2008," the
shocking 400-page report found.
The inquiry - headed by Judge Yvonne Murphy, who in 2009 exposed a damning catalogue of failures in the Dublin
Archdiocese - found the Catholic hierarchy in Cloyne was resisting
church policy 12 years after a framework document on child protection
was adopted in 1996.
The commission's devastating criticisms go right to the top of the Catholic Church.
It
lambasted the Vatican and accused it of an "entirely unhelpful"
reaction for referring to the Irish Church's mandatory reporting
guidelines as merely a study document.
It found the
response from Rome effectively gave a carte blanche to the likes of
Bishop Magee to ignore the guidelines and offered "comfort and support"
to senior clerics such as Monsignor O'Callaghan who dissented from
official Irish Church policy on paedophile priests.
John Magee stood down from day-to-day duties in March 2009 and resigned a year later.
In
one of its most damning assessments, the report states the Cloyne
scandal was different from others, because it dealt with allegations
after 1996.
That was the year the Catholic Church brought
in the child sex abuse guidelines and protection policies, and two
years after revelations about paedophile priest Fr Brendan Smyth "convulsed" the country, the report said.
The
commission said this ruled out any past excuses for the poor handling
of allegations reported in other dioceses such as Dublin and Ferns.
The
commission was alerted to concerns about 33 priests - only one of them
unnamed - but could investigate only 19 because the others were not
connected to Cloyne or the allegations related to periods outside their
timeframe, between January 1996 and February 2009.
The
report found there were concerns raised about almost 8% of the 163
priests serving in Cloyne in 1996. Some 40 victims have been
identified.
The inquiry found Bishop Magee ignored the
report of an indepedent expert drafted in to Cloyne in 2003, who
warned the diocese was not following rules on child sex abuse
allegations.
Bishop Magee initially told the commission he
did not see the report until five years after it was completed, but
later said he was mistaken and did see it at the time it was produced
in 2004.
The commission said: "Clearly, he did not read it
then or, if he did, he did not take its message on board or he chose
to ignore it."
The report notes the bishop told the
children's minister in 2005 that Church guidelines were fully in place
and being fully complied with.
The commission said if he
had read the 2004 internal report or checked with Monsignor
O'Callaghan, he would have known this was not the case.
Later,
in January 2007, he told the Health Service Exectuive (HSE) the diocese
reported any complaints to the HSE or the gardai.
"This was not true," the commission states.
The
commission said the failure by both Bishop Magee and Monsignor
O'Callaghan to read and take heed of the internal 2004 report was
"quite extraordinary".
The report found that in a number of
cases where Church authorities were made aware of alleged abuse, they
made no attempt to find out if there were other suspected victims and
did not report many incidents to the gardai.
The report
states the greatest failure in the scandal was that Cloyne authorities
did not report all allegations to the gardai.
The
commission dismissed a defence by Bishop Magee that he was shocked that
Church guidelines were not adhered to and his insistence that he fully
backed them.
"It became clear during the course of this
investigation that Bishop Magee had, to a certain extent, detached
himself from the day-to-day management of child sexual abuse cases,"
the report states.
"Bishop Magee was the head of the
diocese and cannot avoid his reponsibility by blaming subordinates
whom he wholly failed to supervise."
But while the report
states Bishop Magee must take ultimate responsibility, Monsignor
O'Callaghan was singled out for having stymied the child abuse policy.
Of
the 19 priests investigated, two still serve Cloyne, four are retired,
including Bishop Magee - who no longer lives in the diocese - with
just two of them with restrictions on their ministry.
One
is out of ministry, one is living within a religious order, with some
restrictions on his ministry, while another has left the priesthood.
In one case, where a priest admitted abusing at least four children, there was no attempt by either the Church or the Garda
to find out if the cleric had targeted anyone else.
The report also
notes the Garda was not told about all the admissions made by the
priest.
Only one priest from Cloyne has been convicted, as
another won a Supreme Court appeal to stop his trial over his age, ill
health and delays.
Of 15 complaints to the diocese between
1996 and 2005, nine were not reported. The 15 cases did not include
other concerns or allegations already known to the gardai.
The
most serious lapse was found to be the case in which the alleged
victims were still children when the complaints were made, the
commision said.
The report highlighted a "most unusual and
unacceptable" case where Monsignor O'Callaghan reported an alleged
victim's name to gardai but not the perpetrator.
"He failed to understand that the requirement to report was for the protection of other children," it said.
Nine of the priests involved are dead and one unnamed priest is presumed dead.
Justice Minister Alan Shatter
said that a small number of cases where the Garda handling of
allegations has been called into question have been handed over to the
Garda Ombudsman.
On the inquiry, he said: "Many of its
findings are for others to account for. But for any failings on the
part of the State through the years, we express our profound sorrow.
"This
report is about just some of those who, as children, were abused by
people they respected as arbiters of right and wrong - whose complaints
were handled atrociously - and who now find that some of the promises
that were made that other children would be kept safe were empty."
The
Government said it will set up a vetting bureau, with new laws enacted
in the autumn to allow the sharing of soft information on people
wishing to work with children.
There are also plans to
bring in laws making it an offence to withhold information on crimes
against children and vulnerable adults.
Cardinal Sean Brady, the head of the Catholic Church in Ireland, described the failings in Cloyne as "deplorable and totally unacceptable".
Archbishop of Cashel and Emly Dermot Clifford, the Apostolic Administrator of Cloyne, apologised.
"I
am appalled by the depth of damage and suffering caused by a minority
of clergy in the Diocese, as outlined in this report," the Archbishop
said.
"Great pain was also caused to the families of those
abused, whose strong relationship with the Catholic Church was, in a
number of cases, damaged or destroyed."
The Archbishop
said: "It appals me that, up to 2008, 13 years after these procedures
were put in place, they were still not being implemented in the
Diocese of Cloyne.
"It is a very sad day for all the
priests and people in the Diocese of Cloyne. We sincerely hope that
our responses to complaints and the ongoing efforts in safeguarding of
children and vulnerable adults in the Diocese will go some of the way
to atone for the grave failures of the past. Such failures must never
be permitted to happen again."
Mr Shatter also criticised
the communications that the inquiry received from the Papal Nuncio in
Dublin - the Vatican`s Ambassador to Ireland.
He said it
was a "matter of seriousness" that Rome claimed it could not help the
investigation and said Minister for Foreign Affairs Eamon Gilmore would have to decide how to act on that.
Mr
Shatter said it was "unfortunate and unacceptable" that the actions of
the Catholic hierarchy and representative of an outside state, the
Vatican, may have contributed to failures.
The minister
added he wants assurances from the bishops in Ireland that guidelines
to protect children are being fully complied with in every diocese.