IT WAS June 7th, 2001, at the cathedral in Cavan town and the Catholic primate Archbishop (as he still was) Seán Brady was in jovial mood. At a Mass marking the golden jubilee of the ordination of his old boss Bishop Francis McKiernan, who retired in 1998, he began a warm tribute by saying he was “tempted to offer the prayer of the man who fell into the vat of stout in Guinness’s brewery. He prayed, ‘Lord give me a mouth worthy of this glorious opportunity’.”
Archbishop Brady recalled that it was “some 49 years since I first met the then Fr McKiernan. He was in St Patrick’s College, [Cavan] for the second time, I, for the first – he as teacher, I as student”.
As Fr Brady, he returned to teach at St Patrick’s in 1967 and was there until 1980.
During that time he was secretary to Bishop McKiernan, based too in Cavan town.
In 1975, Fr Brady conducted the two inquiries which led to faculties to minister in Kilmore diocese being withdrawn from child abuser Brendan Smyth.
But apart from the teacher-pupil, bishop-secretary relationship he had with Bishop McKiernan, in June 2001 Archbishop Brady had another reason to be grateful to his old mentor.
Bishop McKiernan had kept his name out of the loop when the sky fell in following the 1994 jailing of Fr Brendan Smyth in Belfast.
By 1994, Fr Brady was serving as parish priest at Castletara (Ballyhaise) in Cavan. On February 19th, 1995, he was ordained coadjutor archbishop of Armagh.
That same year, on October 23rd, Bishop McKiernan was interviewed by RTÉ regarding when he first knew of complaints against Smyth, then in jail.
The bishop said he first became aware of complaints against Brendan Smyth in 1975. He said he had investigated these at the time and they had been substantiated. He reported them to the abbot of Kilnacrott and had withdrawn Smyth’s faculties to hear Confession.
Not once did he mention Archbishop Brady’s role in that 1975 investigation. Nor did he explain that he had himself restored faculties to Fr Smyth in 1984, which he continued to exercise there until 1993, when Bishop McKiernan heard that the director of public prosecution in Belfast was bringing a criminal prosecution against Smyth.
This economy with the facts by the bishop would probably fit the context of mental reservation. It was explained to the Murphy commission by Cardinal Desmond Connell as “a way of answering without lying”.
An example given in the Murphy report concerned a 1997 statement in which the Dublin archdiocese said it had co-operated with gardaí where Marie Collins’s abuse was concerned.
She knew this was untrue and had the statement checked out.
A spokesman for the archdiocese then put it like this: “we never said we co-operated fully” with gardaí, placing emphasis on the word “fully”, as the Murphy report noted.
In that same RTÉ interview Bishop McKiernan also denied receiving a letter in 1974 from Norbertine priest Fr Bruno Mulvihill, a former colleague of Smyth’s at Kilnacrott abbey, which explained that “ever since 1964” he had known Smyth was “molesting children who attend bingo sessions”.
The then abbot general of the Norbertines Fr Marcel van de Ven also denied receiving any such knowledge from Fr Mulvihill in 1986 at an ordination service in Belgium.
At that very time Smyth was hearing Confession in Kilmore and abusing four children in one Belfast family, which helped to put him in jail in 1994.
But, as this reporter discovered, also on October 23rd, 1995, abbot general Van de Ven had a way with words. He had been due to meet then Catholic primate Cardinal Cahal Daly in Rome. He denied this.
He said: “I did not speak to him [Cardinal Daly] on the phone. I never spoke to him. Perhaps they know that I have been trying to contact him. I will try again this evening.”
He had tried to contact Cardinal Daly “three times in the last few days” but the cardinal “was busy at the synod [in Rome].”
Hours later it was a different story.
Contacted again, the abbot general admitted he had met the cardinal the previous Wednesday.
He explained his volte face: “According to the protocol of the church, I should not say anything before the cardinal. The cardinal has the first word. It was not a lie from my side but I wanted to know if the cardinal had spoken to you already. I spoke to him on the phone this evening again and I asked him ‘Is it known that we met?’ and he said ‘yes, it is known.’”