The continued conduct of the Catholic bishops over child abuse is unspeakable.Not just John Magee, the bishop of Cloyne, but all of them - with the notable exceptions of Diarmuid Martin, Archbishop of Dublin and Sean Brady, Archbishop of Armagh.
But first John Magee, the former private secretary and confidant of Pope Paul VI, the former private secretary of Pope John Paul I during his brief pontificate and, briefly, private secretary to the late Pope John Paul II. John Magee is now an episcopal embarrassment.
Barry Andrews, the Minister for Children, gave the following account of official dealings with Magee and the Cloyne diocese.
On November 23, 2005, Magee gave the assurance:
‘‘In our endeavour to ensure a safe environment for children in the diocese of Cloyne, we have initiated a process that is fully compliant with the Church and state guidelines and, specifically, the established guidelines for notifying the Gardaí and the HSE of allegations of clerical sexual abuse.”
In addition, the diocese of Cloyne informed the Health Service Executive (HSE) on January 3, 2007 that it was in compliance with the Children First guidelines, in that it had notified the Garda Síochána and HSE of all child abuse cases.
These claims were false. Cloyne diocese was not acting in compliance with the guidelines and there were two cases where it failed to notify the authorities, in one instance for more than six months and in another for eight years. In one of these cases, when Magee did notify the Gardaí, he gave the name only of the alleged victim, not of the alleged perpetrator.
I asked Magee whether he had told the HSE the full story, and his spokesman responded that the bishop ‘‘fully believed the diocese was in compliance with the guidelines when he made the reply to the HSE’’.
This raises more questions: did he have personal oversight of the investigations of the cases that had arisen? If so, how did he not know the Gardaí and the HSE had not been informed?
If he did not have personal oversight of the cases, why not? Did he make the relevant enquiries of the relevant persons concerning these cases when he gave the responses to the HSE? If he personally did not give the responses to the HSE, did he have oversight of it and, if not, why not?
One way or another, here we have a bishop not just failing to comply with the agreed guidelines on child protection, but his diocese then giving false information to the authorities about its compliance with these guidelines.
There is worse. Andrews said in his official statement last Wednesday: ‘‘There was an obvious difficulty surrounding the provision of information by the bishops as sought under Section 5 of the national audit conducted by the HSE.”
He said the absence of this information significantly detracted from the value of the HSE audit. In fact, the absence of this information made the audit almost entirely useless. The whole point of the audit was frustrated.
Andrews went on to say that his office and the HSE would be engaging with the National Board for Safeguarding Children in the Catholic Church (NBSCCC) ‘‘over the course of the next few weeks to explore and put in place mechanisms that will ensure that both the HSE and the NBSCCC can be satisfied that the highest standards of child safeguarding will be implemented throughout the country’’.
This is astonishing. The bishops failed to supply the information requested, and Andrews, the minister responsible for the implementation of the guidelines, goes along with the pretence that there is some real obstacle to the bishops complying with the request for information. This is a sample of the information sought:
‘‘Please provide from your records, the number of complaints or allegations against individuals of child sexual abuse made to the diocese and which have been brought to the attention of the civil authorities, that is health boards, Health Service Executive and/or An Garda Síochána (pleas e note that the question requires only a numeric answer, eg allegations against A = 2, allegations against B = 3, allegations against C = 1.”
Another example: ‘‘Have all complaints or allegations of chi ld sexual a bus e be en brought to the attention of the HSE and An Garda Síochána?”
Not a single question asked for names or details of particular allegations. Nobody could possibly have been identified by answers to these questions, so no reputations could have been damaged.
Yet, according to the HSE audit report: ‘‘Consequent to receiving [the questionnaire], the bishops, using identical concerns, advised that, whilst anxious to cooperate fully with the HSE, in the absence of the legislative measures anticipated by the Ferns Report [giving the bishops assurances that they could not be sued for defamation for releasing information], they were unable to do so in respect of Section 5 of the planned audit [the section that asked questions such as those above].”
The report continued: ‘‘The bishops identified that Section 5 presented insurmountable difficulties in relation to confidentiality, given that the appropriate legal arrangements had not been put in place.”
The bishops’ excuse for noncompliance with the central part of the HSE audit of their procedures was and is mistaken. There is absolutely no legal impediment of any kind to the supply of the kind of information requested. Indeed, Diarmuid Martin, the Archbishop of Dublin, freely gives such information himself whenever asked in public. No possible libel or slander action could possibly succeed arising from this, for nobody is identified, so no reputation is damaged.
I find it hard to believe that any lawyer gave the bishops advice that there was any legal risk in answering any of the questions asked. To put it at its mildest, it seems obvious that the bishops, en masse and in concert, are being misleading.
It is astonishing that, after all that has emerged about clerical child abuse and its concealment by bishops over many decades, they would still be contriving excuses to avoid being held to account - and doing so in concert.
After all the finger-wagging by that same cadre of clerics over the generations, it now seems it is the bishops who are most in need of moral guidance. Perhaps the Humanist Association could arrange that for them.
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Sotto Voce
(Source: SBP)