WHEN in Rome, Bishop John Magee was "in his element".The Bishop of Cloyne was a master of protocol, a stickler for procedures and revelled in occasion, according to one senior cleric.
He was private secretary to three popes in succession -- Paul VI, John Paul and John Paul II, arranging his visit to Ireland in 1979.
When that privileged position ended, he became Master of Pontifical Ceremonies.
Intellectual and meticulous, the role suited him, according to senior clerics.
If he came across as aloof, then you had to consider his background, said one.
"He was in the Vatican where enormous attention is given to protocol and formalities. There is enormous protocol. He would be in his element with that. He was very, very good at it. He was well-informed and well-briefed. He was also very helpful at all times. If he could do a good turn, he would do it," said the senior cleric.
Then in 1987, this urbane man was appointed Bishop of Cloyne, a large rural diocese in Cork.
"I don't know if he ever settled in Cloyne at all . . . He didn't seem to bring people with him."
Evidence of Bishop Magee's lofty detachment has emerged in spades in recent weeks.
The bishop has refused to bow to calls for his resignation following publication of two critical reports into his handling of child sexual abuse claims in the diocese.
The Church guidelines require every allegation of child sexual abuse to be reported to the Health Service Executive (HSE) and the gardai.
The reports showed that even a decade after the Catholic Church in Ireland produced new guidelines to put children's safety first, Bishop Magee presided over a diocesan "policy" not to volunteer all information on suspicious priests to gardai and failed to tell the health authorities at all.
The most damning report, of course, was by Ian Elliot, the chief executive of a Church-appointed National Board for the Safety of Children, published just before Christmas, which found child protection practices inadequate and, in some respects, "dangerous".
A report by the HSE, finally coughed up last Wednesday after three years, found more breaches in that the diocese didn't share sex abuse allegations with the health authorities. The report was a wash-out.
Intended as an audit of clerical sex abuse in every diocese, the statistical questions about abusive priests at large were abandoned midway through the exercise because new legislation was required to enable Church and State to exchange allegations about suspected abusers.
That was two years ago.
The Government did nothing until last week, when Barry Andrews, minister for children and youth affairs, promised the bones of the required legislation, but not for another six months.
In the end, it wasn't the State's child protection services that routed out the continuing culture of denial in some quarters of the Catholic Church but an agency set up by the Church to safeguard its children.
And it would never have emerged at all but for the persistence of a young man who was abused by a priest in Cloyne and refused to allow the diocese's dismal treatment of his complaint go unchallenged.
In December 2004, the young man -- then a priest himself -- called to see Bishop Magee, alleging that he had been sexually abused by a priest as a boy.
He didn't name the priest but asked for counselling, which the bishop funded.
By May 2005, the priest was ready to name his abuser -- 'Fr A' -- in a meeting with the bishop's representative, Dean Eamon Goold. But four months passed before Bishop Magee confronted the priest. When he did -- in September 2005 -- the priest admitted his guilt immediately and resigned his post.
Another two months passed before the gardai were informed, and then at the victim's request. Monsignor Denis O'Callaghan wrote to the local superintendent. Even at that, the monsignor didn't name the priest.
Affording the self-confessed child abuser such protection was "normal practice" in the diocese, according to Mr Elliot's report.
The priest was never charged. His victim, concerned at how the case was handled, made inquiries of the HSE, to discover that it had no record of the case, even though it should have been informed of it.
The counselling organisation, One in Four, complained to the Department of Health and Children, which five months later told the Catholic Church's newly formed child protection body, the National Board for Safeguarding Children.
Mr Elliot, its chief executive, acted swiftly. He met Bishop Magee days later but received only limited files. When he learnt of complaints against another priest in the Cloyne diocese, he demanded the files and got them.
In his later report, Mr Elliot wrote of how he was struck by the glaring absence of references to victims, or to the need to protect vulnerable children, and the need for urgency in dealing with such cases.
In one case, for instance, a father told the bishop in 1995 that 'Fr B' sexually abused his daughter. The Diocesan Child Protection Management Committee, which reviewed the case, was doubtful about the "quality of the alleged abuse" and noted that she didn't want to go to the gardai. Consequently, the diocese did not report the allegation.
When other complaints against the priest emerged, Bishop Magee placed him in restricted ministry, although he still wore priest's clothes.
By 2002, three complaints of alleged abuse had been made against 'Fr B', yet Monsignor Denis O'Callaghan still raised the possibility of a full return to ministry in discussions about the priest's future.
By 2003, more complaints had emerged and 'Fr B' was reported to gardai. According to Mr Elliot's report, it was clear from diocesan papers, that the policy of the diocese was to give "minimal" information to gardai. In particular, details of past complaints against this priest were not to be volunteered to gardai.
The discovery that the Catholic diocese, headed by an eminent bishop who served three popes, had breached the Church's own child protection guidelines begs the question: how many other bishops in how many dioceses have failed to inform the authorities of child abuse allegations, giving alleged abusers the benefit of the doubt?
That was the purpose of the HSE's report, which was launched with much hoo-hah last Wednesday. The report was intended as an audit of all dioceses -- finding out, among other things, how many clerical abusers were at large and to ensure that all had been reported to the authorities.
It took three years but was dismissed as a "charade" by Sean Sherlock, the Labour TD who has campaigned on behalf of Cloyne clerical abuse victims, almost as soon as it was published.
The HSE report found that the Diocese of Cloyne had failed to alert health authorities to child sex abuse allegations, in contravention of existing child protection practices. It found no evidence that dioceses were not compliant with regulations, while at the same time reporting that bishops had refused to answer statistical questions about the numbers of priests facing allegations for legal reasons.
Several bishops dispute this finding. Bishop Leo O'Reilly, from the diocese of Kilmore (with parts of Leitrim, Cavan and Fermanagh) said he had already passed on to gardai details of every allegation of child abuse made against priests in his diocese before the audit even began.
He was quite willing to provide the information to the HSE in some form but the HSE had not asked him.
There were clear legal problems in sharing soft information, such as rumour and innuendo about child sexual abuse, which could result in breaches of the Data Protection Act if the alleged abusers proved identifiable. That meant the planned Church/ State committees that would sit down and share all of this information couldn't meet.
The legal advice to the bishops, to the HSE and to the minister, was that the legislation would have to be changed.
"My clear understanding was they would be coming back with a further revision of the (Section Five) questions that would obviate the difficulties that were perceived," said Bishop O'Reilly. "There was no indication to us that they felt we weren't cooperating. We were seeking clarifications and, when we sought clarifications about this, the response we got was that there was a difficulty here, so just fill out the rest of it and we'll come back to Section Five later. They never came back . . . That's the situation. We filled it in in good faith.
"I am certainly disappointed at the interpretation that is being put on it now, that we didn't want to cooperate. That is not true."
The questions were also poorly phrased. They asked bishops about allegations against "religious" in their dioceses, indicating members of religious orders such as brothers or nuns, as distinct from priests. Bishops had understood this to refer to priests.
"We asked for clarification on those things . . . I didn't want to submit a false report and at the same time I didn't feel at liberty to change their questionnaire, to stroke out 'religious' and write in priests because I wasn't sure whether that was intended. That was never clarified and it was a simple matter to clarify if they had wanted to, if they had decided to do so."
The events of the past week have exposed a Church that still cannot be trusted in handling cases of child sexual abuse and a Government that has been lax in introducing legislation to help ensure that they are handled correctly by allowing the safe sharing of allegations between the Church and State authorities.
Bishop Magee has apologised and accepted the findings of the report. Clerical sources say he is determined to stay put, despite the disappointment signalled by Cardinal Sean Brady and Archbishop Diarmuid Martin.
His apology has done little to restore trust. Even as Bishop Magee last week accepted his failings, there were signs that his own diocesan committee on child protection had not.
The advisory committee threatened legal action against Mr Elliot's report, finding it "seriously flawed", "false" and "defamatory" of its members. Among the 10 signatories to letter is Diarmuid O Cathain, the solicitor to Cardinal Desmond Connell last year when he attempted in the courts to block Church documents being presented to the Dublin Archdiocese Investigation Commission.
That commission is due to report at the end of the month. It's findings will at least temporarily eclipse the scandal of Cloyne. Archbishop Martin has already signalled that the investigation on the handling of abuse cases in the Dublin archdiocese will be shocking.
When the dust settles, the commission will then train its considerable scrutiny on child abuse in Bishop Magee's diocese. Bishop Magee may have won a reprieve but many believe it to be temporary.
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(Source: SI)