A sickening report into clerical child sex abuse in the Dublin Catholic Archdiocese is to be published detailing decades of cover-ups by church hierarchy.Four Archbishops, including Cardinal Desmond Connell, will be named and shamed over their mishandling of hundreds of allegations, including not reporting crimes to gardai.
The senior clerics' motive was to protect the church above defenceless children, the report will find.
The Dublin Archdiocese Commission is the third inquiry in the last four years to rock the Catholic Church in Ireland following independent investigations into abusive priests.
The pattern of senior clerics moving abusers from parish to parish rather than dealing with the problem will also be addressed.
The 700-page report includes 45 potted histories of a sample of priests from 1975 to 2004 who were investigated by the Commission.
It is understood only ten priests will be named, as they are either dead or in jail, with the rest given aliases. It will detail horrific abuse stories the Commission was told by victims, the response of Bishops and Archbishops and how gardai and health authorities reacted.
Justice Minister Dermot Ahern will publish the report at Government Buildings.
The role of four Archbishops, John Charles McQuaid who died in 1973, Dermot Ryan who died in 1984, Kevin McNamara who died in 1987, and the retired Cardinal, were examined. The Commission looked at the Cardinal's role in the late 1980s and 1990s and the use of an insurance scheme, which he inherited, to pay off victims.
Cardinal Connell, who took part in the Conclave to elect Pope Benedict four years ago, ordered a trawl through the diocesan secret archives in 1995 to determine how many clerics had been accused of child abuse. Only 17 names were given to gardai.
His successor Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, who has continually pushed for full disclosure of clerical child abuse, later found that since 1940 more than 400 children had claimed to have been abused by at least 152 priests in the Dublin area.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Disclaimer
No responsibility or liability shall attach itself to us or to the blogspot ‘Clerical Whispers’ for any or all of the articles placed here.
The placing of an article hereupon does not necessarily imply that we agree or accept the contents of the article as being necessarily factual in theology, dogma or otherwise.
SIC: II