A CONCEPT known as "mental reservation" was used by the diocesan leaders to mislead the media about its dealings with abuse victims in a manner they believed did not involve telling lies, the report finds.Marie Collins had told the commission of her anger about the concept which, according to the report, "permits a churchman to knowingly convey a misleading impression to another person without being guilty of lying".
Andrew Madden told the commission how during an informal meeting in 2003, Cardinal Desmond Connell had apologised for the handling of the Fr Ivan Payne case, but had been at pains to point out to him that he did not lie about the use of diocesan funds in meeting the settlement paid by Fr Payne in respect of his abuse of Mr Madden as a child.
It had emerged in 1995 that the £27,500 settlement was made on the basis of a loan from Cardinal Connell from diocesan funds.
The report states, in relation to the 2003 meeting: "He [Cardinal Connell] explained that when he was asked by journalists about the use of diocesan funds for the compensation of child sexual abuse, he had responded that diocesan funds are not used for such a purpose; that he had not said that diocesan funds were not used for such a purpose. By using the present tense, he had not excluded the possibility that diocesan funds had been used for such purpose in the past."
Mr Madden told the commission the cardinal felt there was an enormous difference between the two.
In another instance, Marie Collins had been upset about a press statement issued by the Archdiocese of Dublin following the conviction of her abuser in 1997, which claimed that it had co-operated with gardaí in relation to her complaint, "as she had good reason to believe the Archdiocese’s level of co-operation was, to say the least, questionable".
"Her support priest Fr James Norman subsequently told the gardaí that he asked the Archdiocese about that statement and that the explanation he received was that ‘we never said we cooperated fully’, placing emphasis on the word ‘fully’."
The report says Cardinal Connell explained the concept of mental reservation to the commission in the following way: "Well, the general teaching about mental reservation is that you are not permitted to tell a lie.
"On the other hand, you may be put in a position where you have to answer, and there may be circumstances in which you can use an ambiguous expression realising that the person who you are talking to will accept an untrue version of whatever it may be – permitting that to happen, not willing that it happened, that would be lying.
"It really is a matter of trying to deal with extraordinarily difficult matters that may arise in social relations where people may ask questions that you simply cannot answer.
"Everybody knows that this kind of thing is liable to happen. So, mental reservation is, in a sense, a way of answering without lying."
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