The sex-abuse scandal in Ireland is partly attributable to a
misguided compassion, which led Church officials to downplay the
evidence of clerical misconduct, a leading Irish Catholic analyst
argues.
David Quinn notes Chapter 19 of the Murphy Commission report on abuse in
the Dublin archdiocese shows the influence of Msgr. Gerard Sheehy, the
top canon lawyer for the archdiocese, who argued persistently against
disciplinary action in the case of Tony Walsh, a notorious pedophile.
(Chapter 19 of the Murphy Report had been withheld from publication
until the conclusion of criminal proceedings against Walsh. The chapter
was made public last week after Walsh— who had served a previous jail
term, and been removed from the priesthood because of his record of
molesting children-- was convicted on new sex-abuse charges.)
Quinn argues that Msgr. Sheehy’s approach, based on the assumption that
pedophiles should be more pitied than punished, was a major factor in
the response to sex-abuse complaints for years. He writes:
This is the era when the 'compassionate' Sheehy view was most dominant and it is the era in which clerical child abusers were most likely to go unchecked. The same view appears to have prevailed in the Roman Rota and was only brought to an end when Cardinal Ratzinger finally got his way in 2001.
Quinn cites a “very revealing” passage in the Murphy Report, quoting
notes in which Msgr. Sheehy condemns the “outrageous suggestion” that
then-Archbishop Desmond Connell should inform law-enforcement officials
about Walsh’s preying on children.
On the basis of the events reported in Chapter 19, Quinn observes,
Cardinal Connell has been undeservedly condemned for his failure to
punish predatory priests.
Quinn argues that a more appropriate focus of
criticism would be the late Archbishop Dermot Ryan, who headed the
Dublin archdiocese from 1981 to 1984, and was “utterly complacent about
the abuse of children throughout the 1970s when the scandals were at
their worst.”
SIC: CC/INT'L