ANALYSIS: THE PSEUDONYM chosen for Tony Walsh in
chapter 19 of the Murphy report was “Fr Jovito”.
So said Justice Paul
Gilligan in the High Court Wednesday.
The name’s alliterative
associations with things jovial or joyful make it seem singularly
inappropriate for this hip-swinging, Elvis-impersonating, frequently
brutal child abuser.
Apparently, however, in line with all other pseudonyms in the Murphy report, it was chosen at random.
Like
previously published chapters, chapter 19 will make for deeply
uncomfortable reading for senior Catholic Church figures in Dublin who
held high office at the time.
A very basic question will be posed:
how could they have allowed a man they knew to have a track record as a
child abuser, from his days as a seminarian at Clonliffe College in
Dublin during the 1970s, go forward for ordination as a priest?
And,
having done so, how could they then have allowed such a man be
appointed a curate in Ballyfermot, a parish with probably the largest
group of altar boys in Ireland?
How could they then too have allowed him responsibility for children’s Masses there?
Church
authorities at Clonliffe and in Archbishop’s House at the time are not
the only ones likely to experience acute discomfort next week as they
head into Christmas.
The Vatican will hardly welcome seven
paragraphs in chapter 4 of the Murphy report which deal with the canon
law trial of Walsh in Dublin and his laicisation in 1992.
Four of
those paragraphs deal with his appeal to Rome where his “sentence” was
commuted to a decade in a monastery. During this lengthy appeal process,
Walsh abused the child who would lead to his first conviction in the
civil courts.
That prompted a rushed visit by the then Catholic
archbishop of Dublin Desmond Connell to Rome where he insisted Walsh be
laicised.
News that those parts of the Murphy report concerning Walsh were to be published was widely welcomed.
Maeve
Lewis of One in Four said it would “undoubtedly provide further
evidence of the culture of secrecy and cover-up which existed in the
Dublin archdiocese prior to the appointment of Archbishop Diarmuid
Martin”.
Ellen O’Malley Dunlop of the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre
was “pleased” but also aware, as was Lewis, of “the reminder” it would
be for victims of clerical sexual abuse.
Fine Gael’s Charlie
Flanagan said publication was “the next vital step in exposing the
institutional abuse of children by the Catholic Church”.
SIC: IT/IE