THERE IS A depressing sense of déjà vu about last week’s annual
report of the Catholic Church’s National Board for Safeguarding Children
(NBSC), a sense once again of good people frustrated, doing a key job
but swimming against a tide of a conservative clerical bureaucracy.
Despite repeated expressions of concern and public statements of
acceptance of the need for new procedures and a changed internal
culture, inertia reigns in the church.
John Morgan, the board’s
lay chairman, puts it down to entrenched “clericalism” and speaks, as
others have before to apparently little avail, of a need for “a new
relationship between the clerical caste and lay people”.
The board
reports delays and constraints on its vital work surveying child
protection practice throughout the church, unexplained failures to
report new allegations of abuse to it, and new budget constraints on the
board’s important training programmes for clergy and laity for which
demand continues to increase.
Most worrying is the delay in the
board’s comprehensive review of the dioceses’ work, a project stymied by
the very people who set it up.
The three sponsoring bodies, the
Bishops’ Conference, the Conference of Religious of Ireland, and the
Irish Missionary Union, announced, in what has become an all-too-regular
refrain in the child protection saga, that lawyers were advising that
collaboration with the board would breach their obligations under data
protection law.
NBSC chief executive Ian Elliott acknowledges that
they have a right to express concern, but insists the board’s practice
in this regard “fully complies with data protection legislation as it
exists in both jurisdictions on the island”.
The church, however, does
not have “can do” lawyers; its default mode remains defensive and
protective of its clergy first and foremost.
After lengthy
negotiations involving the three bodies, and talks with the data
commissioner’s office, an agreement has now been reached that has
allayed such privacy fears and will allow the board to continue its
review work.
The board has committed itself, however, not to publish or
comment publicly on its findings on individual dioceses or church bodies
without the permission of their respective heads. So much for
transparency.
The board speculates that its difficulties in
tracking accurately the level of abuse notification may also have been
linked to perceptions about data privacy legal issues.
Its draft report
had been about to report a significant decline in reported cases, down
to 53 from 197 on the year, when a renewed request for information
bewilderingly produced a dramatically higher figure of 272 complaints to
dioceses and religious orders.
Reassuringly, however, it reports that
all the cases, the bulk of them historic, were duly notified to the
State authorities where victim and alleged abuser were identifiable.
It
is to be hoped that the board’s report and its discussions with the
Apostolic Visitation sent by Pope Benedict will help inspire a new sense
of urgency.
“If you safeguard children within the church,” Elliott
contends rightly, “you will safeguard the church itself.”