Both
women, who were abused by a priest in Cloyne, accused Msgr O’Callaghan
of being dismissive of their pain after he said he expected to return to
his radio programme
Thoughts on Sunday on the Cork station C103 after “this is all blown over”.
One
said: “He just doesn’t get it. When he said, ‘When this is all blown
over’, it made my blood boil. The trauma of being abused never blows
over. He should try living with it for 21 years and then he’d know it
never blows over.”
The other woman was equally critical of Msgr
O’Callaghan’s comments.
“He comes out with all this stuff about his
concern being for the victims but that comment really says it all about
his true feelings: that it’s all a bit of a to-do about nothing that
will blow over and everything will be all right again. Well, he’s
wrong,” she said.
Speaking on C103’s Cork Today programme, Msgr
O’Callaghan denied he had said it was wrong to report suspected abusers
to the Garda and the HSE but said his commitment as a priest was to
provide pastoral care to all involved in the allegations.
His
first concern was to put counselling in place for the victims of
clerical child sex abuse and his second was to put monitoring in place
on the alleged abuser so the danger of any recurrence would be reduced
as much as possible.
“I have met so many victims, they have been
through a terrible time and the fact that they have been hiding this for
so many years, that has added to the distress they have suffered, so I
don’t blame them at all for feeling hard done by the church.”
Msgr
O’Callaghan also disputed a criticism by Cloyne commission chairperson
Judge Yvonne Murphy in the Cloyne report that he seemed more emotionally
sympathetic to alleged abusers than to those who complained of being
abused. He said that was true in some cases only.
“This is very
natural: if you have an accused in hospital, terminally ill, you have to
meet the victim as well but emotionally you can’t go in coldly as a
professional and not feel for this man who is terminally ill and will be
dead in a short time.
“[But] not to every abuser, because once
you got the situation clear in your mind, it was very difficult to deal
with them and to accept that a priest would do what they had done, that
was very hard to accept,” he said.
Cork Today producer John Paul
McNamara said the programme received more than 400 phone calls about the
interview with Msgr O’Callaghan, all criticising his comments and his
role in handling clerical child sex abuse.