Friday's Irish Times featured on its front page an odd photograph, framed as a kind of Usual Suspects-type line-up: a lugubrious collection of four ecclesiastical over-achievers, men known for decades throughout Ireland as secretive and influential, inscrutable figures garbed in the gilt and gold of sacerdotal robes, collectively the very personification of Catholic power in the republic. The four men – John Charles McQuaid, Dermot Ryan, Kevin McNamara, and Desmond Connell – were the successive holders of the office of the Archbishop of the Archdiocese of Dublin; and, for over 50 years, they were at the head of what was, in effect, the largest and most disgraceful criminal conspiracy in the history of the independent Irish state.
This fact has been made conclusively clear by the publication this week of the Murphy Report, which marks – after the Ferns Report in 2005, and the Ryan Report earlier this year – another watershed in the history of modern Irish Catholicism. The Commission of Investigation into the Dublin Archdiocese relates the by now familiar catalogue of horrendous obscenities – abuse, molestation, rape, violence, neglect – committed by priests against children. Yet this latest report differs from its predecessors in that it focuses not on the initial offences, but on the subsequent cover-ups, evasions and subterfuge that allowed the Church to escape embarrassment, and enabled the abuse to continue unabated for decades. The report is unequivocal:
As can be seen clearly from the case histories, there is no doubt that the reaction of Church authorities to reports of clerical child sexual abuse in the early years of the Commission's remit was to ensure that as few people as possible knew of the individual priest's problem. There was little or no concern for the welfare of the abused child or for the welfare of other children who might come into contact with the priest. Complainants were often met with denial, arrogance and cover-up and with incompetence and incomprehension in some cases. Suspicions were rarely acted on. Typically complainants were not told that other instances of child sexual abuse by their abuser had been proved or admitted. The attitude to individual complainants was overbearing and in some cases underhanded. (p. 10)
The practice of the Church was permeated with secrecy, occlusion, lies, 'a cult of loyal obedience': the 'vast majority [of priests] simply chose to turn a blind eye' to the abuse; those who were blatantly guilty were shifted around from parish to parish to avoid problems; several bishops 'heard suspicions and concerns but they did not take the obvious steps of asking precisely what was involved or challenging the priest concerned'.
Consider the activities of Father Thomas Naughton (p. 455), against whom there were 20 documented complaints of abuse. The Commission found that the Archdiocese did 'everything in its power to protect him', and 'ignored his victims' until the story became too big to ignore. 'As a result, he was left to continue his abuse for many years.' This was not a million years ago: he was active in the parish of Donnycarney in north Dublin in 1984 when I was baptised there, and was, following incidents of abuse, moved to the Ringsend parish, where he was active in schools when many of my friends would have been entering education. All the while, the hierarchy was aware of what he had been doing, and what he was capable of. Their response was to smother accusations in denial, and to send him for sessions of psychiatric treatment.
These things are, largely, not news to the Irish people. It has long been known that the Church in Ireland acted as a kind of imperium in imperio, a state within a state (not unlike, say, the Vatican itself), subject to its own laws and legal framework, dismissive of the meddling of outsiders, and fiercely and demonstratively protective of its own sovereignty and prerogatives. Yet it is striking how this notion – so imaginatively apt, so metaphorically neat – is revealed to be precisely what was going on, and was often simply assumed as the status quo by all concerned. The law seemingly stopped at the borders of the Church, and Gardaí (policemen) in Dublin were uneasy about investigating - and were unwilling to take enforcement measures – inside what were, in effect, Church grounds.
The report found 'a number of inappropriate contacts between the Gardaí and the Archdiocese', and that 'very senior members of the Gardaí, including the Commissioner in 1960, clearly regarded priests as being outside their remit'. Law enforcement 'actually report[ed] complaints to the Archdiocese instead of investigating them', and was often content to draw a veil over the whole grisly issue, and to let their counterparts in the hierarchy deal with the matter themselves. In one particularly egregious instance, police even connived in allowing a serial abuser to flee the country.
Reading through the report is a disquieting and, frankly, gruelling experience; Lord Acton's famous and lapidary formulation of Catholic autocracy – 'Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely' - is obviously and immediately called to mind. Yet even more relevant are the words that Acton employed next: 'Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or certainty of corruption by full authority. There is no worse heresy than the fact that the office sanctifies the holder of it.'
This was, surely, what was at work in the Dublin Archdiocese, and in Ireland at large, across five terrible decades of abuse and impunity. The office was seen to sanctify the holder of it; priests were beyond sanction simply because they were priests; and the Church was raised above the law simply because it was the Church. The Minister for Justice, Dermot Ahern, adequately refuted these notions this week when he declared, upon the report's publication, that 'a collar will protect no criminal': 'This is a republic – the people are sovereign – and no institution, no agency, no church can be immune from that fact'. Nearly 90 years after the foundation of the state, it is both heartening and dispiriting that, at long last, these words are becoming a reality. (Sean Coleman)