Tracing the cultural legacy of Irish Catholicism

From Galway to Cloyne and beyond

Eamon Maher, Eugene O'Brien

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781526117205
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Irische Geschichte

This book traces the steady decline in Irish Catholicism from the visit of Pope John Paul II in 1979 up to the Cloyne report into clerical sex abuse in that diocese in 2011. The young people awaiting the Pope's address in Galway were entertained by two of Ireland's most charismatic clerics, Bishop Eamon Casey and Fr Michael Cleary, both of whom were subsequently revealed to have been engaged in romantic liaisons at the time. The decades that followed the Pope's visit were characterised by the increasing secularisation of Irish society. Boasting an impressive array of contributors from various backgrounds and expertise, the essays in the book attempt to trace the exact reasons for the progressive dismantling of the cultural legacy of Catholicism and the consequences this has had on Irish society.

Part I

Tracing change and setting the context

1

‘The times they are a changin’’: Tracing the transformation of Irish Catholicism through the eyes of a journalist

Patsy McGarry

It was towards the end of May 2009 that the Church of Ireland Bishop of Cork, Most Reverend Paul Colton said that Ireland was in the midst of a ‘a national trauma’. That followed publication of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse report. Chaired by Mr Justice Seán Ryan, it followed a decade of investigations by the Commission and contained revelations of truly shocking and systemic sexual, physical and emotional abuse of tens of thousands of children in residential institutions run by eighteen Catholic religious congregations during the twentieth century. To date, over 15,500 of those children (now adults) have been compensated by the Irish State, receiving an average €63,000 each.

The Ryan Commission heard evidence covering the period from 1914, but the bulk of its work addressed the period from the early 1930s to the early 1970s. Accounts of abuse by over 1,700 witnesses, given in relation to 216 institutions, were detailed in the report, which ran to over 2,600 pages. More than 800 priests, brothers, nuns and lay people were implicated. The commission’s report, popularly known as the Ryan Report, was published on 20 May 2009.

What Bishop Colton said then was true, but there was more to come. The Ryan Report was followed by two further published statutory reports into the handling of clerical child sex-abuse allegations by authorities in Dublin’s Catholic archdiocese (published in November 2009) and Cloyne diocese (published in July 2011), as well as the interdepartmental inquiry into the Magdalene laundries (published in February 2013), and an ongoing statutory inquiry into mother-and-baby homes which is expected to report in 2018. What Bishop Colton described as ‘trauma’ in 2009 was mid-way between four such statutory reports. The first two were the Ferns Report of October 2005, which investigated the handling of clerical child sexual-abuse allegations in that diocese and the Ryan Report of May. Many of the abuse revelations, which precipitated such trauma, predated the visit of Pope John Paul II to Ireland in 1979, and by many decades. However, some were actually coincident with the papal visit and continued afterwards.

One such abuse incident during the papal visit even occurred at Dublin’s Pro-Cathedral when Fr Patrick McCabe abused a boy, as emerged during the priest’s trial in March 2013. Moreover, the Ryan Commission’s investigation committee was told of another incident at a public hearing in September 2004, referred to in the introduction of this book, where a young boy was raped by the Brother left in charge of him. Rosminian priest Fr Patrick Pierce, manager in 1975–91 of St Joseph’s Industrial School at Ferryhouse in Co Tipperary, told the committee that the boy had not been allowed accompany his colleagues to the Pope’s mass as punishment for absconding. The brother who raped him had been a prefect at the school and volunteered to stay back with the boy. It was the early 1990s before the assault was reported to the Gardaí, and the abuser was convicted twenty years after the event in 1999. He was sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment, three suspended (Ryan 2009: III, 2, 87).

Then, of course, Pope John Paul’s warm-up act at Galway comprised the then Bishop of Galway Eamon Casey and well-known Dublin media priest Fr Michael Cleary, both of whom, as would emerge in later years, were themselves already fathers in 1979. What these matters reinforce is the view that Pope John Paul’s visit to Ireland in 1979 did not, and could not, stem those forces already at play, which would undermine the influence and authority of the Catholic Church in Ireland. Such dark currents as revealed over recent decades would visit catastrophe on his beloved Church in Ireland, beginning just eight years later in 1987, when the Irish Catholic bishops’ sole response to a warning from the USA that clerical child sexual-abuse allegation could be imminent was to take out insurance in their dioceses.

The Ryan Report, the Ferns Report and subsequent reports would, collectively, be a source of great national shame at Ireland’s treatment of its children and vulnerable adults throughout most of the twentieth century. A consequence of such reports has been a fundamental shift in Irish attitudes to the Catholic Church, an institution that was at the centre of them all. It was also an institution which had been central to the identity of millions of Irish people who for generations had unquestioningly revered it and its personnel. Suddenly and shockingly it had become a suspect outsider, so much so that even Rome itself would get in on the act. In his March 2010 pastoral letter to Irish Catholics, following publication of the Ryan and Murphy reports the previous year, Pope Benedict XVI told the Irish bishops that ‘some of you and your predecessors failed, at times grievously’ when it came to child protection. What the Irish Church allowed ‘obscured the Gospel to a degree that not even centuries of persecution (in the penal laws era) had succeeded in doing’ (Benedict XVI 2010). Pope Benedict sent seven high-powered teams of cardinals, archbishops and bishops to conduct apostolic visitations on the Irish Church and see how things could be put right. However, there was not a word about Rome’s role in any of this. Not a word about prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy Cardinal Castrillón Hoyos who was responsible for the 1997 letter to the Irish bishops dismissing their 1996 framework document on child protection as ‘merely a study document’ because it recommended that all abuse allegations against priests should be reported to the civil authorities. That letter, the Cloyne Report said, ‘gave comfort and support’ to those who ‘dissented from the stated official Irish church policy’ on child protection (Commission of Investigation into Catholic Diocese of Cloyne 2011: 6). This was the same cardinal who infamously, in the letter dated 8 September 2001, congratulated French bishop Pierre Pican who received a three-month suspended sentence for not cooperating with French authorities in their investigations into a priest who was later sentenced to eighteen years in jail for repeated rape of a boy and sexual assaults on ten others. ‘I congratulate you for not denouncing a priest to the civil administration’, Cardinal Castrillón Hoyos wrote in his letter to Bishop Pican, a letter which he insisted had been approved by Pope John Paul II (Castrillón Hoyos 2001).

In 1999, when the Irish bishops were visiting Rome, they were reminded by a Vatican official that they were ‘bishops first, not policemen’ when it came to reporting clerical child sex abuse. But there was worse to come. In May 2001, when he was prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) sent two letters to every Catholic bishop in the world, in Latin (Ratzinger 2001). One insisted that the contents of both letters be kept secret, while the other directed that all clerical child sex abuse allegations ‘with a semblance of truth’ be sent to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and it would decide whether they be dealt with at diocesan or Vatican level. Such letters were sent to the Irish Catholic bishops too, of course, and were therefore of keen interest to the Murphy Commissions in Ireland that investigated the handling of clerical child sexual-abuse allegations in the Dublin archdiocese and Cloyne diocese.

Rome did not even acknowledge correspondence from the commission in September 2006 when it was investigating the handling of clerical child sex abuse allegations in the Dublin archdiocese. Instead, Rome complained that the commission did not use proper channels. So, in February 2007, the Murphy Commission wrote to then Papal Nuncio to Ireland, Archbishop Giuseppe Lazzarotto, requesting he forward ‘all documents in his possession relevant to the Commission’ (Murphy 2009: I, 37). He did not reply. In early 2009, it wrote to then nuncio, Archbishop Giuseppe Leanza, (in office since April 2008), enclosing a draft of its report for comment. He did not reply either. The nunciature in Dublin was the conduit for clerical child abuse reports to Rome, while Archbishop Leanza was personally involved in talks that led to Bishop Magee standing aside as bishop of Cloyne in February 2009. When it was investigating that diocese, the Murphy Commission asked Archbishop Leanza: asked Archbishop Leanza to ‘submit to it any information which you have about the matters under investigation’. He felt ‘unable to assist’ it ‘in this matter’.¹

Such lack of cooperation was a source of profound annoyance where the Irish authorities were concerned. This was most acutely illustrated in 2011. On 20 July, days after publication of the Cloyne Report, Taoiseach Enda Kenny (a practising Catholic), addressing the Dáil, said of the Church that ‘The rape and torture of children were downplayed or “managed” to uphold instead, the primacy of the institution, its power, standing and “reputation”’ (Kenny 2011). The Vatican’s reaction to such abuse ‘was to parse and analyse it with the gimlet eye of a canon lawyer … This calculated, withering position being the polar opposite of the radicalism, humility and compassion upon which the Roman Church was founded.’ Kenny continued, saying that the Cloyne Report ‘excavates the dysfunction, disconnection, elitism … the narcissism … that dominate the culture of the Vatican to this day’. It told ‘a tale of a frankly brazen disregard for protecting children’. Revelations in Cloyne ‘have brought the Government, Irish Catholics and the Vatican to an unprecedented juncture’, he said, concluding that ‘This is not Rome. This is the Republic of Ireland 2011, a republic of laws’ (Kenny 2011).

By any reckoning, this speech was a watershed in Catholic Ireland’s relationship with Rome, and it was enunciated by an Irish Catholic prime minister. It was very far removed from a statement to the same chamber sixty years previously by Mr Kenny’s predecessor, John A Costello, then also Taoiseach and leader of the same political party, Fine Gael. In April 1951, during debate on the ill-fated Mother and Child Scheme, opposed by the Catholic bishops led by Archbishop of Dublin John Charles McQuaid, Costello felt impelled to announce, ‘I am an Irishman second: I am a Catholic first and I accept without qualification in all respects the teaching of the hierarchy and the church to which I belong.’ He told the Dáil, ‘I, as a Catholic, obey my church authorities and will continue to do so’ (Keogh 1994: 208).

Following that July 2011 address by Enda Kenny, things were to get even worse in Ireland’s relationship with Rome. In November 2011 then Tánaiste and minister for foreign affairs, Eamon Gilmore, announced that Ireland’s embassy to the Holy See was to close for financial reasons. Few believed, even in the midst of the worst recession of modern times, that financial reasons were the only ones leading to closure of that embassy in that year.

What all of these events mean today is that Irish people are beyond shock when it comes to scandalous behaviour by Catholic Church authorities in denying and attempting to conceal the truth. It is also a matter of national shame that the Irish State, through its ‘deferential and submissive attitude’ (to use Justice Ryan’s words) to religious congregations and the Church generally, failed in its primary duty to children (Ryan 2009: IV, 451). Further, the sense of betrayal of an innocent people’s trust by the Church goes deep. Yet it was statutory agencies of the Irish State that exposed that shame, despite the Church. Indeed, as we now know, those same religious congregations – with one exception – were drawn into deeply reluctant cooperation with the Ryan Commission and proved recalcitrant to the end, as those of us who reported on public hearings of the commission’s investigation committee can testify. In fact, one congregation persisted in its denial of all abuse in its institutions up to 15 May 2009, just five days prior to publication of the Ryan Report. On that date, Br Kevin Mullan, provincial of the Christian Brothers in Ireland, sent a letter to the Residential Institutions’ Redress Board denying all such abuse following contact by the board after it had received an application from a former resident at the O’Brien Institute in Dublin’s Marino. The former resident had alleged abuse there. The institute had been run by the Christian Brothers. Not alone did Br Mullan deny any abuse had happened there, he asserted he had not been aware of any complaint of abuse from the applicant prior to receipt by the Christian Brothers of the letter from the Redress Board. The insinuation was clear: that the applicant had been tempted to make the complaint by the existence of the board (McGarry 2009).

It transpired that the letter sent by Br Mullan to the Redress Board on 15 May was one of a type which he always sent to that board on receipt of similar letters from it following applications for redress received from the very many others who had been residents as children at institutions run by the Christian Brothers in Ireland. The same formula was followed by Br Mullan in all his replies to the board, with some adjustments to account for details specific to each applicant. The template for his letter, it is believed, was drawn up by lawyers. Even in his initial reaction on the publication of the Ryan Report, Br Mullan did not acknowledge that abuse existed in institutions run by his congregation, as seen in TV interviews that night. That position was softened in media appearances by his colleague Br Edmund Garvey over subsequent days, but it was not until 26 May 2009, six days after the publication of the report, that the Christian Brothers issued a statement through the Murray Consultants public-relations firm in which they said they accepted ‘with shame the findings of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse’ (Christian Brothers’ European Province 2009).

Where the 15 May letter of that year was concerned, a statement by the brothers was issued on 3 June 2009, following a report of the letter in the Irish Times that day. The statement said that such letters to the Redress Board predated publication of the Ryan Report (on 20 May 2009) ‘which highlighted the shocking nature and extent of abuse that occurred’. It added:

The Brothers’ subsequent apologies reflected their shame that as recently as five days prior to publication of the report their responses were s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures and table
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Tracing change and setting the context
• Part II: Going against the tide
• Part III: Challenges in the here and now
• Index