ARCHBISHOP OF Dublin Dr Diarmuid Martin has warned that further investigations of clerical child sex abuse in dioceses will not get to the truth if people in the Catholic Church are not prepared to tell the truth.
Senior church figures who were not prepared to be honest would only be “discovered” through an “invasive” audit of child protection practices in their dioceses, he said.
Asked if he believed his fellow bishops could be trusted on child protection issues, Dr Martin said he hoped they could.
He suggested anyone who was not prepared to act honestly should learn a lesson from the Taoiseach’s remarks yesterday, in which he attacked the church and the Vatican for their record on child protection.
Dr Martin was reacting to an attack by Enda Kenny on the Vatican’s handling of clerical sex abuse during a Dáil debate on the Cloyne report.
Mr Kenny said the report “excavates the dysfunction, disconnection, elitism, the narcissism that dominate the culture of the Vatican to this day. The rape and torture of children were downplayed or ‘managed’ to uphold instead, the primacy of the institution, its power, standing and ‘reputation’.”
Dr Martin said the Vatican, in responding to the findings of last week’s report on child abuse cases in the Cloyne diocese, should reiterate its support for the Irish church in applying existing “norms”, or rules, on child protection. The Vatican should also support the reporting of cases to the State authorities and the carrying out of audits to show exactly where the situation was in relation to child protection.
“Obviously the Vatican defends its position but it doesn’t defend the rape of children,” Dr Martin told RTÉ’s Six One News.
He expressed disappointment that the Taoiseach had not apologised for the failings of State institutions identified in the Cloyne report, which was critical of the Garda response in a minority of abuse cases.
Lessons had to be learned by looking at the failings of the past, and people were let down “across the board”.
Dr Martin said he was very disappointed and annoyed at the findings of the report. “What do you do when you’ve got systems in place and somebody ignores them? What do you do when groups, either in the Vatican or in Ireland, . . . try to undermine what is being done and . . . simply refuse to understand what is being done?”
Acknowledging that people could feel deceived by the church, he said the norms set down by the present pope in 2001 had been ignored in the Cloyne diocese.
“What sort of a cabal is in there and still refusing to recognise the norms of the church?” he asked.
All the other Irish bishops had put these norms into practice, “as far as I know”, he added.
Dr Martin said six elderly priests were verbally abused at a colleague’s funeral this week when someone challenged them, claiming they “should be ashamed of themselves”.
“Those who felt they were able to play tricks with norms, they have betrayed those good men and so many others in the church who are working today,” he said.
Dr Martin said he found himself asking if he could be proud of the church of which he is a leader, but from what he was seeing he had to be ashamed. He felt ashamed because of what had been done to the victims of clerical child abuse but also because of the effect of this on other people in the church.
“I have a responsibility to defend the not just good but exemplary priests. Anyone who has played tricks with norms has betrayed those men.”
He denied that he had been marginalised within the church for the stance he had taken, and said he had never been told that what he did was wrong.
