POLITICAL REACTION:ABUSE SURVIVOR Andrew Madden received a standing ovation from Fine Gael delegates in Killarney on Saturday when he criticised Pope Benedict's pastoral letter. Mr Madden had been invited to the national conference to speak on children's rights.
After studying the document, Mr Madden said it represented, “not an inability to do the right thing, but an unwillingness to do the right thing”.
He repeated his call for the resignation of the pope and Cardinal Seán Brady, arguing that the pastoral letter had changed nothing. A major problem, he said, was the pope’s failure to accept the cover-up of clerical sex abuse in Ireland.
He added: “The whole Murphy report was about the cover-up of the sexual abuse of children by priests in this country for three decades. For the pope not to acknowledge the cover-up, and the part that Irish bishops and the Vatican played in it, is really just not on.
“Obviously, if we are going to respond in any meaningful way to the Murphy report, in particular, and the Ferns report, because it revealed the same thing . . . that ought to have been addressed.”
Dismissing the suggestion that the papal document was part of a process, Mr Madden said that approach was “buying time, moving things out”. He said that when the Irish bishops went to Rome there were expectations that something useful would come out of their meeting with the pope.
Instead, he added, the bishops had said at the time that people should wait for the pope’s letter. “They beefed up that quite a lot, as if this was going to be the thing,” he added.
Fine Gael spokesman on children’s rights, Alan Shatter, said it was not acceptable that the Vatican used its authority to interfere in the Republic’s affairs and also invoke diplomatic protocol when it suited it to withhold information from a Government-appointed commission investigating allegations of clerical abuse.
“Nor is it acceptable that the Vatican refuses to permit its ambassador, in the guise of the Papal Nuncio, to co-operate with such a commission or to attend at a parliamentary committee meeting requested by members of the sovereign parliament of this State to discuss these issues,” he added.
Mr Shatter said “the pope’s silence on these issues in today’s pastoral letter is both surprising and disturbing.”
At the very minimum, he added, he expected the pope would have pledged that the Vatican would now fully co-operate with, and make all requested information available, to the Murphy commission in its ongoing investigation.
“I also expected an announcement that the Papal Nuncio would now accept the request previously rejected to meet with the Oireachtas foreign affairs committee to discuss these important issues,” he added.
