PRIESTS HAVE gone from being portrayed as “incompetent idiots” like Father Ted to being “sexually frustrated clergy where child abuse was just par for the course”, a senior member of the hierarchy has said.
Bishop Donal McKeown said the predominant cultural image of his fellow bishops was that they were “twisted, incompetent old man, well aware of evil actions among some of their colleagues, but saying nothing in order to protect their power”.
Using that logic, the corrupt church was not just the home of abuse but the cause of it, and such a rotten body should be destroyed in the eyes of its detractors, the bishop told the St Joseph’s Young Priest Society in a sermon delivered on Sunday but released to the press yesterday.
He told the congregation it was a “daunting task” encouraging vocations to the priesthood when “because of celibacy, clergy and religious are all potential child abusers, some just about keeping their instincts under control”.
Bishop McKeown, the Auxiliary Bishop of Down and Connor, has been severely critical of the church’s response to clerical sex abuse in the past. He went as far as to criticise Cardinal Seán Brady for the “disastrous effects of his inaction” in relation to how he dealt with sex abuse allegations against the paedophile priest Fr Brendan Smyth.
On Sunday, the bishop said it was important to recognise that many people felt “terribly hurt” by the church as an organisation, by the arrogance and coldness of individual priests and by the apparent distance of some bishops.
