ANALYSIS:Cardinal Seán Brady is not resigning. His loyalty to the Catholic Church is not to be underestimated, writes PATSY McGARRY
THERE IS nothing particularly surprising about the decision by the Catholic Primate Cardinal Seán Brady to remain on in office. As we know by now in Ireland, bishops do not resign easily. And as for cardinals, well it has never happened here and Seán Brady is not a man to set such a precedent.
At least not for now.
The qualification arises because if he is perceived by church authorities at some stage in the future to be a liability as it addresses child protection issues, then he may be persuaded to stand aside. He would go then too.
The loyalty of men such as Cardinal Brady to the church cannot be exaggerated and is such that they would readily sacrifice themselves if they felt they were in any way a threat to “our family and our home”, as he referred to the church in the final words of his statement last Monday night.
The church is their element. It is their “mother” to which they have the deep attachment of a grateful child for an indulgent parent. And they do see themselves as indulged when raised to the status of bishop, never mind cardinal.
News of such elevation sends them into paroxysms of surprise, humility and gratitude, as we saw yesterday with the new bishop designate of Killaloe, the Rev Kieran O’Reilly. He said that to describe his reaction on learning of his appointment as “one of surprise would not be an understatement”.
He added: “But in a spirit of service I accept this appointment and express my gratitude to Pope Benedict XVI for asking me to take on this ministry of service and leadership in the Church of Killaloe.”
Another example of what such gratitude allows was the decision of Cardinal Desmond Connell to drop his High Court action against his successor Archbishop Diarmuid Martin in February 2008 when he tried to prevent 5,586 documents he claimed were privileged to him from being handed over to the Murphy commission.
Cardinal Connell believed he would be breaching confidence if he allowed the documents to be read by others. But he dropped that action when persuaded by Cardinal Brady that it would be damaging to victims of abuse and to the church.
Such loyalty is attractive in a cynical age as this.
But it has its dangers. These are starkly illustrated in the Murphy report. It was such loyalty which allowed four archbishops in Dublin and sundry auxiliary bishops to cover up the clerical child sex abuse of children in the archdiocese for the greater part of the period investigated, from 1975 to 2005.
Let us be clear on what Murphy concluded. It said: "The welfare of children, which should have been the first priority, was not even a factor to be considered[my italics] in the early stages" of the period investigated. It continued: "Instead the focus was on the avoidance of scandal and the preservation of the good name, status and assets of the institution and of what the institution regarded as its most important assets – the priests."
There is no doubt Cardinal Brady regrets both his actions and inactions of 1975, when he conducted a canonical investigation into allegations by two young people of their abuse by Fr Brendan Smyth.
He swore those teenagers to secrecy about the inquiry, as required by canon law, believed their story and reported to his bishop. He did no more.
Had he done so Smyth might have been stopped then. Meaning that all those he abused in the following 18 years before he was apprehended in 1993 would have been spared.
They include people such as “Samantha” who, as she told this paper last March, was abused by Smyth at a convent boarding school from 1974 until 1979. She would have been spared four years of abuse. She was traumatised to discover this last March. There will be others.
Ironically, you could argue that it was due to Brady’s inaction in 1975 and afterwards that Smyth was finally apprehended. He abused four members of a Belfast family in the 1980s and they brought this to the attention of the RUC, setting in train an investigation which led to the 1994 jailing of Smyth in Northern Ireland and his subsequent jailing in the Republic in 1997.
It is what happened in the years between 1975 and 1993 which will dog the remaining period of Cardinal Brady’s term as Catholic Primate and Archbishop of Armagh.
The likelihood is that his staying on will promote a further drip-drip of stories of
abuse from those years, refocusing attention on him as leader of the Catholic Church in Ireland. There are also the court cases to come, one of which gave rise to last March’s revelations about what went on in Kilmore diocese in 1975. They will concentrate a lot of minds.
Also, recent speculation about the appointment of a coadjutor archbishop to Armagh may be premature. A coadjutor is only appointed where a decision has been made by a bishop to retire or stand down, usually for age reasons. That, clearly, is not the case where Cardinal Brady is concerned.
Usually a coadjutor, who has rights of succession unlike an auxiliary bishop, is not appointed until close to the retirement date of the sitting bishop or archbishop.
An example involves Cardinal Brady himself, who was appointed coadjutor archbishop of Armagh in 1995 and succeeded Cardinal Cahal Daly there as Archbishop in 1996, when Cardinal Daly was 79.
Similarly, in Dublin, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin was appointed coadjutor in 2003 and became Archbishop in 2004 when Cardinal Connell retired, at the age of 78.
Cardinal Brady is 70. He does not have to send a letter of resignation to Rome until he is 75, in August 2014, and as we saw with his predecessor, Rome may not then accept it for years after that.
But I would not put money on him being Archbishop of Armagh at 79, as Cahal Daly was. Even 2014 would be stretching it.
Patsy McGarry is Religious Affairs Correspondent