‘Incomprehensible, inexcusable. I apologise’

HORROR, hurt, incomprehension. And that was just how the bishop felt.

Three and a half years after he arrived to take over the poisoned chalice of the Diocese of Ferns, Apostolic Administrator Eamonn Walsh stood in the aged Parochial House in Gorey, trying to exorcise the ghosts of the past.

His trouble was that the ghosts were still living. He met 37 of the victims of paedophile priests in the diocese face to face over the last three and a half years and knew their true number was mulitples more.

Among them was the girl raped from the age of 11 until she was made pregnant at 14 and forced to flee to England to conceal what was seen as her shameful secret.

“This report has horrific accounts. They are the stories of people who were hurt in indescribable ways,” Bishop Walsh said of the 271-page document.

“When you read such a litany of horrible, horrible gross abuse and rape, it leaves you speechless.”

It also left him without excuse.

“When I look at what happened, it is incomprehensible, it is inexcusable and it is totally inappropriate. I unreservedly apologise,” he said.

The bishop had nothing to apologise for personally. The report’s comprehensiveness was at least partly due to his insistence that no more secrets be kept. But just as he accepted its contents, so he accepted his place as figurehead for a hugely troubled and troubling institution.

“There is no doubt about it. We got our message wrong. We were ordained to bring God to people and reach out to the most vulnerable. And what did we do? Some of our people preyed on the most vulnerable,” he admitted.

Bishop Walsh said he was at a loss to explain why Ferns in particular produced so many abusers.

“I ask myself that question. I can’t come up with any answers. Except that, if you get careless in anything, the slippage can be great.”

There would be no more carelessness, he pledged.

“No priest about whom there are child protection concerns are, or will be, permitted to minister in the diocese,” he said. “I would not let anybody take a risk with my own nieces and nephews. Why would I let anyone else’s child be put at risk?”

Bishop Walsh praised the courage of those who came forward to report their experiences and urged those who had not yet disclosed their suffering, to make themselves known.

“Today is public acknowledgement that they are being believed, that they are being heard,” he said. “I would hope that a day like today would free some individuals to have that extra courage to come forward. I would urge anybody who has been abused to come forward to the civil authorities or come to me.”

He accepted, however, that convincing the faithful to have faith in their priests as well as their religion would take time and work and that the scars of past wounds might never heal.

“You can break trust in an instant,” he said, “and you might not win it back in a lifetime.”

The Diocese of Ferns has arranged for the establishment of an independent counselling service for anyone affected by the issues raised in the report.

Contact can be made on freephone 1800 33 1234 from 11am to midnight.