Continue to listen and support victims, urge authors

The apostolic visitation report strongly underlines the need for the Catholic Church to continue listening to and providing counselling services to the thousands of people abused in its care.

It also strongly supports the work of the National Board for Safeguarding Children in the Catholic Church, describing its work on devising child protection policy and ensuring its implementation, as “thorough and far-reaching”.

“It should continue to receive sufficient personnel and funding,” they add.

It says “much attention has been shown to the victims, both in terms of spiritual and psychological assistance and also from a legal and financial standpoint”.

However, it recommends that diocesan authorities and the religious “continue to devote much time listening to and receiving victims, providing support for them and their families”.

The authors acknowledge “with a great sense of pain and shame” the abuse that occurred and say the “wellbeing” of victims is “of paramount concern to the Church”.

They say that the NBSCCC’s child protection guidelines are being implemented in dioceses but recommend that regular audits of their implementation are carried out “in a prompt manner”.

They say the guidelines must be regularly re-examined to ensure they are effective and operate “for the good of everyone concerned”.

The report also says the Church’s canonical tribunals need to be re-organised so that “cases awaiting definitive resolution” can be processed. Canonical tribunals are held by the Church when it seeks to defrock a priest accused of abuse. One investigation is due to recommence shortly into Fr Ronat. A Cloyne priest, he has been accused of 11 accounts of sexual abuse but has not been convicted in court.

The authors acknowledge that “many good priests have been unjustly tainted by association with the accused in the court of public opinion”. Some, they also said, “have not felt sufficiently defended by their bishops and superiors”.

The Irish Church’s difficulties in agreeing common stances on the clerical sex abuse scandal are also referred to, with the authors saying bishops have “at times found it difficult to agree on a common level of action”.

The Irish Church needs to rebuild its relationship with the laity as “many lay persons have experienced a loss of trust in their pastors”.

“Concrete means for revitalising communities of prayer, community, and life” must be developed, they say, while saying young people need to have a “deeper” religious education.

“A careful review is needed of the training given to teachers of religion, the Catholic identity of schools and their relationships with the parishes to which they belong.”