Mistrust is clouding resolution of the clerical abuse issue

SOME months back I was on Vincent Browne’s radio programme discussing a new report, A Time to Listen - Confronting Child Sexual Abuse by Catholic Clergy, commissioned by Irish bishops.

One of the authors, Dr Hannah McGee, gave many startling findings from her research into sex abuse. For example, almost a third of women and a quarter of men had reported some kind of sexual abuse in childhood.

Vincent Browne was even more surprised by another fact - only a small proportion of the abuse reported, 3%, had been perpetrated by clergy or religious.

“If the incidence of abuse of people is so high in our community, and the incidence of abuse by members of the clergy is so relatively low,” Browne concluded, “the focus on abuse by clergy has been a bit unfair.”

Other people had been making that point for a long time. Sex abuse by Church personnel is the most shocking and reprehensible, given what the Church is supposed to stand for and the trust placed in clergy by parents and children. But the excessive focus on clerical sexual abuse has cast a cloud over thousands of decent, hard-working priests and religious.

It may also have hindered society’s attempt to examine the true nature of abuse, its root causes and the ways and means of preventing it. Vincent Browne’s acknowledgement of the need for fairness and balance on the issue was welcome.

But it seems this enthusiasm was short-lived. The first edition of his new weekly magazine, Village, returned to the practice of Church-lynching last weekend.

Village carried an in-depth piece about difficulties that arose between Church leaders and the Lynott Working Group. (Maureen Lynott was the chief architect of the State’s child protection policy, Children First. She and a number of other experts were appointed by the Church to make recommendations for a nationwide Church policy). Although Village purported to give both sides of the story, the real agenda was visible in the headline, “Episcopal Sabotage,” and in the opening line: “The Catholic Church has yet again been seen to regard internal power structures as more important than the safety of children...”

The true story was different. It was about the Church’s attempt to unify the policy of 26 separate dioceses and around 150 religious orders, all of them autonomous. It was about disagreements within the expert group itself and between the expert group and the negotiating Church leaders regarding draft guidelines.

A lack of diplomacy among some of the Church negotiators compounded the problem. There was some unnecessary quibbling about the inclusion of non-sexual abuse within the Lynott Group’s draft recommendations. It was about the failure of some members of the working group to believe the Church could be acting in good faith. It was about an ill-timed solo run to the media to say the working group had disbanded, even though the chairperson had suggested that discussions were still ongoing. Finally, it was about inaccurate media reporting: contrary to Village’s claim that the Church had “repudiated” the Lynott recommendations, the bishops hadn’t even seen the final draft.

Central to the disagreement was a recommendation by the Lynott Group that where professionals appointed by the Church had decided there were “reasonable grounds for concern,” they would report these cases to the civil authorities as a matter of course, instead of advising the bishop or religious head to do so.

This seems, at first glance, a reasonable proposal, especially in the light of the failure of Church authorities to report cases in the past.

But the Church has reason to be cautious. In the past, it found that the involvement of professionals was not necessarily a safeguard against bad decisions about sex abusers. In some cases, priests were reassigned to duty having been described as ‘fit for ministry’ by medical experts.

In the Catholic Church, the buck stops with the bishops or the head of the religious order. They will be the ones responsible, and rightly so, if hired professionals make the wrong decision - for example, if they arrive at the wrong conclusion about an allegation of abuse and fail to report it.

None of this is to say that the Church should not have professional advisors, or that they should lightly reject advice.

“Anything but,” as the Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin said last week.

“The bishop or the religious superior must consciously take those decisions for which he or she bears fundamental responsibility,” Martin told the National Conference of Priests. “We need independent, expert advice, documented in a transparent way.”

There shouldn’t be any disagreement about that among Church leaders. Since 1996, they have adhered to a voluntary code of conduct, the so-called Green Book, which requires them to notify the gardaí if they have knowledge or suspicion of abuse. They also established panels of experts to advise them on their obligations where allegations of abuse were made.

The former Archbishop of Dublin, Desmond Connell, made it clear that he adhered to the advice given and honoured his reporting obligations.

THIS is the context in which the dispute over the Lynott Group should be considered. There was no talk of the Church not reporting abuse cases. The issue was, how to report? And if the Church had shown its good intentions by putting together a team of experts to make recommendations, why all the acrimony when there were points of disagreement? Surely people should have kept talking instead of making their reservations public.

It all comes down to trust. Some people seem unwilling to believe that the Church wants bona fide structures to prevent abuse.

“It is extraordinary that we continue to look to the Church to protect our children,” wrote Colm O’Gorman of the victim support agency One In Four.

O’Gorman’s refusal to trust the Church may be understandable, but is increasingly out of touch with the more competent Church handling of child protection matters of recent times.

“Canon Law continues to be used for an excuse for why best practice in child protection cannot be adopted across the Irish Catholic Church,” he wrote in Village. “It is one of the excuses offered as an explanation for the Church’s rejection of the recommendations of the Lynott Working Group.”

But in a letter to Church leaders on September 16, Maureen Lynott wrote that “the canonical aspects can be accommodated and are not impediments moving forward”.

There is an attempt to frame the debate as a clash between civil law and canon law, with child protection the loser. This does a disservice to survivors of abuse who want reconciliation with the Church and who want sensible child protection arrangements which reflect the goodwill of Church and State, and which guarantee accountability on all sides.

From the Church’s point of view, any new guidelines should be consistent with canon law because they can then be binding on all Church authorities. From the State’s point of view, its child protection norms must be applied.

This is what will happen: Church leaders will take advice from the professionals where abuse has been alleged. It will be their responsibility, under canon law, to implement that advice. Meanwhile the professional advisers will comply with their civil duty to report “reasonable grounds for concern” about abuse.

A comprehensive child protection policy will emerge. But little thanks will be due to those commentators whose actions have sowed division and mistrust.