Connell under fire again over abuse claims
Among the revelations are accusations that a paedophile ring existed among a number of priests from the archdiocese and that Cardinal Connell ignored an internal Church tribunal’s recommendation that a chronic sex offender be defrocked.
The archdiocese, the biggest in Ireland with 200 parishes across Leinster, is facing 450 separate legal actions by victims of paedophile priests and is paying out undisclosed millions in legal fees, settlements and treatments for offenders.
Prominent American cleric and canon lawyer Fr Tom Doyle described the archdiocese’s behaviour to victims as “disgusting and appalling”.
He said priests at all levels of the hierarchy had colluded not to report allegations against priest: “They have stonewalled and isolated victims. There is something radically, radically wrong.”
Fr Doyle was outspoken in campaigning for measures to address the problem of paedophile priests within the Catholic Church in the US before he was transferred to work as chaplain at an army base in Germany.
His attack came as RTÉ’s Prime Time programme disclosed the case of a victim whose abuser was given a clean character reference by Cardinal Connell in 1988, despite the fact that he had admitted assaulting the young altar boy in 1974.
Cardinal Connell, who was archbishop at the time, says he found nothing on Fr Patrick Hughes’ file to indicate he had ever been in trouble despite the Church paying out almost £60,000 in settlement to the victim and ensuring the return of pornographic pictures Hughes had taken of the boy.
The victim’s solicitor, Julian Deale, said he found it unbelievable that nothing was kept on file about Hughes’ past so that he got a clear reference for a transfer to a parish in San Diego in 1988.
“It would seem to be stretching credulity to breaking point,” he said. “They (the Church) have records going back to the time of Christ.”
The absence of records on Hughes’ file casts doubts over the value of the Hussey Commission set up by the Church in June this year to carry out a national audit of diocesan files on complaints of clerical child sex abuse. Cardinal Connell admitted at the time he announced the commission that he could not guarantee all files had been properly maintained and accepted some may have been destroyed. Prime Time also revealed that the Cardinal ignored the advice of a tribunal set up in 1992 to investigate claims of sex abuse against Fr Tony Walsh whose paedophile assaults on young boys had been reported at least as early as 1980.
He was finally stopped when he attacked an 11-year-old boy in a toilet after attending the funeral of the child’s grandfather. The boy’s parents alerted gardaí and Walsh was jailed but even then, the programme claimed, Cardinal Connell did not reveal Walsh’s past offences to gardaí.
The programme makers spent seven weeks in negotiations with the Cardinal’s office in an attempt to persuade him to take part in the broadcast but he assigned two representatives (Monsignor John Dolan and the archdiocese’s head of communications, Eddie Shaw) to speak for him instead.
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