Cardinal refuses to resign

The BBC reports on how Ireland’s most senior Catholic cleric, Cardinal Sean Brady is facing calls to resign. It has been reported that he attended meetings in 1975 in which children who had complained they were abused by a priest were asked to sign vows of silence. However the Cardinal has refused to resign, saying that he had reported what he had heard from victims to his bishop.At that time, the Cardinal was secretary to the bishop of Kilmore.

Cardinal Brady said he had followed his bishop’s orders and that there were no guidelines for dealing with such investigations at that time.

The writer cannot comment on the state of child protection in Eire, but in the United Kingdom during the seventies, prosecutions for child sexual abuse did take place. Social workers were not as aware as they are now, of the scale of the problem and the risk involved to children, but they had an awareness nonetheless. Coming back to Cardinal Brady, it is debatable what would have happened, had he reported the matter directly to the police and gone against his superior. The fate of such whistleblowers is not a happy one in the United Kingdom. 

However the writer’s experiences of cases against the Catholic Church is that it is not an organisation that is ideally placed to protect children and young people from sexual abuse.  In addition, it seems to have huge difficulty getting to grips with the concept of responsibility when problems arise. Its religious foundation is not one that lends itself well to an open and transparent culture, particularly when modern child protection requires a high level of skill and expertise, where different agencies work together and share information.  The Church would do well to look at the recent case of  the women abused by their father, a Sheffield man. That was a case where a father had abused his daughters over a period of three decades, and the authorities gave them apologies for serial failures. However in relation to Cardinal Brady’s comments, one is left with the sense that this all happened a long time ago, and really we should move on. That will be easier for Cardinal Brady and his church, than those children abused by priests.

The effect of all of this is a huge amount of anger directed at the church. There is also a financial cost, which no amount of prayers can avert. The writer has dealt with three such claim against the Catholic Church, all of which resulted in large amounts of damages and costs being paid either by insurers or by the church itself.  In the case of A v The Archbishop Of Birmingham (1) The Trustees Of The Birmingham Archdiocese Of The Roman Catholic Church [2005] the Claimant received over half a million in damages. The level of costs is now known.