Victims of clerical sex abuse in the diocese of Cloyne will be afforded a chance to meet the bishop who oversaw the diocese when a number of serious allegations against priests went unreported.
The apostolic administrator of Cloyne, Archbishop Dermot Clifford of Cashel, said today the diocese planned to establish a special healing programme for victims early next year.
As part of the programme, abuse survivors will be able to meet former bishop of Cloyne John Magee, who resigned in March last year, and Msgr Denis O’Callaghan, the delegate for the diocese with responsibility for child protection, in the company of a trained facilitator.
Dr Clifford was speaking following the publication of previously redacted portions of the Cloyne report.
He told RTÉ's Morning Ireland that similar programmes established in the US for clerical abuse victims had had positive outcomes.
The Cloyne report, which investigated how clerical child sex abuse allegations were handled in the diocese between 1996 and 2009, detailed a catalogue of failures on the part of church authorities. It laid the blame squarely with Bishop Magee and Msgr O’Callaghan.
Dr Clifford again extended his sympathies to abuse victims, admitting there had been a failure to adequately appreciate the suffering of victims.
He said that some priests failed to report allegations of abuse because they saw it more as a sin than a crime.
“I suppose they didn’t see the thing as a crime…they saw the thing more as a sin than a crime and (they) probably weren’t advised strictly enough as to where their duties lay when an allegation came to them,” he said.
The Cloyne report arose after the Catholic Church’s own child protection watchdog, the National Board for Safeguarding Children, found child protection practices in Cloyne were “inadequate, and in some respects dangerous”.
In January 2009 the then government decided to extend the remit of the Murphy Commission, then investigating the Dublin archdiocese, to include Cloyne.
Its subsequent Cloyne report, published on July 13th, examined how abuse allegations against 19 priests there were handled between 1996 and 2009.
As court proceedings were then pending against “Fr Ronat”, the pseudonym for the priest who is the subject of chapter nine of the Cloyne report, the High Court decided that elements of that chapter should not be published until those proceedings concluded, which they have.
Last Friday, the High Court ordered that the redacted elements be published.
The Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (ISPCC) said today it remained "extremely concerned" about the findings in the redacted part of the report which it said highlighted "a litany of horrific abuse that remained unreported and hidden".
While acknowledging steps taken by both the church and Government to address the issue in recent years, the society said child protection guidelines without the necessary statutory and administrative framework were, in themselves, not enough.
Dr Clifford took over as apostolic administrator of the diocese of Cloyne in March 2009 when the former bishop of Cloyne John Magee stepped down.
