Parents are deeply concerned about clerical abuse revelations, says Kathryn Holmquist

Over the coming weeks, little girls dressed like innocent brides in white dresses and little boys in their Sunday best will be offered by their parents and families to the institution of the Catholic Church as they make their first Holy Communions. Parents, understandably, may be feeling ambivalent about this. The question parents have to ask themselves is this: "Can I trust the Church to protect my child from abusers when the entire system of the church has devoted itself to protecting abusers from public scrutiny?" There are many good priests, who themselves feel abused by their colleagues' betrayal of trust, and who feel let down by their Church for allowing child sex abusers to remain within it. Realistically, however, there is a reason that child sex abusers are drawn to the Catholic Church.

The Church "unquestionably" has more than its fair share of people who misuse power to corrupt the trust of children and their parents, says professor of psychology and psychiatry Bill Marshall of Queens University, Canada. There are far more abusers within the Catholic Church than in other walks of life, he asserts. He should know - he has been directly treating and designing treatment programmes for sexual offenders within the Catholic Church for the past 33 years.

"Many priests and brothers tell me that they either joined the Church to cure their problem of sexual attraction to children or young boys, or that they were drawn to the Church because they knew that the Church would protect them while they pursued their activities," he says.

"Celibacy has nothing to do with it," he adds. These are men who do not want normal sexual relations with other adults. They need power in order to get their kicks and the Church has provided them with, in Marshall's words, "protection".

In Newfoundland in the 1980s, Catholic parents took a stunning stand - unlike the seemingly forgiving attitude of parents in the Republic. There was a scandal of child sexual abuse within Mount Cashel, a Christian Brothers institution, which had eerie parallels to the crisis we are currently seeing in the Republic. The archbishop was forced to resign after first refusing to face the problem, then claiming the Church would handle it within its ranks. "People became angry that he was not facing his responsibilities. His attitude was 'we are able to look after our own'," says Marshall.

The appalled parents of victims were in crisis because they had, often, forced their children - despite their children's protests - to participate in activities with priests. It had never occurred to them that their children may have good reasons for not wanting to spend time with priests.

Parents who were not directly affected, also felt personally betrayed and angry both at the corruption within the Catholic system, but equally if not more at the Church's denial of this corruption. So parents, en masse, made their feelings known. Some 70 per cent of parents of children in Catholic schools removed their children from those schools.

If Irish parents wanted to make a stand and to insist that the Church completely overhaul the system that has allowed abuse to continue, they could follow the Newfoundland example. Would this be an unreasonable reaction? On the one hand, people may say that they know their parish priest is a good priest, and that individuals were responsible. However, it is the system of the Catholic Church as a whole that has created an atmosphere in which abuse has been allowed for generations. This is the view of Marie Keenan, a psychologist based in county Kildare who works with priests. She sees sex abuse by priests as being the result of a "lethal cocktail of power being misused by the powerless". Unlike Marshall, she says the Catholic Church has the same representation of child sex abusers as other walks of life. Priests have been unable to cope with revelations of sex abuse because they are indoctrinated from an early age not to think for themselves. They speak with an institutional voice. This makes them psychologically unprepared and sexually undeveloped for the real-life problems they will certainly encounter in the lives of their flock.

As Marshall asks, "Is this the sort of inexperienced person who should be giving parents advice about their children as they speak from the pulpit?" It's a difficult question. I would go further and ask, do such people even have the resources to give spiritual advice, since psychology and sexuality are important elements of spirituality? Parents have to decide for themselves.

Marshall advises: "Find out about your own parish priest; find out if there is any suspicion about him. Parents may feel that they trust their own priest, that their faith is important to them and that their parish church is an outlet in which they feel safe." Other parents may feel that it is an unsafe system that they want to remove their children from until they can be assured that the system has undergone a genuine, root-and-branch revolution.