The autumn sunshine was sweltering in St Peter’s Square when Pope John Paul II beatified Edmund Rice in October 1996, but it was still not as hot as the celebrations which included an al fresco holy hooley called “the Rice rave”. This, the penultimate step to canonisation, was the answer to generations of schoolboys’ daily prayer all over Ireland since 1961 that the founder of the Christian Brothers would be declared a saint by Rome.
RTÉ beamed the ceremony live from the Vatican. It featured a procession of 23 of Ireland’s most senior Catholic churchmen and 12 Oireachtas members, led by the ministers for education and defence in the Fine Gael-Labour Party government and the deputy leader of Fianna Fáil.
None of the dignitaries raised as much as a murmur of dissent when, in the course of his homily, Cardinal Cahal Daly, primate of All-Ireland, proclaimed that “the bad image sometimes given to the Brothers in some sectors of the press and media is totally unjustified”.
Four years later, and on foot of continued media revelations about brutality against children in religious-run institutions, the government established the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse. Its five-volume final report published in May 2009 showed exactly who had been telling the truth about the Christian Brothers and who had not. The main reason it took the commission nearly a decade to complete its work was that the congregation did their damnedest to stop the truth from coming out, resisting disclosure at every turn.
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Mr Justice Seán Ryan, the commission’s chairman, said the Brothers had made statements they knew to be “incorrect or misleading”, omitted relevant facts and denied that a member of the congregation was ever in an institution where a witness had “got a name even slightly wrong”.
Over the years, when members of the congregation went on trial in the criminal courts for forcing sex on children, it sought judicial reviews and frequently secured orders that the trials be abandoned due to the lapse of time since the alleged incidents of abuse. When survivors turned to the civil courts in pursuit of compensatory justice, the Brothers bare-facedly denied the allegations, compounding the victims’ suffering.
[ Christian Brothers may be shielding assets from sex abuse victim, High Court toldOpens in new window ]
The commission recorded a particularly despicable example of this unchristian strategy following the grotesque abuse by a Brother of a child in Artane industrial school. “A witness to the commission told how he was ordered to lick faeces off the shoe of a Brother who thrashed him when he had done so,” the report states. “The man identified as the perpetrator by the witness verified the account and admitted his guilt. Despite this, his congregation continued to insist the incident never happened.”
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. The method may have changed, but the strategy remains the same — deny, deny, deny.
The misnomered Christian Brothers, who ought to be renamed the Cheapskate Bullies for their continuing torment of abuse survivors, are refusing to nominate any of their number to represent the congregation in High Court litigation instituted by about 30 people who, as minors, fell foul of abusers operating under their auspices.
The law requires that an individual must be nominated because the congregation is an unincorporated association and, therefore, it may not be sued as a single entity. The only recourse for plaintiffs is to issue summonses for every one of the 100-plus Brothers, even those in jail for abusing children, thus prolonging the litigation and exacerbating their costs and distress.
[ Jailing of Christian Brother Paul Hendrick does not end victim’s legal battlesOpens in new window ]
Paul Hendrick, a Christian Brother and former principal of the congregation’s school in Westland Row, Dublin, was recently jailed for four years after pleading guilty to the abuse of Kenneth Grace in the 1980s, starting when the boy was 13. As The Irish Times reported on Tuesday, Grace has had to obtain multiple court orders compelling the Christian Brothers to provide information about the members because the congregation refused to provide it voluntarily. John Gordon, Grace’s senior counsel, has said in court that the Christian Brothers, who have assets valued at more than €66 million, are playing “ducks and drakes with the legal system”.
In the days after the Ryan report was published 14 years ago, Br Edmund Garvey, the then provincial of the congregation’s European branch, was interviewed on Newstalk radio and urged anyone who had suffered at the congregation’s hands to go to the courts with their cases. It was Garvey who initiated the strategy of refusing to nominate a representative for the legal actions, a tactic his successor, Br David Gibson, is continuing. The hypocrisy is staggering.
Equally staggering is the fact that hundreds of thousands of boys were entrusted for their education and ethical development to an organisation so shamelessly devoid of moral rectitude.
There are many good people among the Brothers and the mostly lay teaching staffs in their schools. They are not to blame for the congregation’s tactics, which might be characterised as harder for a rich man to squeeze through the eye of a needle than for a legalistic Brother to squeeze through a loophole in the law. What exactly are they trying to protect with their cynical courtroom ploys? Is it money: that stuff Jesus Christ, the man who inspires the congregation’s name, flung from the temple along with the lenders?
For the past fortnight, Ireland has mourned Sinéad O’Connor as a fearless advocate for child abuse survivors. Stories about her many private acts of kindness and support have tumbled forth since her death. As her family laid the singer to rest this week, a void opened up that needs to be filled by new activists who will stand up for those who continue to be tormented. Where is the public anger at what is being done in full view to Grace and the other 30 plaintiffs being given the run-around by the organisation Rice founded upon the ideal, “Catholic and Celtic, to God and Ireland true”?
As schools prepare to reopen this month, Ireland is busy getting books and uniforms but what it needs most in the interests of its children is to get mad.