Cardinal Brady has been the most convincing promiser of accountability from the church. But what now?
NORTHERN CATHOLIC political leaders have been falling over their feet about Cardinal Seán Brady – perhaps little different from the rest of the island. But no wonder people are wrong-footed. The global Catholic Church may be incapable of reform, since its management system apparently operates in a world parallel to the real one, compromised from the top.
It was a senior British judge who said that a successful appeal against the convictions of the Birmingham Six was unthinkable, because it would open up an “appalling vista”. The late Lord Denning meant it would implicate police, prison officers, judges and juries, which would show the entire system to be tainted. The unthinkable has happened in the Irish Catholic Church. Cardinal Brady’s behaviour as the officer of a secret court 35 years ago opens a vista stretching all the way to Rome.
Now that the focus is wider, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin – adept performer when the crisis related to his own diocese – sounds unsure and tentative. Taoiseach Brian Cowen stumbles behind Minister for the Environment John Gormley, unwilling to be more forthright. And in the North, each revelation lands into a society whose sectarian and political divide is as deep as ever.
Most unionist politicians have held back. Anti-agreement Traditional Unionist leader Jim Allister, a lawyer, expressed shock at the oath of secrecy demanded from children, voicing ancient unionist fears of Rome by adding that the oath was “on foot of an appalling and secret document of direction from the Vatican”. For all his pedantic legalese, Allister was right, and church legalese sustained the secrecy.
The drip-feed of revelation leaves Northern Catholics particularly bereft. The continuing scandal makes real the demons the Rev Ian Paisley conjured for decades in his pulpit to galvanise anti-Catholic fear and hatred – of corrupt priests and nuns abusing the innocent in a web of ritual. From Washington, Sinn Féin Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness eventually said that the Cardinal should consider his position, while emphasising that he was himself a believer and “not an enemy of the church”. He did go on to wonder how many children had been told not to speak of abuse, and said like many Catholics he felt uneasy about the revelations. The SDLP’s new leader Margaret Ritchie, also in Washington, sent a letter to McGuinness and First Minister Peter Robinson demanding they get her and Sir Reg Empey into their White House meeting yesterday with President Obama. But she issued no simultaneous statement on Cardinal Brady.
Gentle-voiced Seán Brady, a prelate who seemed humble, turns out to have been an interrogator in secret church courts. By yesterday he was voicing shame at a “painful episode” from his past. When his role in relation to paedophile priest Brendan Smyth first emerged, the cardinal’s instincts were to disclaim responsibility. He had been “out of the country” for years, he said, as Smyth continued to abuse.
The vista suggests an entire cohort of middle-aged to elderly men, implicated from youth in a culture of “silence and secrecy”, to quote the cardinal himself, devoted primarily to the preservation of the institutional church from scandal.
In 1995 Belfast television journalist Chris Moore published a book on Smyth’s marathon of abuse over half a century, and the church’s response. He found it ineffectual, un-coordinated, often marked by denial. Moore, like others, found early Smyth victims in Ballyjamesduff, near the monastery to which Smyth belonged, Kilnacrott Abbey. The reports found Smyth living in the abbey and abusing in Ballyjamesduff in the early 1950s.
Nobody stopped the abuse, certainly not Cardinal Brady’s secret questions 20 years later, also in Ballyjamesduff. A letter in this paper yesterday contributed some insights, quoting from the 2001 reassertion, signed by Pope Benedict as a senior Vatican official, of the obligation to keep secret allegations of priestly paedophilia. The writer also suggested church authorities have always viewed paedophilia as a “fixation” – to be treated, not regarded as morally guilty.
And then there is former professor of canon law Msgr Maurice Dooley, the most outspoken defender of Cardinal Brady, telling RTÉ and BBC NI that he was not morally or legally obliged to take the 1975 allegations to gardaí. On Radio Ulster's phone-in programme Talkbackthe Monsignor replied doggedly to angry callers, most clearly Protestant. An e-mail to the programme said the church seemed to be run by "old dusty men". Lost in the noise, at one point the Monsignor made the amazing declaration that "by the law of the church in any of these trials, the officers of the court – Fr Brady – would be precluded from informing the police."
Yet other than Archbishop Martin, Cardinal Brady has been the most convincing promiser of future accountability from the church, and care for children. The episode from his own past gives the present an air of bad faith – and who is there to make it good.