Madam, - In its comments on the Ferns Report, the Government seems to be carefully avoiding the Vatican's role in the scandal. Colm O'Gorman writes (Opinion & Analysis, October 26th) that he tried to hold the Vatican to account by taking a civil action against the Papal Nuncio, but that this was blocked by the Nuncio claiming diplomatic immunity.
Mr O'Gorman draws attention to the criticism of the Vatican in the Ferns Report, in particular the Vatican document Crimen Silicitanis which, in 1962, was sent to every Catholic bishop in the world. It requires everyone, whether church official, witness or complainant, to take an oath of secrecy in relation to any disclosed sexual abuse, on pain of automatic excommunication. It also requires each bishop to keep the document in a secret archive and not to comment upon it or reveal its existence.
This is a scandal of the highest order. It helps to explain the attitude of bishops to allegations against priests. If the Vatican refuses to discuss the matter, should this State have diplomatic relations with the Vatican? Does the Government have the courage to stand up to the Vatican on this? A Papal Nuncio who acts in such a way should be declared unacceptable and expelled from Ireland. - Yours, etc,
KEN KEABLE, Kilclooney, Kilmacthomas, Co Waterford.
Madam, - An institution that has been found to make decisions to the profound disadvantage of its weakest members cannot escape the accusation of being unchristian.
A major overhaul of the way the Catholic Church recruits and trains its clerical class is long overdue but will not happen because the decision-makers in Rome do not feel the need. It seems unlikely that any change for the better will take place for the forseeable future without major intervention.
Even this in itself is unlikely to be effective if it comes from those who have literally no access to the institutional structure of their own church. The institutional church has survived in spite of a lot of wrongdoing in the past and it will continue to survive and continue to place its own privileged members, i.e. clerics, above everyone else. Why not? - Yours, etc,
CAITRIONA McCLEAN, Weston Avenue, Lucan, Co Dublin.
Madam, - I very much support the points made by Mary Raftery (Opinion, October 27th).
Even though, like most of us in this country, I was educated in church-controlled schools where I never saw or experienced abuse, and although I am a practising Catholic, I believe the causes of the present scandals do lie in part with the control held by the churches in our education system.
This must be ended if we are to begin to address this problem.
It is important to remember that we may only as yet be seeing the tip of an iceberg. We do not know the true extent of this abuse.
Control of all our educational system must rest with the State, and thus be accountable to the people of this country. - Yours, etc,
DARACH CORCORAN, Castlebar, Co Mayo.
Madam, - If reporting on the death of Liam Lawlor by other media has given rise to the need for an apology to the Lawlor family and to the woman passenger in the car whose name was also blackened, then Mary Raftery's column of October 27th must give rise to a similar response.
She writes that the boards of management of national schools "are invariably chaired by priests in the area". This may have been the case many years ago. Today, out of 479 national school boards in the diocese of Dublin, 166 have a priest as chairperson; 313 do not. As a member of the board of two national schools (mostly a thankless job for all members), and as chairperson of one of those, I can state categorically that it is by no means what Ms Raftery describes as a "position of absolute power".
Your columnist says the Ferns Report "identifies severe failings within the culture of the Catholic Church which it believes contributed to the abuse of so many children in Wexford. In other words, the failings in Ferns are endemic to the very nature of the institution itself". Now, while I have been a priest for over 38 years, I am by no means enamoured of many aspects of the culture and of the mode of exercise of authority in the church. Ms Raftery, however, does your readers no favour by such a glaring non sequitur. A culture is a complex mode of expression of an individual or a group, and is by no means endemic to the nature of the individual or group.
Chief among the failings, according to your columnist, are celibacy and secrecy. Celibacy, whether it be a failing or not, is clearly not of the nature of the church; nor is "secrecy", although a certain confidentiality is vital to normal human relationships. I do not imagine that Ms Raftery would consider secrecy a failing in her doctor or solicitor.
Ms Raftery writes that it is imperative to wrest control of our schools from a group neither accountable nor answerable to any form of democratic control. Democracy is an imperfect tool, and is no guarantee of freedom from abuse of power, but our education system does operate under our democracy, whoever it may be that has immediate responsibility. Perhaps The Irish Times might consider a survey to discover what percentage of our people would want church influence excluded from the education system.
Ms Raftery describes the church as "an organisation whose very essence has now been unambiguously identified as a risk factor for children." This is a serious charge to make in a public arena. If it were true, the only responsible course of action would be to destroy the church and make it an illegal organisation.
I have not read Ferns Report, but I think that any person with good judgment would be very slow to make such a charge. - Yours, etc,
PÁDRAIG McCARTHY, Arkow, Co Wicklow.
Madam, - Many who watched Prime Time last Tuesday must have been moved beyond the point of tears by the genuine and heartfelt words expressed by Bishop Eamonn Walsh and by the obvious sincerity and the deep sorrow which he expressed so nobly and honestly in his apology to the many people who suffered clerical abuse in the Diocese of Ferns over 40 years. He must have felt during his lengthy investigation that he had come face-to-face with a vision of hell. It surely was not an easy task.
Bishop Walsh is a saintly and honourable man who is prepared to stand up and state the truth. It was obvious that he was emotionally overcome by the task that none of us would have wished on our worst enemy. At last the awful truth of clerical abuse in Ferns, and elsewhere, appears to be opening up.
It is appalling to realise the degree of "cover-up" not only in Ferns but, one wonders, in how many other dioceses through Ireland?
The church is not the only agency to participate in sweeping the whole matter under the carpet. It is alleged that the Government, the forces of law and order, and the health boards also participated in this denial of justice.
Which, I wonder is the worse crime? Is it to abuse a child? Or is to know that a child has been abused and yet do nothing? - Yours, etc,
DERMOT HARTE, Buttevant, Mallow, Co Cork.