Amid the tributes paid to Cardinal Desmond Connell on his retirement as Archbishop of Dublin earlier this week, it is worth remembering an event which occurred last August, writes Mary Raftery.
Two sisters, who had been savagely sexually abused as children by Dublin priest Father Noel Reynolds, asked to meet the cardinal. They were in the midst of a family crisis, and felt that on a purely pastoral level a meeting with Dr Connell might help them.
Dr Connell flatly refused to meet them. They were informed that for legal reasons he felt it would be inappropriate. The two sisters did have an ongoing civil case against the Dublin archdiocese, but had emphasised that their desire for a meeting was not related to legal matters, but to their Catholic faith.
Father Noel Reynolds was one of Dublin's most dangerous paedophile priests. Before his death in 2002, he admitted to sexually abusing up to 100 children during his career, including the two sisters. Their ordeal took place during the 1970s, when they were brutally raped from the time they were seven until they were in their early teens. Their adult lives have been blighted.
In 1995, when Reynolds was parish priest of Glendalough, complaints were made to the archdiocese about his inappropriate contact with some local children. Eventually, in 1997, Desmond Connell had him transferred to another ministry, at the National Rehabilitation Institute in DúLaoghaire, a hospital which had children among its patients. In flagrant breach of his own guidelines, he did not inform the hospital that there were concerns about Reynolds's contact with children.
Last December, the then Coadjutor Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, was asked why the archdiocese was constantly using lawyers to fight victims of child sexual abuse by priests. "That happens very rarely," he said, although adding that in an adversarial climate, "everybody has to defend themselves with the only instruments that are useful, that are valid. Sometimes it's very unpleasant."
The victims of Noel Reynolds know all about the "unpleasantness" to which he refers. Less than a year ago, the Dublin archdiocese informed the two sisters raped by Father Reynolds that they were not entitled to compensation, that the diocese was not a legal entity and so could not be sued, that it did not employ Reynolds, that it had no supervisory role over him, and that the archbishop was in no way liable for any alleged abuse that Reynolds may have committed.
To be fair to him, the new Archbishop Martin has spoken of his desire for a less adversarial approach towards victims. But any change will come too late for these two sisters. Worn down by the Church's hardball tactics, they finally settled their case last December for a paltry sum, a small fraction of the amounts received in other, more high-profile legal actions. Still suffering the effects of their abuse, they simply couldn't take any more of the Church's bullying hostility towards them.
This pattern of aggression towards child abuse victims is commonplace in dioceses throughout the world.
However, the mould was broken last year by the new Archbishop of Boston, Sean O'Malley. One of his first actions was to hire new lawyers; satisfactory settlements were rapidly reached with many of the victims, who said that the climate had literally changed overnight.
Interestingly, when asked last December if the Church's dependence on legal advice was one of the reasons for its problems in Ireland, Diarmuid Martin was less than definite: "to some extent, yes, and to some extent, no," he replied. No evidence there of Boston's newfound, unequivocal approach.
Boston, however, has had two major advantages over Dublin in this respect. Firstly, in the form of Voice of the Faithful, it has a strong protest group of committed Catholics determined to hold their Church to account for its cover-up of the scandal. Secondly, Boston had a significant group of priests who were prepared to stand up to the hierarchy in support of victims, and very often did so publicly.
Dublin, and indeed Ireland, has neither of these. Most priests here remained shamefully silent in the face of overwhelming evidence of cover-ups and bullying tactics used against victims. The Irish laity may well have been shocked and disillusioned by the revelations of abuse, but no coherent representative voice has ever emerged to articulate those feelings. Both of these facts reflect profoundly on the nature of the Catholic Church in this country, and inevitably on the calibre of its leadership.
Cardinal Connell himself appears to feel as much sinned against as sinning. In a recent sermon, he said "as I ask pardon of those whom I have offended, I freely forgive whatever has seemed unfair to me." He preached of abandoning "all thought of self-justice, every memory of wrongs done to us, to cancel from our hearts every feeling of resentment, even if it is just towards everyone." Perhaps if this had been his message to the two sisters, it is as well for their own peace of mind that he refused to meet them last August.