Bishops and criminality

Bishops who concealed felonies should be prosecuted; the crisis of child sexual abuse must be addressed

There was a crime known as "misprision of a felony" which involved the concealment of a felony known to have been committed. The offence was abolished, for reasons unexplained, by the Criminal Law Act 1997, but anybody guilty of concealing a felony known to have been committed up to the time the 1997 Act came into force could still be prosecuted for misprision of felony and could still be sentenced to a long term of imprisonment.

It is obvious that bishops were aware, at least through the 1980s and 1990s, that priests in their diocese had been guilty of child sex abuse, a serious crime. It is not believable that these bishops did not know that sexually abusing a child was a crime.

Of course it is true bishops did not always know for certain that a crime had been committed, merely that allegations were made of a crime being committed. But it is also obvious that, in some instances, bishops did know that crimes had been committed, for they sent clerics for "treatment".

And yet they failed to report these crimes to the civil authorities. There seems to be prima facie evidence that, in failing to do so, the bishops themselves were guilty of criminality. It is not acceptable that evidence of such criminality not be investigated and, where appropriate, prosecutions not be instituted.

Indeed there is evidence that the Catholic authorities were (are?) engaged in a conspiracy to conceal criminality. The order of Pope John XXIII to keep secret evidence of the clerical sexual abuse of children, under pain of excommunication, was the origin of such a conspiracy.

And the direction of Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI), as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, that the Congregation had "exclusive competence" to deal with allegations of clerical child sexual abuse seems also to be legally suspect.

As a preliminary, the Catholic Church should now ensure that its internal regulations comply strictly with the laws of the State.

What is most striking about the Ferns report is not that so many priests of the Ferns diocese were involved in the sexual abuse of children (although the number of priests involved is very striking): it is that the Catholic Church knew for years about the phenomenon of clerical sex abuse, knew of the harm this did to children and yet instigated no procedures for protecting children, no programmes to help children recover from the abuse they suffered and no convincing mechanism to prevent priests known to have abused from further contact with children. Scandalously, the primary concern of the bishops seems not to have been the abused children, or children who might be abused in the future, but the financial assets of their diocese.

The reflections of the very impressive Ferns report on the culpability of the Vatican are telling. It speaks of "a failure of the church authorities in Rome to educate bishops and priests about the growing awareness of child sexual abuse within the Roman Catholic priesthood... A culture of secrecy and a fear of causing scandal informed at least some of the responses that have been identified by this Inquiry. By failing to properly identify the problem of child abuse even to colleagues and professionals, bishops placed the interests of the Church ahead of children whose protection and safety should at all times have been a priority" (page 256).

It is a damning indictment of the morality of those who purport to be our moral educators.

The incidence of child sexual abuse extends far broader than the Catholic clergy. As the SAVI report (Sexual Abuse and Violence in Ireland), conducted by the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland in 2002, showed:

• One in five women (20.4 per cent) reported experiencing contact sexual abuse in childhood with a further one in ten (10 per cent) reporting non-contact sexual abuse. In more than a quarter of cases of contact abuse (that is, 5.6 per cent of all girls), the abuse involved penetrative sex – either vaginal, anal or oral sex.

• One in six men (16.2 per cent) reported experiencing contact sexual abuse in childhood, with a further one in 14 (7.4 per cent) reporting non-contact sexual abuse. In one of every six cases of contact abuse (i.e. 2.7 per cent of all boys), the abuse involved penetrative sex.

The figures are startling. Only a small fraction of the perpetrators are members of the clergy, almost all are men and most are known to the victim.

While we have witnessed a torrent of condemnation arising from the Ferns report, we have known for four years now of the scale of child sexual abuse and yet almost nothing seems to have been done by the authorities to deal with the crisis.

As recommended by the Ferns report, a major promotional campaign is necessary to convey to young people that sexual abuse inflicted upon them is wrong, that they have no culpability for it, that they must immediately report anybody who sexually abuses them or attempts to do so. And we must institute procedures that are sympathetic to the complaints of children and thorough in investigating evidence of such abuse.

VINCENT BROWNE