Lies from Connell and Co. most shocking aspect of diocese report

It was the lies that are the most striking revelation of the report on the Dublin Archdiocese. That is after the disclosures of the terrible abuse of probably thousands of young people over the years and the cover up of those abuses. But the lies from the mouth of an Archbishop, a professor of philosophy, later a Cardinal of the Church, the man who spoke of his counterpart in the Church of Ireland as being intellectually inferior, a finger-wagging moralist, the man who had a moral qualm about attending a reception hosted by Bertie Ahern and his then partner, Celia Larkin. The man who, as head of the philosophy department at UCD for years, was the Church’s man in a key post. Desmond Connell.

Desmond Connell, the moralist, told the Investigation Commission that it was ok to lie, provided one had a “mental reservation”. OK, he didn’t say it was ok to lie, it was ok to convey an untruth and do so deliberately. And this was his explanation:

“Well, the general teaching about mental reservation is that you are not permitted to tell a lie. On the other hand, you may be put in a position where you have to answer, and there may be circumstances in which you can use an ambiguous expression realising that the person who you are talking to will accept an untrue version of whatever it may be - permitting that to happen, not willing that it happened, that would be lying. It really is a matter of trying to deal with extraordinarily difficult matters that may arise in social relations where people may ask questions that you simply cannot answer. Everybody knows that this kind of thing is liable to happen. So, mental reservation is, in a sense, a way of answering without lying.”

In the early 1990’s Desmond Connell lent a priest in the Dublin diocese, Ivan Payne, money to compensate Andrew Madden, whom he had sexually abused. Andrew Madden had instituted legal proceedings against Ivan Payne. Desmond Connell was asked by Joe Little of RTE whether he had compensated victims of clerical abuse. He said:  “I have compensated nobody, I have paid nobody” and then went on to say that the finances of the diocese “are not used in any way” (to make settlements in civil actions concerning clerical child abuse).

In 2003, almost a decade later, Desmond Connell had a meeting with Andrew Madden, who, of course, was fully aware that what Desmond Connell had said to Joe Little was a lie. The Investigation Commission report says:

“In the course of an informal chat Cardinal Connell did apologise for the whole handling of the Fr Ivan Payne case. He was however at pains to point out to Mr Madden that he did not lie about the use of diocesan funds in meeting Fr Payne’s settlement with Mr Madden. He explained that when he was asked by journalists about the use of diocesan funds for the compensation of complainants of child sexual abuse, he had responded that diocesan funds are not used for such a purpose; that he had not said that diocesan funds were not used for such a purpose. By using the present tense, he had not excluded the possibility that diocesan funds had been used for such purpose in the past. According to Mr Madden, Cardinal Connell considered that there was an enormous difference between the two”.

The other person of heroic stature that emerges from this scandal, Marie Collins, another of the abused victims (Andrew Madden also emerges as heroic from all lf this), had exposure to Desmond Connell’s understanding of truth.

The commission report says about this:

“In anticipation of the publication of the Framework Document, a meeting was arranged at the request of Archbishop Connell with a representative of An Garda Síochána. A detective inspector and a detective garda met a representative of the Archdiocese at Archbishop’s House on 17 November 1995. The representative delivered details of―all persons who had made allegations of sexual abuse against members of the clergy that were in his possession.

“These details comprised the names of 17 alleged clerical abusers together with the names of each complainant and brief details of the allegations. The Commission does not consider that the reporting carried out in this instance by the Archdiocese was in fact in compliance with the standards of the Framework Document. Within the collective knowledge of priests and officials of the Archdiocese, there was an awareness of complaints concerning a total of at least 28 priests or former priests (at least 12 more than were named on the list).

“When Cardinal Connell was asked by the Commission about the absence of any reference on this list to a particular named priest, his reply was that this priest’s name was possibly not on the list because he had been laicised at the time the list was produced and consequently was not a member of the clergy. In further evidence before the Commission, the Cardinal responded that the disclosure “was a beginning and it was a very big beginning because nothing of the kind had ever happened before”.

After the conviction of the priest who had abused Marie Collins and others in the criminal courts, in 1997, the Dublin Archdiocese issued a press statement claiming that they had co-operated with the Gardaí in relation to her complaint. The Commission says: “Mrs Collins was upset by that statement as she had good reason to believe that the Archdiocese’s level of co-operation was, to say the least, questionable. Her support priest, Fr James Norman, subsequently told the Gardaí that he asked the Archdiocese about that statement and that the explanation he received was that “we never said we cooperated ‘fully’, placing emphasis on the word ‘fully’”.

And these guys presume to lecture the rest of us on morality.