Category: Abuse of Power

ACTIVISTS in the US documenting clerical sex abuse cases within the Catholic Church expressed dismay yesterday at the findings of the Cloyne report.

They also voiced scepticism that the Vatican or church authorities in Ireland will ever allow the extent of abuse to be fully revealed.

“The Cloyne Report is disheartening confirmation that even today, despite the Church’s knowledge of the profound anguish of thousands of victims, its reform policies are public relations ploys, not true child protection programs,” said Anne Barrett Doyle, the Boston-based director of BishopAccountability.org, an online database documenting the Catholic sex-abuse crisis worldwide.

Barbara Blaine, president of a US-based pressure group called Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, said the report’s conclusion that the Vatican encouraged the Cloyne cover-ups “should surprise no one”.

“A key reason bishops ignore, minimise and hide child sex crimes,” she said, “is because Vatican officials have largely urged, and sometimes insisted, that they do so.”

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THE Vatican is today protecting disgraced Bishop John Magee.

Magee is now believed to be hiding out in Rome following the latest scandal to hit the Church. Insiders believe he is being protected by the Vatican and Pope Benedict amid the furore of the damning Cloyne Report.

The Vatican has so far refused to comment on the report which accuses Magee of lying to the state about the protection of children.

Pressure is now growing on the Church to call the Bishop to account.

The report shows that the Catholic Church was ignoring its own guidelines of child protection as recently as 2009.

It also says that Bishop Magee kissed and touched a teenage boy in a manner described by investigators as “inappropriate behaviour”.

Bishop Magee’s exact whereabouts remained a mystery today as pressure was growing on the Catholic Church to call the bishop to account.

He has not commented on the report or made himself available to answer questions from the media.

A visibly shaken Archbishop Dermot Clifford said he would have been “very happy” if Bishop Magee was in front of the press responding to questions about the Cloyne report instead of him.

“I’d be very happy if he was sitting here in this seat and it’s a pity that he isn’t,” he told a press conference in Cork after the publication of the report.

The diocese’s caretaker bishop, who is also the Archbishop of Cashel and Emly, described himself as “having distanced himself from John Magee” in recent years and had not any contact with him recently.

He said he believed that the former Bishop of Cloyne was out of the country.

Bishop Magee has been accused of lying to the State over child protection procedures in the Cloyne Diocese where he and a senior assistant failed a succession of victims of clerical sex abuse.

The report also reveals that Bishop Magee was the subject of a complaint over an alleged inappropriate incident with a teenage boy. His actions were deemed to be “inappropriate behaviour” rather than abuse.

It took diocesan authorities three months to report on the matter to gardai once they were made aware of the allegations.

A file was later sent to the DPP who recommended no charges be brought against the bishop.

The complaint centred on an incident where Dr Magee “tightly” embraced a 17-year-old boy, referred to in the report as “Joseph” and allegedly kissed him on the forehead.

Joseph, who had been contemplating entering the priesthood, had a number of further meetings with the bishop, some when he was under 18 and some when he was over 18.

Dr Magee later denied kissing Joseph on the forehead but said he had made the sign of the cross on his forehead.

He acknowledged telling Joseph he loved him but later explained his intention “was to comfort the young man who was upset by family problems”.

Dr Magee was referred to a “boundary counsellor” who outlined what “constituted good practice in the area of touch in the context of pastoral relationship.”

The commission found that the case was dealt with appropriately.

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A retired Catholic bishop has been singled out for failing to follow Church rules on reporting clerical sex abuse in an Irish diocese as recently as three years ago.

A fourth damning inquiry into the church in Ireland lays the blame for the mishandling of allegations with John Magee – a former Vatican aide who served as personal secretary to three popes.

The judge-led investigation into his inadequate attempts to deal with abusive clerics launched a withering attack on the former Bishop of Cloyne in Co Cork for attempting to blame subordinates for his failures.

The long-awaited report also found his second-in-command Monsignor Denis O’Callaghan did not approve of the Church’s protection guidelines, in particular the need to alert the police, and “stymied” child abuse policy.

“It is a remarkable fact that Bishop Magee took little or no active interest in the management of clerical child sexual abuse cases until 2008,” the shocking 400-page report found.

The inquiry – headed by Judge Yvonne Murphy, who in 2009 exposed a damning catalogue of failures in the Dublin Archdiocese – found the Catholic hierarchy in Cloyne was resisting church policy 12 years after a framework document on child protection was adopted in 1996.

The commission’s devastating criticisms go right to the top of the Catholic Church.

It lambasted the Vatican and accused it of an “entirely unhelpful” reaction for referring to the Irish Church’s mandatory reporting guidelines as merely a study document.

It found the response from Rome effectively gave a carte blanche to the likes of Bishop Magee to ignore the guidelines and offered “comfort and support” to senior clerics such as Monsignor O’Callaghan who dissented from official Irish Church policy on paedophile priests.

John Magee stood down from day-to-day duties in March 2009 and resigned a year later.

In one of its most damning assessments, the report states the Cloyne scandal was different from others, because it dealt with allegations after 1996.

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A damning report into the handling of child sex abuse allegations in the Cloyne diocese (Ireland)  has found the hierarchy in Cloyne was resisting its own church policy 12 years after a framework document on child protection was adopted in 1996.

In addition, the Vatican was “entirely unhelpful” to any bishop who wanted to implement procedures for dealing with allegations of child sexual abuse in the Irish Catholic Church, saying the framework document on child sexual abuse, agreed by the Irish Bishops Conference in 1996, was “not an official document.”

This gave individual bishops, “the freedom to ignore” the guidelines, branded by the Vatican as a “study document.”

According to the 400-page report, there were 15 cases between 1996 and 2005 that “very clearly” should have been reported by the diocese to the Gardaí, but only six were reported.

The report by Judge Yvonne Murphy (who also led the investigation into the Dublin diocese), scrutinises how both Catholic Church and State authorities handled allegations of abuse against 19 priests in the County Cork diocese.

It is not an investigation into child sexual abuse by priests but into the handling of allegations.

The Church comes out very badly, the state less so.

The response of Gardaí was “generally adequate,” said the report.

The report covers the period from 1996 (when the Church had introduced its own child protection framework), until 2008.

It found that the response of the Diocese of Cloyne was “inadequate and inappropriate,” and that the primary responsibility for the failure lies with the then bishop of Cloyne, Bishop John Magee.

It says he “took little or no active interest” in the management of clerical child sexual abuse cases until 2008, 12 years after the framework document on child sexual abuse was agreed by the Irish Bishops’ Conference.

Publishing the report, Minister for Justice Alan Shatter appealed to victims of abuse to “come forward” and said that they would be dealt with by the Gardaí with “compassion and dignity.”

He said that in spite of the creation of new structures and promise of change, there were still those who continued to act “in bad faith.”

It is not enough to take the words of “organisations on trust” as the report found they “did not live up to their word.”

He went on, “The failure of the Church to report cases to the Gardaí was perhaps the most appalling failure of all as it occurred after so many shocking revelations of past failures.”

He announced the publication of a new Bill, the Criminal Justice Withholding Information on Crimes Against Children and Vulnerable Adults Bill, which will put child protection on a statutory basis and introduce penalties of up to five years imprisonment for breaches.

“There will be no legal grey area which inhibits prosecutions,” said Minister Shatter.

It is difficult to understand the mindset of those who, as recently as 2006, 2007 and 2008, despite all that has been said and learnt in the last two decades, to know that they were repeating the failures of the past, concealing and oblivious of the extent to which their failures placed children at risk, said Minister Shatter, who apologised “for any failings of the state.”

The promised legislation will put the Children First legislation on a statutory basis, said Minister for Children and Youth Affairs, Frances Fitzgerald.

“There will be no a la carte approach to Children First,” she said.

The Church’s own child protection body, the National Board for Safeguarding Children in the Catholic Church, is currently conducting an audit of the implementation of child protection policies in all of the dioceses.

In response to calls from the public to publish the results of this audit, Ms Fitzgerald said, “the more transparency there is from the Church, the more reassured one can be.”

The serious failures in Cloyne were first investigated by the NBSCCc and its report was published in December 2008.

Cardinal Seán Brady, Primate of all Ireland has welcomed the report.

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