From: People For Peace
Voices of Justice for Peace
Regional News
BY FR JOACHIM OMOLO OUKO, AJ
NAIROBI-KENYA
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 20, 2012
For more than a decade, advocates for those abused by clergy have been demanding that church leaders in Ireland and at the Vatican accept blame for protecting paedophile priests. The big question here is why such cases do increase almost in daily basis.
[book cover image; An Irish Tragedy
How Sex Abuse by Irish Priests Helped Cripple The Catholic Church; by Joe Rigert]
Joe Rigert’s book, An Irish Tragedy, tries to give the answer to the question. He makes a potentially controversial suggestion that there was something about the background and training of Irish priests that made them more prone to become abusers. Joe adds that apart from the training, social and religious background in Ireland has also contributed to the matter. The story of how Irish immigrants helped to build the Catholic Church, both in Ireland and America. In his investigative reporter Joe Rigert’s search for the roots of the Catholic sex-abuse scandals which led him to Ireland, he found that rigid sexual repression in both society and the priesthood has had the opposite of its intended effect, fostering bizarre and criminal sexual expression. Though a tiny country, Ireland has been a chief exporter of abusers to America, making the Catholic Church’s darkest crisis a true Irish tragedy. Catholic historian Terrance Dosh calls this book “a riveting read with many remarkable insights.” The book details the history of the migration of Irish priests and their unusual penchant to abuse girls and women, and raises questions on the Church’s emphasis on homosexuality as the primary cause of the sex-scandal.
The book is a must-read for those who remain unconvinced of breadth of the scandal; and a useful book for those wanting the history, details and underpinnings of this tragic event. The book suggests that sex abuse by Catholic clergy is not limited to a “church” problem. It is a deeply rooted, complex flaw in society in general because the results impact so many aspects of their daily lives. It is against the background that the problem is not only with priests but nuns as well. In March this year an Irish nun appeared before a special sitting of the country’s Circuit Court on 87 charges of the sexual abuse of primary school girls. Rape and sexual molestation were “endemic” mainly in Irish Catholic church-run industrial schools and orphanages where priests and nuns for decades terrorised thousands of boys and girls in the Irish Republic. According to the report, molestation and rape were “endemic” in boys’ facilities, chiefly run by the Christian Brothers order. The report concluded that when confronted with evidence of sex abuse, religious authorities responded by transferring offenders to another location, where in many instances they were free to abuse again.
[map of Irland]
Some clergy and nuns were considered notorious child molesters. Some of them raped or indecently assaulted over one hundred children, mainly in Dublin where four former archbishops in Dublin – John Charles McQuaid, who died in 1973, Dermot Ryan, who died in 1984, Kevin McNamara, who died in 1987, and retired Cardinal Desmond Connell – were found to have failed to report their knowledge of child sexual abuse to the Garda from the 1960s to the 1980s despite the fact that they were aware of complaints. The Murphy Commission of Inquiry into the abuse of children in Dublin identified 320 people who complained of child sexual abuse between 1975 and 2004. It also stated that since May 2004, 130 complaints against priests operating in the Dublin archdiocese had been made. It is so notorious to the point that the Irish government had to announce the closure of its embassy to the Vatican, starkly illustrating that relations between Dublin and the Catholic Church are at a historically glacial low. The government and the Vatican has always remained in serious disagreement over child abuse by the clergy, with the Irish Prime Minister, Enda Kenny, accusing Rome of trying to sabotage official inquiries. Traditionally, Ireland has been unusually close to the Catholic Church, but its faith was greatly shaken by a series of damning reports on the Church’s alleged indifference to child sex abuse by priests and other clerics. Fr Joachim Omolo Ouko, AJTel +254-7350-14559/+254-722-623-578E-mail omolo.ouko@gmail.comPeaceful world is the greatest heritageThat this generation can give to the generationsTo come- All of us have a role.