Never for long has the issue of abuse by church servants – and the mishandling of that issue by church authorities – been off our front page since this site was launched in 2013. 2024 saw a resurgence of evidence of the church’s deepest problem in Ireland – prompting us to create this page as a guide to our ongoing attention to it.
Already by September 2024 more than thirty News Items and Articles had been created in the ‘Abuse‘ category, and a chronological list of these can be found by clicking that word.
In 2018, in Erring Shepherds, Aidan Hart gave us a vivid short history of this disaster. This could now be updated with subsequent horrific revelations of abuse in Irish schools run by Catholic religious orders, beginning in 2022, and the misgivings of Hans Zollner, papal adviser on child safeguarding, over whether Catholic bishops were even yet, in 2024, fully accountable for failure on the issue.
If it is true that most sexual abuse in Ireland is not perpetrated by clergy it is also true that those designated as leaders of the church have signally failed to provide leadership in dealing with it where it has been most horrific and outrageous – in church-supervised places where children should have been safe – a powerful factor in the collapse of social respect for the Catholic church in Ireland since 1994.
We protest especially that not even yet has it been acknowledged by the college of Catholic bishops that the revelation of this problem within the church did not begin with themselves, the ‘overseers’ – whose very symbol of office is the shepherd’s crook. Instead that revelation began (in 1985) in a society strongly influenced by a separation of church and state, by the progress of secularism and by a plurality of religious belief – the USA. Had it not been for the victims themselves, their families and legal representatives, and for civil police and courts and secular media, we could have waited forever for our own Catholic religious leaders to reveal the problem.
How can the teaching, governing and sanctifying authority of Catholic bishops survive and recover from this failure?
As an example of this continuing fear of transparency, why – despite a clear call for that by Bishop Noel Treanor in 2009 – has there never been a church-initiated study of the prevalence of abuse in Catholic-run institutions for children in Ireland – aimed at discovering the spiritual and cultural causes? How can we be confident of the safety of Catholic children in the future if we have not fully understood what went wrong in the past?
And all of this in spite of the most solemn warning of Jesus himself against any toleration of those who would spiritually harm any child. (Matt 18:6)
As we wait for the church leadership to attend to this anomaly, and to explain it, we also point to the transparency of the church’s own most sacred texts, the Bible, in recording the deepest faults of biblical figures such as King David of Israel and, later, King Ahab and the Herods. We pray that David’s compunction in admitting his murderous treatment of Uriah will overtake, without further delay, the leadership of the church in providing complete historical transparency on this unprecedented failure, as a necessary step in the progress of synodality.
We therefore welcome the strong protest by Archbishop Dermot Farrell (22-09-2024) against the culture of denial that afflicts some in the church – who speak as though the issue of abuse had been invented by external enemies, and as though the church could ‘move on’ without a thorough accounting and repentance.
This page offers a brief guide to ACI pages relating to this issue, and a list of them from the beginning. There cannot be a recovery of the church until leadership has settled to dealing thoroughly and exhaustively with the issue of abuse in all of its manifestations – and discovered how to speak openly and constructively to lay men and women – parents especially – about it.