If possible the evidence is even more damning. The accounts of rape, assault and beatings are familiar but almost worse — because cooler, more institutional, more deliberate — is the detail of the cover-up.

To quote the report, the archdiocese remained wedded to “the maintenance of secrecy, the avoidance of scandal, the protection of the Church and the preservation of its assets”. Right up to 2004, priestly sex offenders were quietly moved to new parishes, even promoted. Victims were told to keep silent. Archbishops held back files; the Papal Nuncio and the Vatican showed no inclination to throw open the records: a “studied silence” met requests for additional information. The pattern follows earlier investigations in the US and Australia; as one victim there said, cover-up “was a policy, a system, it was throughout the Church . . . it’s not just rogue elements”. In Ireland the gardai are now huffing about possible legal action, but their own inattention and deference to the clergy is also bitterly criticised in the report.

This is not old stuff from the era of Angela’s Ashes.

For seven years till 1995, Cardinal Desmond Connell, then Archbishop of Dublin, kept incriminating documents locked in a secret vault, detailing abuses by seventeen priests....

Read the whole article.

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1. Simon Icke wrote: http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2009/1127/1224259545384.html This report is very detailed and upsetting, I suggest you don’t read it, if the details of these appalling crimes against children are too much to bear. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for the good people to do nothing. edmund burke. December 1, 4:38 pm | [comment link]

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