Here is the article I was referencing:
Therapy led to soaring abuse rate in Irish Church
The Church in Ireland has been embroiled by sex abuse scandals since last Summer. Just this week, in fact, Cardinal Sean Brady has been under intense pressure to resign after it was revealed that he did not inform police about the abuse of children by one of Ireland’s most notorious child abusers, Fr Brendan Smyth.
Of course, the Church has actually been rocked by these scandals since the mid-1990s, but the publication of two official reports investigating abuse by priests and religious have been published since last summer and as a result the saga of clerical sex abuse has rarely been out of the Irish headlines since then.
The first report – the Ryan report – investigated abuse in mainly Church-run institutions for children. The second – the Murphy report – detailed abuse by clergy in the Dublin archdiocese.
These documents revealed little that was new. It was the sheer detail they contained that made them so shocking.
To judge from the Murphy report, child abuse by clergy peaked in Dublin in the 1970s and 1980s. Allegations of abuse were disastrously mishandled by the Dublin archdiocese up until roughly the mid-1990s after which time diocesan authorities finally began to deal with allegations properly.
The Catholic Church in Ireland now operates arguably the most robust child protection system in the country, something that is rarely acknowledged. The public still appears to believe that the Church has learned nothing, and done nothing. This is simply not true.
The search for the causes of clerical sex abuse has been ongoing. The male-only priesthood has been blamed. The hierarchical structure has been blamed. Clericalism has (rightly) been blamed. A desire to protect the reputation of the institution has (rightly) been blamed.
But two of the chief culprits are held to be canon law and the rule of celibacy.
Canon law, or Church law, has been blamed for forcing bishops to cover up the allegations, to hide them, and certainly it is true that anyone taking part in a canonical investigation is required to swear an oath of secrecy, or confidentiality.
But the Murphy report itself is very interesting about canon law. It points out that a big problem with this law isn’t that it was used, but that it wasn’t used.
It says: “The Church authorities failed to implement most of their own canon law rules on dealing with child sex abuse…canon law appears to have fallen into disuse and disrespect during the mid 20th century. In particular, there was little or no experience of operating the penal (that is, the criminal) provision of that law… for many years offenders were neither prosecuted nor made accountable within the Church.”
Why did it fall into disuse and disrespect? It was because priests and bishops began to regard it as being overly legalistic and too focused on punishment. They decided it lacked compassion.
Therefore, they stopped using it. No longer did priests accused of child abuse face a canonical trial and the possibility of “defrocking”.
Instead, and with disastrous consequences, they were sent for therapy and then, “cured”, they were reassigned to ministry.
The bottom line is that if canon law had been used properly, fewer children would have been abused. Civil authorities would still not have been informed, but priests found guilty of child abuse under Church law would have been punished and likely removed from ministry making it more difficult for them to offend again.
What about the rule of celibacy? The Murphy report doesn’t comment on this because it is outside its competence. But apparently it is not outside the competence of any number of commentators who like to point the finger straight at this rule and blame the paedophile scandals on it, in part at least.
They claim that the ‘thwarting’ of normal sexual desire is bound to end in the perverting of desire, that in some cases it will be misdirected into desire for children.
This is a big claim for which there should be big evidence because if it is not true, then it is an appalling smear that affects not just celibate priests, but anyone who is celibate, whether that be voluntary or involuntary.
If celibacy is really so dangerous, should we, for example, prevent celibates from being anywhere near young children as one former government minister here in Ireland once suggested? How many lay teachers would that affect?
In fact, no evidence has ever been advanced to show that celibates who look after children are more likely to be abusers than non-celibates who look after children.
What we do know is that while children have been abused in Catholic-run institutions, they have also been abused in institutions run by other Churches, in State-run institutions, in institutions run by other bodies, and of course, in their own homes as well.
A great deal of the coverage attaching to the issue of child abuse by Catholic clergy is undoubtedly motivated by animus towards the Catholic Church itself because abuse by other organisations rarely receives such coverage.
This animus is motivated by rules and beliefs many outsiders find incomprehensible and grotesque, for example, the celibacy rule.
But unless evidence can be found to prove that there is something about Catholicism itself which produces abuse on a scale found in no other institution that cares for children, then we will have to assume this animus is, in fact, a prejudice and treat it as such.
David Quinn is a columnist for The Irish Independent, and a writer on religious and social affairs
timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article7068604.ece?token=null&offset=12&page=2
But thus far the shifting of blame to health professionals seems unwarranted. I am not so partisan to my old career that I would deny such culpability if it were supported by evidence, any more than I am so partisan to my faith that I cannot see how the institutional church (as opposed to the church that is the mystical body of Christ) has let us down here. Like I said, there’s plenty of blame to go round.