Madam, – As we celebrated the Feast of St Patrick, how ironic that Cardinal Seán Brady and former auxiliary bishops of Dublin, who have given their lives carrying on the work of Patrick, trying to make the love of Christ a reality in the lives of people, are now being vilified and castigated for not being perfect. Christ did not choose angels to preach His Gospel, He chose frail, imperfect human beings like you and me who would and could, like you and me, make mistakes from time to time.
The same Christ one time said “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone” (John 8v7). – Yours, etc,
Madam, – The defenders of the Catholic Church’s position on childhood sexual abuse continue to attempt to use the concept of canon law to justify their actions, or in the case of Cardinal Brady, inaction. It is time that the use of canon law is seen as an attempted undermining of this State and of its laws and values.
In my work as a psychotherapist, I encounter on a daily basis, the destruction of lives that childhood sexual abuse and rape have caused. I find offensive the defence that 35 years ago we were living in different times without the knowledge of the serious consequences of child sexual abuse. I was 22 years old then and both myself and my contemporaries would have been very well aware that immediate legal action was required in relation to sexual crimes against children.
I have to question our collective mental health for allowing the Catholic Church any role whatsoever in the education of our children. If we do not take action soon, I predict a major collective guilt at our inaction in the not too distant future. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – Martin McGuinness, Sinn Féin, calls on Cardinal Brady to consider his position because of shameful deeds in the past (Home News, March17th). Pots and kettles come to mind. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – I have been following the child abuse scandals and debate in Ireland since the publications of the Murphy and Ryan reports. I can understand the anger people in Ireland are feeling about these cases, and their calls for the resignation of individuals within the Catholic Church. However, there has been a serious failure in these debates and by politicians to search for a preventative to child abuse, which is continuing in Ireland regardless of the resignations and the imprisonments.
One has to realise that child abuse will continue to occur in society unless it is treated as sickness more so than a crime. The perpetrators of child abuse are quite often normal people and are accepted as ordinary people in the community until their acts are discovered. The majority of the perpetrators are normal people, but with a sickness that leads them to have abnormal sexual desires. The majority of perpetrators are well aware that what they are doing is wrong and damaging to the victims, but they do not know how to manage their sickness and are only giving in to their own desires – and giving into sexual temptation is something everybody is guilty of.
The problem of clerical sex abuse is again coming to public attention here in Germany, and like Ireland, the perpetrators and their accommodators are being called to justice. However, there is also much debate about finding preventatives to child abuse, and there is the realisation that this problem needs to be treated more as a sickness rather than a crime, if a solution is to be discovered. For example, recently the Charite Hospital in Berlin established a support group for potential child abuse offenders. The hospital invited people to the support group who felt that they might have sexual feelings towards children. The hospital originally planned for a small number of participants for the support group, but was overwhelmed when a large number of people from all over the country applied to join. These people recognised their problem and willingly sought help when assistance was offered to them. The hospital can now provide support to these people and at the same time conduct research to provide a preventative.
In the towns and villages across Ireland, when an individual realises that he/she has such feeling for children, who does he/she turn to for advice? There has already been talk about compensation to child abuse victims in the range of €100 million to €200 million, and at a cost of billions to the taxpayer. I suggest a percentage of that money be put to establish pilot projects across Ireland to try to deal seriously with the illness of child abuse and to help find a preventative. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – When or if we, by sheer force of numbers, eject Cardinal Brady into ignominy by our relentless clamour, roused, amplified and delivered by the media, some of the more old-fashioned of us may later begin to reflect on whether the stiff formalities of justice and tedious niceties of fair play were given sufficient respect.
Overtaken by that mature reflection and seeking to ease those pricks of conscience by examining again the grounds on which we pronounced judgment, where better to look than in the archives of “the paper of record”? Unfortunately, having searched your pages over the three days of the clamour so far, I can find no answer to certain vital questions of fact.
Could one of your reporters put before us all of the salient facts? Not by slippery implication nor tendentious circumlocution, but in concise, specific terms, what is the offence, or offences, of which he, the Cardinal, Primate of All Ireland, Archbishop of Armagh or Seán Brady the man, is guilty? What is the evidence on which a judgment can be made of whether he is guilty or innocent of that or those specific offence or offences? Who made known to Fr Brady’s superiors that Brendan Smyth had abused the two children whose examination was then assigned to him? Had that person or persons already reported the crime to the police? If not, why has your finger of blame for such failure been transferred entirely to those to whom he, she or they gave the information?
Given the reportedly widespread abuse of children tainting every diocese and the therefore large number of canonical processes similar to that conducted by Fr Brady, will you give us an exposé of all the clerics involved (irrespective of any subsequent elevation within the hierarchy – presumably of no relevance to the question of guilt) and the extent of their failure to inform the police, assuming that their own informants had not already done so? Will you include the secular lawyers, doctors and other professionals who undoubtedly were sometimes made aware of the abuse of children?
If it is a legal fact that such failure to report is a “misprision of felony”, why do you encourage us, the rabble, to prosecute this crime when we are paying for an expensive prosecution, courts and penal system for that purpose? There are many such questions, but you will know them without my prompting if you are interested in protecting all the “children of the nation” in the true sense in which that term was used in the 1916 Proclamation. – Yours, etc,