THE GRANADA Institute has welcomed the findings of the Murphy report and said no priest found to have abused a child should ever return to pastoral duties.
“Current practice dictates that in the case of a priest we would recommend that the priest be removed from ministry on a permanent basis, that he does not have any unsupervised contact with children or vulnerable adults and that he undergo an appropriate course of psychotherapeutic treatment,” Dr Joseph Duffy, director of clinical services at the Granada Institute – a sex offender treatment clinic in Dublin – said yesterday.
The Granada Institute was set up in 1994 by the Hospitaller Order of St John of God to treat child sex abusers. It has worked with 1,800 clients since its inception. About 20 per cent of the current clients at the clinic are diocesan priests or members of religious congregations.
Dr Duffy was responding to concerns raised in the Murphy report regarding the Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin about occasions in the past where the institute had recommended that clergy accused of child abuse could resume pastoral duties.
“While the commission recognises that some form of work may indeed be of help in rehabilitating sexual offenders, it is concerned that any form of pastoral work will almost inevitable include contact with children,” said the report.
“There is also the fact that a priest is still a priest, and by his very status, if he wishes to commit child sexual abuse, he will find it easier to do so than if he were a layman,” it concluded.
The institute, which treated 26 of the priests accused of child abuse in the report, told the commission that in all cases where it recommended a limited form of ministry, its clinical judgment was that the priest in question was “low risk”.
In a statement to The Irish Times, Dr Duffy said that if a priest had abused a child, it wouldn't be appropriate for him to resume pastoral duties.
Many of the findings in the report related to recommendations made up to 15 years ago, and the institute called for the full implementation of the Murphy report’s findings, he added.
The report criticised the archdiocese of Dublin for failing to provide full information to treatment facilities such as Granada about priests’ histories when they were referred for assessment.
“This inevitably resulted in useless reports. Nevertheless, these reports were sometimes used as an excuse to allow priests back to unsupervised ministries,” it says.
Dr Duffy said yesterday best practice dictated that assessment reports are developed with full collateral information.
The commission also found that an assessment report compiled by the Granada Institute on Fr Terentius – a member of a religious order in the archdiocese of Dublin who faced multiple allegations of abuse – was “seriously deficient”.
In this case the commission praises the actions of the church authorities for referring Fr Terentius to the institute for an assessment when allegations of abuse were made.
But it notes the report by the institute stated that two allegations of sexual abuse were made but that he had not admitted to any others. This was untrue, says the commission, which notes that Fr Terentius had admitted to several incidents involving six boys to his therapist.
The commission also notes Granada’s assessment report stated that the boys were aged 17 at the time. In fact, they were aged 13/14, it concludes.