CATHOLIC PRIMATE Cardinal Seán Brady last night defended his actions in a further case of alleged clerical sex abuse involving two young women.
In a statement prompted by a UTV report, details have been provided on the cardinal’s handling of allegations made in 2001 by two young women against a priest in Armagh diocese.
There was sufficient evidence to charge the priest in relation to one of the women but not the other.
This latter woman told UTV she was abused by the priest in 1997, when she was 17, and again in 1998. The priest warned her not to tell anyone but in 1998 she informed her school. She alleges that when the priest found out he raped her.
The priest was acquitted by the courts in Northern Ireland following a trial on one charge arising from the allegations made by the first woman.
However, he still remains suspended from ministry and is forbidden to wear clerical attire.
The statement says: “The day following the police interview, Cardinal Brady suspended [Fr X] from ministry as a priest, forbidding him to say Mass publicly, to hear confessions and to have unsupervised access to minors.” It adds: “Following [Fr X’s] acquittal, Cardinal Brady met him again and reinforced that [Fr X] remained suspended on the same terms, in spite of having been acquitted by the court.”
After the priest’s acquittal one of his complainants, the woman on behalf of whom no prosecution was brought, sought compensation from the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board and, separately, from [Fr X] and Cardinal Brady. She settled with the priest for £45,000 and then withdrew her action against Cardinal Brady and the compensation board.
In a separate development, Bishop of Derry Séamus Hegarty said last night that the confidentiality aspect of an out-of-court settlement agreed with a woman and her alleged priest abuser there, was not at the diocese’s instigation. Nor did the diocese contribute to the £12,000 settlement.
Yesterday’s Belfast Telegraph reported that the woman said she had been abused by a priest of Derry diocese from 1979, when she was eight. She told her parents on her 18th birthday. She claimed she was bound to secrecy in a legal deal involving Bishop Hegarty.
Meanwhile, Archbishop of Cashel Dermot Clifford has silenced former professor of canon law Msgr Maurice Dooley and apologised for any distress Msgr Dooley’s recent claims may have caused. Msgr Dooley said it was neither a crime nor a sin against God’s law for clergy not to report child sex abuse to gardaí.
Archbishop Clifford insisted that opinions expressed by Msgr Dooley were “his own personal views” and “do not represent the policy or the practice of the Catholic Church in Ireland today concerning the reporting of allegations of abuse to the civil authorities, North and South.” That practice was “to report all allegations to the statutory authorities”.