PRESBYTERIAN ASSEMBLY:IT IS particularly shocking that vulnerable people were "brutalised under the shadow of the cross", a Dublin city minister told the Presbyterian Assembly in Belfast.
A Dublin lay member of the church also told the Assembly yesterday that an unusual outcome of the Ryan report was that it was likely to persuade more people to support the Lisbon Treaty.
The Rev Alan Boal of the Abbey Church in central Dublin said the scale and duration of the abuse revealed in the Ryan report shocked everyone, including current members of the Catholic orders involved. The findings also made it difficult for churches generally to preach Christianity.
“For all Christians on this island it is particularly shocking that some of the most vulnerable members of society were brutalised under the shadow of the cross and in the name of the crucified one,” he added.
“This has a profound effect on the victims, on their partners, on their children and grandchildren. It will, moreover, make the job of the church even more difficult as we try to preach Christ crucified to a very cynical public,” said Rev Boal. It was nothing short of an outrage that people should have abused their positions by carrying out such crimes against the most vulnerable in society and then aggravating their crimes by covering up their actions and silencing their victims, he said.
“However, it is not for this house, or any part of the Presbyterian church in Ireland, to gloat over the fact that the Roman Catholic church is here at fault. No denominational point-scoring should detract from the victims’ pain,” said Rev Boal.
He said that “much child abuse has taken place and sadly continues to take place in other institutions and in family homes”, adding that “wider society is rightly most aggrieved when the Christian church, which should be most trusted, errs in this way”.
George McCullagh from the Adelaide Road congregation in Dublin said that the report could help the Yes vote in the second Lisbon Treaty referendum.
“It does seem that something like the Ryan report will encourage people – and it gives me no pleasure to say it – to see the Lisbon Treaty as more secular than other treaties, and to that extent to turn against the church or religious-based organisations of control,” he said. “They will be more inclined to vote in the way of a more liberal treaty, which to some people is represented by the Lisbon Treaty,” he added.
He believed the Republic’s problems would have been far worse had it not been part of the EU and the euro. “To that extent people are beginning to realise that perhaps they were hasty in reacting to superficial fears in last year’s vote, and now are becoming more realistic.”
