Madam, - Some years ago, when the clerical child abuse scandal began to break, you published a letter from me advocating that all clerics in posts of public office should be accountable to the State. I suggested that clerical managers of school boards and members of school, college, hospital, nursing home and hospital boards should be interviewed for their posts by a lay body, vetted and required to submit the names of independent referees.
I am well aware that this would not stop abuse. It would, however, change attitudes and lay down a basis for democratic accountability. (I received several abusive letters at the time, as well as offers to pray for my soul and an invitation to attend a retreat.)
The Ferns report now convinces me that all Roman Catholic clerical members of school and college boards of management, including chairs of school boards, should resign forthwith from office. This would be a fitting gesture of sorrow and repentance for what has been done in their name. Furthermore, no priest should accept office in education management for a period of 10 years.
During this time, a full State enquiry should be held into abuse in all of the Irish dioceses and parishes. Programmes of training and induction should be set up for managers and board members, mentored by experienced educators and parents.
I write as an educator of many years' standing, but also as someone who recently learned to my horror of the ecclesiastical abuse of several people near and dear to me in childhood. These people are now in late middle age. They have carried their sorrow and their secret traumas throughout their lives. Nothing can compensate them for their anguish and their sense of failure and of having been failed. We do not have to go to church. Our children are compelled by State law to attend school.
The Irish State and the Irish Catholic community have been and remain complicit with the Catholic Church authorities in these tragic and appalling matters. Many local communities are still riddled with hypocrisy, sentimentality and toadyism to priestly office. As I write, a priest on RTÉ is recounting how heartened he was because a parishoner left a bunch of flowers on his doorstep, with a note "Thinking of you today". My abused acquaintances, and those brave people who first tried to blow the whistle, have never received any such bouquets.
Only the subjection of all of its citizens, including cardinals, archbishops, bishops and priests, to the laws of a democratic and accountable society, irrespective of the claims of the Vatican, can begin safeguarding all of us. We do not yet have adequate laws and processes in place, but we have made a start. Let us continue this process, for the sake of those abused in the past and present and to safeguard our children's precious future. - Yours, etc,
Dr MARY C. KING, Ballyduff, Ashford, Co Wicklow.
Madam, - You are quite wrong to suggest that blame is a poor response to the scandal of sex abuse by Catholic priests (Editorial, October 26th). The apportionment of blame is precisely the correct response, given that it has been so lacking to date. Indeed, for so long, the abused were the ones blamed by the church - and often by those closest to them - for the abuse they suffered.
Yes, the Irish Catholic Hierarchy should be hanging its collective head in shame. However, it is a further scandal that not one of its senior clerics has been put behind bars, where they belong, for ignoring what went on under their collective nose.
When I look back on my upbringing and think of the fire and brimstone sermons from parish priests upbraiding my fellow congregants and I for our moral failings, the anger wells up inside me. As Irish children, we were taught to respect the priest above all others, and all the while lecherous, lascivious brutes in black and white prowled parishes in search of their next victim, as bishops turned a blind eye.
Oh, there is a need for blame all right - and the Ferns report should be just the start. - Yours, etc,
FERGAL QUINN, Richmond, Surrey, England.
Madam, - Bishop Eamon Walsh, Apostolic Administrator of Ferns, is considering a day of atonement for the horrors of the past. Perhaps the College of Cardinals too should consider atonement and change. Will this report, like so many others, be ignored by Rome?
The destruction of innocent lives forever by paedophiles protected by the church is not forgiven by pleas for forgiveness. Forgiveness can be given only when change is affected and the medieval notions and culture of the church are once and for all left in the past.
The time for verbosity is at an end and action within our society is required to ensure that we never allow such widespread and endemic abuse to continue with impunity. - Yours, etc,
DEIRDRE COSTELLO, Lower Kilmacud Road, Stillorgan, Co Dublin.