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The Clerical Child Abuse Thread (merged)
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You know I don't think we have, I've met Catholics who have said that what happened in the past should stay in the past and people are only looking for money.
Ok, not many, but its deeply worrying to speak to anyone that thinks this. It also mirrors what Vatican representatives were saying to victims a few years back "you're only in it for the money!"
Absolutely, and this is the point I'm making : it's not in the past, because (for example) Ian Elliott is saying that his attempts to bring in robust child protection procedures were actively resisted by the bishops, to the extent that if he were to start over he would refuse to participate at all. So they are still not interested in preventing abuse, but only want to use people like him as cover, to "fix" their public image instead of fixing the problem of abuse.
So at what stage do the rest of us stop giving the benefit of the doubt to people who still defend the church after all this, and start considering them the same way we would for anyone else who continues defending the innocence of a child abuser long after his guilt has become clear to everyone else?
I think I'm stopping now. To my mind, anyone who is still a practising Catholic after the most recent revelations by the diocese of Pennsylvania and the comments by Ian Elliott about the church in Ireland is like someone who supports the mafia as being decent folk really.0 -
Mod Note:in case this appears like a break in continuity because this question has come on this thread and its predecessors a bit, the post below was moved and merged to this thread.
Why is there no one being arrested and put on trial in Ireland for covering up sexual abuse ?
It's not as if those in political power in Ireland are pro Catholic Church anymore, quite the opposite in fact.
Concealing a crime is a criminal offence to the best of my knowledge.
Why, if there was so much abuse covered up and evidence is available (or can be obtained with warrants if needs be) to show they covered it up, are these people not being arrested, charged, and put on trial ? If found guilty they can be sentenced, if found innocent they can be cleared.
Ireland is capable of holding fair trials and serving justice, so why are the authorities not doing so ?
The crimes are genuinely suspected, so why are the police not taking in bishops and questing them ? and if found guilty in a court of law, they can and should be imprisoned like anyone else.
Now that the government and authorities are no longer pro Catholic Church, I don't understand why they are not taking at lease some of these people to trial ?
Surely that is what real justice is ?0 -
Respectfully, why was this post moved and buried in a mega thread, when other posts / threads that could easily be moved to a mega thread according to the charter are not ?0
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The laws on mandatory reporting of child abuse are quite recent - three or four years? - and are not retrospective. (You can't retrospectively criminalise and punish an act or omission which wasn't a crime when it was done.) So it's only possible to prosecute recent cases of concealment. And I don't know that there have been any of those.0
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Peregrinus wrote: »The laws on mandatory reporting of child abuse are quite recent - three or four years? - and are not retrospective. (You can't retrospectively criminalise and punish an act or omission which wasn't a crime when it was done.) So it's only possible to prosecute recent cases of concealment. And I don't know that there have been any of those.
Concealing criminal activity and attempting to pervert the course of justice is a crime, and plenty of recent evidence has come to light.
So, I'm not buying your excuses for the state not even attempting a single arrest, questioning, warrant, or trial, never mind a conviction, in any of the thousands of cases of abuse that have been covered up by Church management in Ireland.
I'm certainly not buying the excuse that not even a single case of the many instances of covering up and concealing the crimes meets the requirements for police investigation, further questioning under caution, search warrants and/or trial by the authorities.0 -
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Failure to report a crime is not generally a crime in Ireland (or indeed in most countries); if it were, we wouldn't need legislation for the mandatory reporting of child abuse.Irish Kings wrote: »Concealing criminal activity and attempting to pervert the course of justice is a crime, and plenty of recent evidence has come to light.
So, I'm not buying your excuses for the state not even attempting a single arrest, questioning, warrant, or trial, never mind a conviction, in any of the thousands of cases of abuse that have been covered up by Church management in Ireland.
I'm certainly not buying the excuse that not even a single case of the many instances of covering up and concealing the crimes meets the requirements for police investigation, further questioning under caution, search warrants and/or trial by the authorities.
Conspiracy to pervert the course of justice is a crime, but simple failure to report a crime does not constitute conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.
I understand your strong feelings here, and I am the last to defend the systematically appalling failings of the Catholic church in dealing with this issue. But I don't think we can criticise the state for not prosecuting bishops for failure to report without all examining what legal obligation the bishops had to report in the first place. However appalling their behaviour may have been, if it wasn't a crime, they can't be prosecuted for it.0 -
Peregrinus wrote: »
Conspiracy to pervert the course of justice is a crime, but simple failure to report a crime does not constitute conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.
However appalling their behaviour may have been, if it wasn't a crime, they can't be prosecuted for it.
So are you really trying to claim, that not a single Bishop involved in any of the many cover ups in Ireland was not attempting to pervert the course of justice in even just one of the cases ? . . .and therefore not a single one of them has committed any crime according to Irish law ?
Yeah right . . .Pull the other one . . . I'm not buying it.0 -
No, I'm not trying to claim that. I'm saying (a) I can't point to a bishop who was doing that, and (b) neither can you. In which case, criticism of the state for not prosecuting the hypothetical bishop is a bit premature.Irish Kings wrote: »So are you really trying to claim, that not a single Bishop involved in any of the many cover ups in Ireland was not attempting to pervert the course of justice in even just one of the cases ? . . .and therefore not a single one of them has committed any crime according to Irish law ?0 -
Peregrinus wrote: »No, I'm not trying to claim that. I'm saying (a) I can't point to a bishop who was doing that, and (b) neither can you. In which case, criticism of the state for not prosecuting the hypothetical bishop is a bit premature.
There was the matter of how the law of misprision (failure to report a crime) was removed, supposedly to be updated, just as the first cases of abuse and subsequent cover up were coming to light, and mysteriously no replacement law was ever brought forward.
With the result that whereas Fr Sean Brady could, in the past, have been charged with misprision, and presumably in an updated law, with some sort of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, suddenly there was no law governing his actions at all.0 -
Misprision of felony has been abolished in most common-law jurisdictions, and before its abolition it was generally regarded as obsolete. Ireland was pretty much at the tail-end of the law reform process that included the abolition of this crime; it would be a mistake, I think, to see this an attempt to relieve the church of the consequences of its handing of child sexual abuse.
Even before it was abolished, it was very rarely prosecuted; part of the reason for this is because it was impossibly wide. (If you're thinking of prosecuting the bishop for not reporting an incidence of sex abuse that is made known to him, are you also thinking of prosecuting the victim? The victim's parents? Any medics who examined or treated the victim, knowing of the circumstances? They are all as guilty of misprision as the bishop is.)
When the offence was abolished, which happened in various countries between the 1960s and 1990s, crimes going unreported was generally not seen as a huge problem, and certainly not a problem that required the criminal law to resolve it. Perhaps it should have been, but it wasn't.
The other crime that, we now know, is commonly massively underreported is rape/sexual assault of an adult. We haven't tackled this by either reviving misprision of felony or introducing more focussed reporting requirements. It's probably outside the scope of this thread to discuss whether we should be doing something like that.
None of this is to excuse the bishops. But our inability to prosecute them isn't their fault; it's ours. We fostered a culture in which abusive crimes by (mostly) men against (mostly) women and children went unreported, thus contributing to a sense on the part of the men concerned that they were entitled/protected/could get away with it. And of course for a long time they mostly did get away with it. We have now introduced reporting requirements with respect to crimes against children. It remains to be seen how much difference that will make, but it's certainly a step in the right direction. We are no longer complicit - at least in this respect - in the creation of a culture which says that such crimes don't really matter.
But there's not much we can do about historic failure to report. That wasn't a crime because we didn't recognise the need to make it a crime.0 -
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Wrt Reporting crimes against children : have we? What happens if a priest hears a confession by an abuser or by someone who knows of abuse and hasn't themselves reported it? Does the priest have to report that?0
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Wrt Reporting crimes against children : have we? What happens if a priest hears a confession by an abuser or by someone who knows of abuse and hasn't themselves reported it? Does the priest have to report that?
I believe that's been answered in the past relevant and relevance to the sexual abuse of children here, that as the admission/s were made to the priest during confession, under the sanctity of religious confession, that nothing was done generally in respect of bringing any charges against any such confessor-priest. That's on the basis of the Civil legal world recognizing the existence of the Religious legal world which "allegedly" owed it's obligations to a higher authority.
I used the word "allegedly" because I have no doubt that being human, offending priests took advantage of the religious confessional system to get away with their criminal actions, knowing the confessor-priest could say nothing to anyone about the criminal acts and deeds that were confessed-to.
That's the rub, the confessor-priest has/had to accept the validity of the confessions at face value without any doubt and that the criminal-act priests used the confession-box to go on raping children after absolution. The only thing that might affect the offenders would be their own consciences.
I do not know if those who decide on the bringing of criminal charges against the confessor-priest/s continue to take cognizance of the higher authority or recognize the faults in the higher authority system whereby those who actually carried out the offences against children escape any sanction whatsoever, in the knowledge that the Civil legal world recognized that separate legal world and chose not to take offenders to task.
Other priests, outside the sanctity of the confession and NOT being a priest who had taken the confession of an offender-priest, when faced by children who were abused and raped chose to call them liars without any bother or questioning of the priest concerned. I have no problem with identifying that class of priests, regardless of their position within the/any church, as being criminal by personal choice.0 -
Irish Kings wrote: »Mod Note:in case this appears like a break in continuity because this question has come on this thread and its predecessors a bit, the post below was moved and merged to this thread.
Why is there no one being arrested and put on trial in Ireland for covering up sexual abuse ?
It's not as if those in political power in Ireland are pro Catholic Church anymore, quite the opposite in fact.
Concealing a crime is a criminal offence to the best of my knowledge.
Why, if there was so much abuse covered up and evidence is available (or can be obtained with warrants if needs be) to show they covered it up, are these people not being arrested, charged, and put on trial ? If found guilty they can be sentenced, if found innocent they can be cleared.
Ireland is capable of holding fair trials and serving justice, so why are the authorities not doing so ?
The crimes are genuinely suspected, so why are the police not taking in bishops and questing them ? and if found guilty in a court of law, they can and should be imprisoned like anyone else.
Now that the government and authorities are no longer pro Catholic Church, I don't understand why they are not taking at lease some of these people to trial ?
Surely that is what real justice is ?
I think we can safely say that the authorities were to some extent responsible for allowing the church and their nest of peodo's to have free reign on the nations children and may fear what trials or tribunals could reveal.0 -
Peregrinus wrote: »No, I'm not trying to claim that. I'm saying (a) I can't point to a bishop who was doing that, and (b) neither can you. In which case, criticism of the state for not prosecuting the hypothetical bishop is a bit premature.
Utter Rubbish, the media and politicians are well able to point to such cases all day long, and have being doing so since the 90's at least.
New reports of cover ups are coming out regularly.
We've had legions of evidence provided to us by our media and politicians that these bishops covered up criminal activity. Yet the state refuses to even arrest a single one of them for further questioning or issue a single search warrant against their offices. The only organisation that can administer justice in Ireland for the victims of crime is the state, and they are failing abysmally and getting away Scott free along with said bishops.0 -
Irish Kings wrote: »Utter Rubbish, the media and politicians are well able to point to such cases all day long, and have being doing so since the 90's at least.
New reports of cover ups are coming out regularly.
We've had legions of evidence provided to us by our media and politicians that these bishops covered up criminal activity. Yet the state refuses to even arrest a single one of them for further questioning or issue a single search warrant against their offices. The only organisation that can administer justice in Ireland for the victims of crime is the state, and they are failing abysmally and getting away Scott free along with said bishops.
What about dat Cardinal fella that was the leader, Brady or Connell?? One of them lads took notes on Poedo Brendan Smith from a young boy who was abused and swore him to secrecy. Smith went on to rape many more children.
I think his defence was he passed the info up to his then leaders and put it out of his mined.
Could he not be charged wit some crime? If he's stil alive?
Personally speaking I'd be satisfied with an old stye "biblical stoning".0 -
Short answer: Yes, he does.Wrt Reporting crimes against children : have we? What happens if a priest hears a confession by an abuser or by someone who knows of abuse and hasn't themselves reported it? Does the priest have to report that?
Slightly longer answer: Since 2017, a "mandated person" who knows or has reasonable grounds to suspect, on the basis of information received in the course of their employment/profession, that a child has been harmed/is being harmed/is at risk of being harmed must report their knowledge/suspicion to the Child and Family Agency.
"Harm" includes sexual abuse, and "sexual abuse" includes all the stuff you might expect - underage sex, child pornography, etc, etc.
"Mandated person" includes a range of professions, one being member of the clergy or pastoral care worker of a church or other religious community.
There is no exception in the legislation in relation to information received, or suspicions formed, in confession. They are subject to the same reporting requirement as any other knowledge or suspicion.
Further point: this obligation applies not only where the priest learns of the abuse from the abuser, or from a third party who knows about the abuse; it also applies where the priest learns about the abuse from the victim.
Further further point: The obligation doesn't apply to information received/suspicions formed before 11 Decenber 2017, when the law was brought into force. But it does apply to information received/suspicions formed after that date about abuse which occurred before that date. So if you're a mandated person and an adult tells you that, years ago, as a child, he was harmed, you must report this.
Final point: There's an obvious issue with enforcement of this obligation in the context of the confessional. If I confess to you that I have harmed a child, the only people who can prove that I confessed this to you are me and you. I'm not likely to be keen to give evidence about my confession, for obvious reasons, and nor are you, for equally obvious reasons. In practice, it's very unlikely the authorities would ever know that I confessed this to you, never mind be in a position to prove it. So I think prosecutions of priests who "respect the seal of the confessional" rather than reporting abuse are going to be vanishingly rare.
Which is not to say that the requirement doesn't have a value in terms of the statement it makes, the signal it sends. But we'd be unwise to place to much reliance on it as an effective enforceable child protection measure.0 -
In which case, you should be able to;Irish Kings wrote: »Utter Rubbish, the media and politicians are well able to point to such cases all day long, and have being doing so since the 90's at least.
New reports of cover ups are coming out regularly.
We've had legions of evidence provided to us by our media and politicians that these bishops covered up criminal activity. Yet the state refuses to even arrest a single one of them for further questioning or issue a single search warrant against their offices. The only organisation that can administer justice in Ireland for the victims of crime is the state, and they are failing abysmally and getting away Scott free along with said bishops.
(a) name the bishop;
(b) name the offence he committed;
(c) identify the elements of the offence; and
(d) point to the evidence which proves each element of the offence.0 -
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Peregrinus wrote: »In which case, you should be able to;
(a) name the bishop;
(b) name the offence he committed;
(c) identify the elements of the offence; and
(d) point to the evidence which proves each element of the offence.
(a) name the bishop;
Cardinal Sean Brady
(b) name the offence he committed;
He interviewed 2 abused children and immediately swore them to secrecy. To break the vow would lead to excommunication from the Catholic Church. The children understood this to mean they would go to hell.
He did not tell the parents. He did not tell the Gardaí.
One of the teenagers, Brendan Boland, had been abused for two years. He told the inquiry about the other young victim, who was then interviewed alone. He also gave the names and addresses of five other children at serious risk from Smyth. A BBC documentary in 2012, The Shame of the Catholic Church, tracked those children down. Their parents were never informed. They were never warned. No one was. The consequence of this inaction was that two of those children continued to be abused by that monster for years. Smyth also began abusing one boy’s little sister and two of his cousins. The family was destroyed.
Cardinal Brady has defended his actions, saying his inquiry recommended Smyth’s removal from priestly duty, but this didn’t happen. Instead, Smyth was given carte blanche to abuse children, on two continents, for another two decades. One of his US victims, lawyer Helen McGonigle, was aged six when Smyth raped and sodomised her. He also abused her sister, Kathleen. She committed suicide in 2005, unable to live any longer with what she had suffered. Throughout all of those years, the 20 years that Smyth was free to defile countless children, and his subsequent arrest and imprisonment, Cardinal Brady never breathed a word of what he knew. He kept silent.
From 1975 to 1995, as Sean Brady rose through the ranks in the Catholic Church hierarchy, Brendan Smyth continued to rape and abuse children.
(c) identify the elements of the offence;
He facilitated a known paedophile. A monster. He did nothing to stop him. He turned a blind eye. He towed the line to ensure he would continue climbing the ladder of power.
He never told any of the parents.
If Brady had acted, an estimated 200+ children would not been raped or molested.
(d) point to the evidence which proves each element of the offence
Brady himself admitted to believing the children he swore to secrecy. He apologised for his inaction.
The oath he forced those children to sign;"I will never directly or indirectly, by means of a nod, or of a word, by writing, or in any other way, and under whatever type of pretext, even for the most urgent and most serious cause (even) for the purpose of a greater good, commit anything against this fidelity to the secret, unless a...dispensation has been expressly given to me by the Supreme Pontiff."
Now tell me why Brady did not resign or did not go to prison?0 -
Sycamore Tree wrote: »Now tell me why Brady did not resign or did not go to prison?
I genuinely do not know.
But then I have no idea why people still go to Mass to be lectured to by priests on a Sunday, nor why any[/i, never mind many, are going to turn up and treat Francis like a rock star, so maybe I'm missing something.0 -
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You’ve told me what Brady did, but you haven’t named the offence that Brady committed, and you haven’t shown that what Brady did constitutes that offence. Are you saying, for example, that what Brady did constitutes perverting the course of justice? If so, you need to identify the elements of that offence of perverting the course of justice, and show that Brady’s conduct includes all the elements of the offence. If you can’t do that, that explains why Brady hasn’t been prosecuted.
Brady’s conduct may have been disgusting, but you can’t be prosecuted for being disgusting. Only for an offence, all of whose elements you can be proven to have committed.0 -
Peregrinus wrote: »You’ve told me what Brady did, but you haven’t named the offence that Brady committed, and you haven’t shown that what Brady did constitutes that offence. Are you saying, for example, that what Brady did constitutes perverting the course of justice? If so, you need to identify the elements of that offence of perverting the course of justice, and show that Brady’s conduct includes all the elements of the offence. If you can’t do that, that explains why Brady hasn’t been prosecuted.
Brady’s conduct may have been disgusting, but you can’t be prosecuted for being disgusting. Only for an offence, all of whose elements you can be proven to have committed.
How about a crime against humanity, and toss in a crime against his God as well just to ensure he'd face both civil and canonical trials as well: wilful intent to fail in his duty of care to both the humans put in his care under God, and to his obligations to his God?
With the contempt he treated others to he clearly has no understanding of humanity or conscience or obligation to other humans, swayed to an alternative lifestyle by his understanding of the creed-book he swallowed.
Being Christian, I can only hope that he wakes up, admits his crimes against humanity and his God before he faces that God to explain his deeds in the afterlife he supposedly believes in. I'll leave him to that justice.0 -
Peregrinus wrote: »You’ve told me what Brady did, but you haven’t named the offence that Brady committed, and you haven’t shown that what Brady did constitutes that offence. Are you saying, for example, that what Brady did constitutes perverting the course of justice? If so, you need to identify the elements of that offence of perverting the course of justice, and show that Brady’s conduct includes all the elements of the offence. If you can’t do that, that explains why Brady hasn’t been prosecuted.
Brady’s conduct may have been disgusting, but you can’t be prosecuted for being disgusting. Only for an offence, all of whose elements you can be proven to have committed.
Although of course none of that even begins to explain how a man who made a very successful career out of the study of good and evil can have failed so utterly to identify what the right thing to do in such a case was.
I'd bet plenty of petty criminals have a surer notion of right and wrong than Cardinal Brady seems to.0 -
Peregrinus wrote: »In which case, you should be able to;
(a) name the bishop;
(b) name the offence he committed;
(c) identify the elements of the offence; and
(d) point to the evidence which proves each element of the offence.
Any one of the many hundreds of news articles and reports about any Irish Bishop that resigned in the last 10 years due to the scandals has all that information and far more.
So why not a single Bishop questioned under caution ?
Why not a single search warrant issued for their files and offices ?
Why not a single file refereed to the DPP for consideration ?
The Church and / or State apologists, bluffers and deflectors are just as bad and are all aiders and abettors in this huge national disgrace.
Why are the golden circle and their cronies and lackeys all so terrified of a case getting an open public hearing and being properly trialed in proper legal court of law and the victims getting basic J U S T I C E ?0 -
Actual crime known to Irish criminal law is what we need here, Aloysius. "Crimes against humanity" and "crimes against God" can't be prosecuted in Irish courts.aloyisious wrote: »How about a crime against humanity, and toss in a crime against his God as well just to ensure he'd face both civil and canonical trials as well: wilful intent to fail in his duty of care to both the humans put in his care under God, and to his obligations to his God?
I'm certainly not defending Brady here; far from it. I'm addressing the question if why he hasn't been prosecuted. He can't be prosecuted unless we can point to a prosecutable offence that he is known to have committed. If I'm defending anyone from criticism, its the guards/the DPP.0 -
Peregrinus wrote: »Actual crime known to Irish criminal law is what we need here, Aloysius. "Crimes against humanity" and "crimes against God" can't be prosecuted in Irish courts.
I'm certainly not defending Brady here; far from it. I'm addressing the question if why he hasn't been prosecuted. He can't be prosecuted unless we can point to a prosecutable offence that he is known to have committed. If I'm defending anyone from criticism, its the guards/the DPP.
Yes I agree with you. I believe there should be a case stated by the Irish State Prosecution side and our legal system should be prevented from stymying that, all under the defence much abused guise of protecting the accused's right to a fair trial. When that system is wired to preventing the truth come out in an honest way, then it's a perversion of what it purports to be. If needs be, use something along the lines of a Special Criminal Court with three judges to give justice to the victims.
I'm not going to bother providing proof of such system abuse as it's self evident in what was done to those victims who came forward and stated their cases in court which were found proven despite the further abuse of system they faced from the defendants and their protectors. This includes quasi-canonical sessions in presbytery houses etc, done in an extra-judicial way which are seen as acceptable and haven't been declared an abuse of Ireland's right to judicial independence where it comes to natural justice.
Where it comes to doing Devil's Advocate for the accused [in respect of this particular bunch of proven liars] I'd say that duty was done and over with as they have drawn too often from the well of kindness, regardless of Pastor Martin Niemöller's reminder to us all. The most I'll do now is give them the courtesy of a nod & "morning" in passing.
Reading today's Irish Examiner headlines, there's always a chance that a witness might step forward and be the cause. An honest and straight-forward statement of the obvious from an Irish Archbishop is in the link below. https://www.irishexaminer.com/breakingnews/ireland/majority-of-clerical-abuse-victims-yet-to-come-forward-says-archbishop-863950.html0 -
I don't think the problem is the lack of evidence; it's the lack of a relevant offence known to Irish law.
Can you name an offence, known to Irish law, that you think Brady could be convicted of?0 -
Peregrinus wrote: »I don't think the problem is the lack of evidence; it's the lack of a relevant offence known to Irish law.
Can you name an offence, known to Irish law, that you think Brady could be convicted of?
I'm not going down the rabbit-hole of the state being to blame for Brady etc. getting off the hook because of a suggestion that the state did not have on it's law books something which could be used to try and charge him with in connection with they way he and others abused child sex attack victims, thank you.0 -
If you're not prepared to discuss that, it's hardly fair of you to criticise people for not prosecuting him. You haven't established, and are not prepared to establish, that he could have been prosecuted.aloyisious wrote: »I'm not going down the rabbit-hole of the state being to blame for Brady etc. getting off the hook because of a suggestion that the state did not have on it's law books something which could be used to try and charge him with in connection with they way he and others abused child sex attack victims, thank you.0 -
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Peregrinus wrote: »If you're not prepared to discuss that, it's hardly fair of you to criticise people for not prosecuting him.
Is that not, inter alia, exactly what you were doing when you wrote about the lack of a relevant offence with which to charge Brady?
If you want to find something pertinent in respect of the same, in a devils advocate way, please do so and come back to me/us with the results of your research.
PS: I know we can keep up batting this back and to between us and waste thread space in doing so, so I won't bother doing so.0
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