The sexual abuse of children by priests was blamed on survivors and there was “no effort made to deal with the perpetrators”, Catholic Archbishop of Dublin Dermot Farrell has said.
The archbishop made his remarks on clerical abuse in an interview with a US conservative Catholic TV network.
Of the perpetrators of the abuse, he said: “Sometimes they were left in situ, sometimes they were moved around, because there was maybe a thinking the problem was the person they were involved with rather than with the actual perpetrators,” he said.
“So if you moved them somewhere else that’ll deal with the problem. They were putting the blame on the survivor,” he said.
“We know different now but then, because there was a sexual element in it, they [church authorities] didn’t want to deal with that. That was part of the, maybe, the shame that they wouldn’t actually deal with it or make it known. They kept it secret and it was very secretive.”
He said there was “a culture of denial, a culture of covering up, a culture of silencing, ignoring. Nobody would accept it. The other thing, it was endemic in society”.
Archbishop Farrell was speaking in a report on the US conservative Catholic EWTN (Eternal World Television Network), titled Survivors of Sexual Abuse Speak Out in Ireland. The report included an interview with Blackrock abuse survivor David Ryan.
Archbishop Farrell told reporter Colm Flynn that clerical child sex abuse “was known at all levels [in the church]”.
“Yes, I think that in the case of priests, some of their colleagues knew about it, were aware, at least suspicious that something wasn’t right. Certainly, we know bishops knew about it, because they were the people who moved somebody from A to B. There was a fortress mentality, protect the church first, people closed ranks, and there were serial perpetrators.”
He agreed that [for clergy] the accountability bar was higher. “Absolutely. You’ve high moral values, there’s the integrity, there’s the hypocrisy, so all of those things come into play. There is a higher standard expected of the ministers of the Catholic Church.”
Where the church in general was concerned “we’ve got to face up to it as all the baptised, listening to the stories, understanding the stories, accepting the truth of those stories,” he said.
“In our own case we have compensated victims that have come forward and we try to settle all of those cases as quickly and expeditiously as possible. I think the religious orders, if they knew about cases and they came forward, have settled many of those cases,” he said.
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