'Trust us, we know best" sums up the new Catholic Church policy on child protection, entitled Our Children, Our Church. What is most shocking about the changed procedures, published last Monday, is that they are actually less progressive than the guidelines which have been in place for the past 10 years.
The 1996 Framework Document, known internally as The Green Book, was the church's response at that stage to the avalanche of clerical child sex abuse cases. Widely criticised for its ambiguity, there was one area in which it did not pull its punches. It stated the following: "In all [ my emphasis] instances where it is known or suspected that a priest or religious has sexually abused a child, the matter should be reported to the civil authorities." Elsewhere, it clarified that by civil authorities it meant the Garda and health boards.
It was this policy that allowed bishops repeatedly to claim that the church was the one body that did have mandatory reporting of child abuse, and that consequently it was at the cutting edge of child protection. We now know, of course, that these were only guidelines, and were often ignored. Former archbishop of Dublin Cardinal Desmond Connell famously told one victim of abuse, Marie Collins, that he did not feel obliged to follow them.
We know that Bishop Brendan Comiskey of Ferns felt that they did not apply to cases where it was an adult complaining of abuse suffered as a child. However, the 1996 document had that covered as well, specifying clearly that all these cases should also be reported to the Garda.
While identifying the serious flaws with the implementation of the 1996 guidelines, the Ferns report accepted that the church did at least have a policy of automatically reporting all allegations and suspicions to State authorities.
It is simply staggering that after 10 years of such a policy of mandatory reporting, the church should now so baldly rescind it. For this is precisely what the bishops did last Monday.
No longer are all allegations and suspicions to be reported to the authorities. Outsiders will now only be made aware of cases which contain "a semblance of truth" or where there are "reasonable grounds for concern". None of these caveats, none of this hedging appeared in the 1996 guidelines.
Our Children, Our Church even goes so far as to give an example of a case where no information shall be passed to State authorities. Where church personnel are satisfied that the "alleged offence" could not have occurred, as the person complained of "was absent from the alleged location" at the time specified, then no further action is required.
However, children who are abused may often get specific dates wrong, as any garda experienced in these kinds of investigations will attest. It is frequently one of the first aspects which a police investigation will attempt to pin down. That the church should appropriate such a level of discretion to itself, particularly in the light of its dismal past in this area, is profoundly disturbing.
The church's claim that these determinations will be made in future by lay child protection officers (employed by bishops) does little to allay the deep alarm caused by its abrogation of the mandatory reporting policy of 1996.
All of this now leaves the State with a thorny problem, which has been blithely ignored by Minister for Children Brian Lenihan in his welcome for the new church policy.
The State has established a commission of inquiry which, in addition to dealing with the scandals in the Dublin archdiocese, will also have the power to examine any diocese which fails to implement the recommendations of the Ferns report.
These recommendations were predicated on the continued existence within the church of a policy of mandatory reporting. That this policy has now been abandoned by the church means that it has de facto rejected the Ferns report's most fundamental recommendation, namely the continuation of the practice of reporting each and every allegation, regardless of semblance of truth or reasonable concern.
The report went further, recommending that even allegations considered to be unfounded, together with all suspicions, rumour and innuendo should be made known by each diocese to the HSE and the Garda through a system of regular inter-agency meetings designed to ensure complete openness from church personnel. This practice has already been adopted in the Ferns diocese.
By allowing for circumstances in which some allegations can be kept secret, the church has now rejected the Ferns recommendations and consequently the terms of reference for the State's audit of current church policy in the area of child abuse. The key question now is what is the State going to do about this.
The church has shown that it is hopelessly incapable of learning from its catastrophic mistakes. Its determination to maintain power over what it reports and what it keeps hidden must not be tolerated by a State, whose first and paramount duty is to protect its children.