Religion should not be a cover for paedophiles

There is no innate connection between Catholicism and paedophilia. Formal and informal paedophile rings have existed within many walks of life, including, for example, sports organisations and the British pop music industry.

A recognition of this fact has two broad consequences. One is that it would be wrong to use the child abuse scandals that have overtaken the Catholic Church to discredit the faith or sincerity of an entire religion.

The other is that paedophiles and those who allowed them to prey on defenceless children should not be allowed to hide behind the cloak of religion. The impulse of religiously-motivated people to protect religious orders from the consequences of their actions and inaction is morally disastrous.

This morning, as the High Court begins to hear the first civil action against the Christian Brothers taken by a victim of sexual abuse, we have to face a frightful fact. An institution which consciously projected itself around the world as a representative of Irish values became a vehicle for systemic paedophilia.

As Mary Raftery's Prime Time documentaries showed last week, what Ireland meant to children on three continents was sustained cruelty, casual indifference and, when the truth emerged, denial of responsibility.

In the face of this appalling reality, it is tempting to seek comfort in the notion that crimes against children were the dark lining to a silver cloud of good intentions. On Saturday, for example, my colleague Breda O'Brien quoted a passage from the recently published inquiry by the Australian Senate, pointing out that "for many child migrants their experiences in the Australian institutions were positive".

This seems to imply that abuse by Christian Brothers was the exception rather than the rule. In fact, a reading of the full report (it is available on the internet, at the Australian Senate site) makes it absolutely clear that it means the opposite. The report makes a distinction between many of the institutions that took part in the child migrant scheme (Barnardo's, for example) and for the most part treated children well, and, quite specifically, the Christian Brothers of Ireland.

After the passage that Breda quoted, it says that "the allegations of regular sexual assault involved children in the care of only a small number of institutions . . . Of the 207 public and confidential submissions received from individual child migrants, 38 recounted episodes of sexual assault. All but 14 of these - almost two-thirds - were from Christian Brothers institutions in Western Australia."

It may sound over-dramatic to say that the only parallel for what we are talking about here is something like the rape camps of Bosnia. But it isn't. The Australian report talks of "systemic criminal sexual assault and predatory behaviour by a large number of the brothers over a considerable period of time. Evidence was given of boys being abused in many ways for the sexual gratification of the brothers, of boys being terrified in bed at night as brothers stalked the dormitories to come and take children to their rooms, of boys as 'pets' of the brothers being repeatedly sodomised, and of boys being pressurised into bestial acts."

Getting our heads around this horror is hard. Both the inquiry in Australia and a similar, equally damning, parliamentary report in the UK note the inadequacy of the English language itself: "some of what was done there was of a quite exceptional depravity, so that terms like 'sexual abuse' are too weak to convey it." The words we need are these: a revered Irish institution ran rape camps on three continents.

The most immediate revelation in Prime Time's reports, however, is that of Irish involvement in schemes to allow the Brothers to escape the consequences of what the institution has done. Specific assets held by the Brothers in Canada have been transferred to an Irish-registered company, Richmond Newstreet, so as to put them beyond the reach of claims for compensation by the victims.

It is clear from the documentation obtained by Prime Time that even some of those directly involved in this operation feel queasy about it. Remarkably, for example, Des Lamont of L and P Financial Trustees of Ireland, the Dublin firm handling the business, felt it necessary in a letter to the Superior General of the Brothers, Edmund Garvey, to remind the order that "the dimension of justness may not be an automatic inclusion in the proposals of all the professional firms involved" and that the Brothers are supposed to "be compassionate in relation to any who have suffered hurt or harm".

Likewise, the head of the Canadian province, Brother Barry Lynch, wrote a long soul-searching letter to Brother Garvey in 1996, questioning the "moral rightness" of the strategy of using legal and financial devices to escape responsibility. He wrote of a "situation in which survivors may not be fairly and equitably compensated, in which justice and healing of harm are not foremost in our minds but getting the issue of compensation behind us and moving on with our mission are foremost in our thinking". Yet that situation is exactly the one that still prevails.

A decade ago, the nation went hysterical when, in the course of a World Cup soccer game, Eamon Dunphy was thought (wrongly) to have declared himself ashamed to be Irish. Yet here is something that really should make us ashamed to be Irish: decades of systematic paedophilia carried on in the name of Ireland and of Christ against children on three continents. What are we doing to restore our good name?

fotoole@irish-times.ie