Driving all the Snakes Out of Ireland for St. Patrick's Day?

WIDESPREAD condemnation of the way the Roman Catholic bishops of the Dublin archdiocese dealt with paedophile priests over three decades culminated in a call for the expulsion of the Papal Nuncio, Archbishop Giuseppe Leanza, over the Vatican’s failure to respond to the scandals (News, 27 November).


The independent commission established by the Irish government under Ms Justice Yvonne Murphy of the High Court examined com­plaints against 46 individual priests, involving 320 children, the majority of whom were boys. One priest admitted sexual abuse of more than 100 children.


It found that four Archbishops and several auxiliary Bishops of Dublin, including five now serving in dioceses of their own, seriously failed in their duty of protection towards children.


The Roman Catholic Church’s own rules and structures facilitated a cover-up, the report says, which included the movement of priests who were known offenders from one parish to another, thus allowing them to reoffend. It also failed to report offenders to the Garda Siochána, the police force of the Republic of Ireland, over the entire period of their tenure in office. The Gardaí, in turn, often deferred to the hierarchy by simply advising archbishops of complaints they themselves had received. RC prelates were thus re­garded as being above the law of the State.


The inquiry described the be­haviour of successive Arch­bishops of Dublin as showing “denial, arro­gance, and cover-up” over a period from the 1970s until the 1990s. The Justice Minister of Ireland, Dermot Ahern, described the report as chronicling a scandal on an astonish­ing scale, and pledged that, in the Republic, no organisation or institu­tion would be allowed to regard itself as superior to the State or its people. “A collar will protect no criminal,” he said.

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Even Golden Brown wants to get in on the feeding frenzy and talk tough about evil in Northern Ireland.

At least Russia is more sensible than Ireland. They want to improve their relations with the Vatican. In our humble opinion, we think that Catholicism is too good for Ireland.