The black avalanche of sex-abuse stories can become so incessant that we want to forget about it. But we need to face it honestly. A thousand years ago, when St Peter Damian wrote his denunciation of sexual immorality among the clergy, Pope Leo IX thanked him profusely. “Everything that this little book contains,” the Pope wrote (in Matthew Cullinan Hoffman’s translation), “has been pleasing to our judgment, being as opposed to diabolical fire as is water” – and he predicted that St Peter Damian would eventually “rejoice in the celestial mansion with the Son of God and of the Virgin”. Our salvation may partly depend on how seriously we take the evil of abuse.
The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, now in its fifth year, is not exactly St Peter Damian’s Liber Gomorrhianus. Having started with a vast remit – failures by “public bodies and important institutions” – it has lost three chairwomen and several senior lawyers. The former Director of Public Prosecutions Lord Macdonald has suggested that the inquiry could become an “embarrassing fiasco”. The inquiry into the Church – which focuses on Birmingham archdiocese and the Benedictines as case studies – has even been used by lawyers to attack the Seal of Confession. All that notwithstanding, the inquiry is a chance to look honestly at the Church’s record.
That record is alarming, judging by last week, which was devoted to Birmingham Archdiocese. Since the 1950s, there have been at least 78 allegations against priests and other diocesan workers; at least 13 priests have received police cautions or criminal sentences.
Amid those numbers are cases of unspeakable wickedness and disastrous misjudgment. Take just one priest: Samuel Penney, jailed in 1993 after admitting 10 sexual assaults on children. He was relocated to a new parish after the mother of one victim reported abuse. The archdiocese’s lawyer admitted last week that Church authorities paid Penney “wholly insufficient attention”.
There has also been the beginning of a reckoning. Jane Jones, who chaired the archdiocesan safeguarding commission from 2007 to 2013, was found to have written a paper in 1993 which discussed the Penney case. Jones disparaged the survivors’ families, said the “first victim” was Penney himself, and suggested that the abuse probably took place in an “affectionate” environment: “Sexual activity can be warm and comforting.” Jones pointed out that this was written 25 years ago, long before she began working for the archdiocese, and that she would never hold such views today.
Archbishop Bernard Longley of Birmingham said it was clear that “serious mistakes” had been made. He apologised to abuse survivors, adding: “I know that apologies feel that they come too late and are inadequate.” Archbishop Longley’s predecessor in Birmingham, Cardinal Vincent Nichols, had to delay his testimony due to illness. But he did send a letter admitting that “Often in the past we [presumably the archdiocese] failed to respond promptly and vigorously to the cries and accounts of victims.”
Cardinal Nichols was partly referring to the case of Fr John Tolkien, son of the novelist, who in 2003 denied allegations of sexual indecency dating back decades. The case was not pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service because Fr Tolkien had dementia; he died shortly afterwards. But the Church had known since 1968 that Fr Tolkien had allegedly told boy scouts to strip naked. This was not disclosed – even in 2003, when the archdiocese reached a £15,000 settlement with a man who said Fr Tolkien abused him. A lawyer acting for the archdiocese wrote to the then Archbishop Nichols in 2003: “You have said that the archdiocese would prefer not to disclose this document even if it means settling the action.”
Speaking generally, Cardinal Nichols acknowledged: “We put too much in our sense of duty to shield other Catholics from these horrors, putting what we saw to be the good of the Church before a search for the truth of what happened.”
The inquiry is likely to reveal more failures – and to show that, despite all the reforms, the Church still needs to be more open-hearted to abuse victims. It has already shown what catastrophes can result when the truth is put to one side.
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