Sins Of The Fathers

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Colm o'gorman is suing the Pope. Although his allegations of abuse against Father Sean Fortune led to legal proceedings against the priest on 66 counts of sexual, indecent assault and sodomy, O'Gorman has yet to receive an apology from the Catholic Church. He is also suing Fortune's bishop, Father Brendan Comiskey, who was reportedly first informed about allegations against the priest in the early 1980s, but nevertheless allowed him to continue to minister in the southern Irish town of Fethard-on-Sea.

The reluctance of the church to acknowledge the crimes of its representatives has forced O'Gorman and others to resort to the law. There have been many cases across Europe against men of the cloth who have abused their positions within communities to gratify their pedophile inclinations. The Vatican has only recently begun to admit that it's been slow to recognize the problem. In November last year Pope John Paul II used the Internet to issue a document that contained apologies to victims of sexual abuse by members of the clergy. And last week the Pope issued a 21-page letter saying that the church "shows her concern for the victims" of priests who have succumbed "even to the most grievous forms of the mysterium iniquitatis [mysterious evil] at work in the world."

At the presentation of the Pope's letter Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos, head of the Vatican Congregation for the Clergy, implied that, because of the cases in the U.S., the sex scandals were a problem only in English-speaking countries. But recent revelations in the Pope's homeland show that the problem is more widespread. In February, the Polish daily Rzeczpospolita published a story alleging that the Archbishop of Poznan, Father Juliusz Paetz, made a habit of sexually assaulting young clerics from the local seminary. According to the report, Paetz's behavior became so notorious that the rector of the seminary, Father Tadeusz Karkosz, forbade the archbishop to visit the college.

But the allegations were not new. The paper charged that Paetz's inclinations had been known for at least two years, with several students quitting the seminary after they claimed to have been molested. A month after the allegations first appeared Paetz issued a pastoral letter saying, "I deny all the information presented in the media."

In common with many other abuse cases, the church seemed unwilling to take action against one of its own. However, in a landmark case in France last year, Father Pierre Pican, Bishop of Bayeux-Lisieux, received a three-month suspended sentence for failing to inform the police after Father René Bissey confessed to him that he was sexually abusing children. Bissey was jailed for 18 years in 2000 for raping one boy repeatedly and abusing 10 others betwen 1989 and 1996. Pican's defense claimed that the bishop had been motivated by his priestly obligation to keep Bissey's remarks secret, even though Bissey admitted his actions outside the confidentiality of the confessional.

It has been the unwillingness of the Catholic hierarchy to take action on abusing clergy that has stored up problems for the church. In the case of Fortune, a BBC TV program last week alleged that he was abusing boys over a 20-year period, a situation that was so widely known that his parishioners complained about his predatory behavior to Bishop Comiskey's predecessor, Bishop Herlihey, as well as to the Vatican's ambassador to Ireland, the Papal Nuncio, and ultimately to the Vatican itself. The only result was that Fortune was moved from one parish and then sent off to study media communications in London and to seek psychiatric help.

If the church was unwilling to act, the state has sometimes stepped in. Since September 2000 people who had attended Ireland's 52 Industrial Schools until they were closed down in the 1970s have been giving evidence of the abuse they suffered to committees of enquiry set up by the Irish government. Some 3,000 men and women have come forward with stories of physical and sexual abuse against members of the Christian Brothers, the Sisters of Mercy and the Oblates of Mary Immaculate. Jacinta Madden, a lawyer working for a Dublin-based firm representing over 700 claimants, says that "the church is defending its stance very strongly, which is a little ambiguous, because recently they contributed $110 million to the fund for compensating these people." With the threat of legal action looming, the Christian Brothers took full page advertisements in the national press in March 1998 to apologize to anybody abused by members of the order.

That was one of the first acknowledgments that showed how concerned the church has become, feeling that its moral authority has been undermined and recognizing that its clergy has been severely demoralized by the seemingly endless allegations. In England and Wales, the church has set up the Catholic Office for the Protection of Children and Vulnerable Adults. This body is based on a report into tackling pedophile activity in the church made by a former Appeal Court judge, Lord Nolan. In presenting his report, Nolan said he hoped that it would "help to bring about a culture of vigilance where every single adult member of the church consciously and actively takes responsibility for creating a safe environment for children and young people."

The new body is chaired by the Archbishop of Birmingham, the Most Reverend Vincent Nichols, who believes that "We were behind with our understanding of pedophilia." He acknowledges that "the learning curve over the past 15 years has been very steep," but is sure that the new body will "not lag behind best practice, and in fact be a model for it." Now the French church has created a consultative committee on sexual abuse against minors and has taken its first action: advising the removal of Father Gérard Mercury from his parish in Bordeaux after he had been convicted of molesting minors for a second time.

Despite the attempts by the church to put its house in order, the underlying attitude of denial still makes it difficult for victims of sexual abuse to come forward. "Twenty years ago that bastard raped me," grieves a tormented O'Gorman, "and I am still now forced to be in a position where I have to fight to get somebody to acknowledge what they did or didn't do. It's not good enough." Given the opportunites that church has had in the past to deal with priestly crimes, there is the suspicion that it is only the lawyers' intervention that hasbrought action.