The Stain Still Spreads

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Marie Collins was a 13-year-old hospital patient when Father Paul McGennis sexually abused her in 1960. Thirty-five years later he was still a priest and she found the courage to complain to the office of Dublin's Archbishop, Desmond Connell. There she found a stony bureaucratic indifference that has made her so angry she now wants to file criminal charges against the archdiocese for covering up McGennis' crime. "The abuse didn't take away my religion," says Collins, a Dublin housewife who no longer attends Mass. "The two years trying to get Cardinal Connell to do the right thing did."

A tide of similar complaints that peaked in the last two weeks now finds Connell, 76, a fastidious expert on Aquinas who wrote his doctoral thesis on angels, being heckled at Mass, reading editorials demanding his resignation and, since last week, facing a tough government inquiry. The widespread view that he has tried harder to stifle bad publicity than to confront this crisis is undermining his church — which has already seen regular Mass attendance drop 20% since 1998.

It can be no consolation either to Collins or Connell that other Catholic prelates around the world are in similar states of siege, as the church comes to terms with its persistent pedophiles and the rage of their victims, who are now banding together in advocacy groups linked by the Internet. Nowhere has it been easy to square the church's 2000-year-old traditions of priestly authority and institutional survival with modern notions of accountability. Last week, a committee of American and Vatican bishops was redrafting the American bishops' proposed "zero tolerance" policy toward sexual abuse by priests that the Vatican had rejected as too harsh. But in Ireland, where the church's power has for centuries been pervasive, the damage caused by pedophile priests has been particularly corrosive.

Collins' case shows why. In 1996, when McGennis was still serving as a parish priest a year after her first complaint, she went to her local bishop to have him removed. But he kept his post for another year, until just before police were about to charge him for abusing both Collins and another woman. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 18 months.

Before the trial, the Cardinal's right-hand man, Monsignor Alex Stenson, wrote Collins that McGennis had admitted abusing multiple children. But when she gave the letter to police, Stenson was furious and threatened to sue her. The church never turned over its full dossier on McGennis to police and Stenson refused to give a written statement. Subsequently, it emerged that the church had known in 1960 that McGennis was taking obscene photographs of children, and that a youth worker complained about him in 1994. "After McGennis was convicted [in 1998] Cardinal Connell issued a press statement saying he had cooperated with the police," says Collins. "It was a total lie, not just to me but to the people."

The Dublin archdiocese now has 26 abuse cases pending. A television exposé two weeks ago described a variety of serious lapses in the way the archdiocese has dealt with abusing priests, prompting Connell to declare "my own deep regret for serious inadequacies in our response." He has named a commission headed by a respected former judge to investigate.

But it appears to be too little too late. Fear that the commission would be cozy with the church led the government to announce its own inquiry last week, a move that would have been unthinkable a decade ago but in the current climate has been popular. Justice Minister Michael McDowell declared he was "not afraid of the bang of a crosier," and said the church's internal canon law, which it has sometimes relied upon to justify keeping mum about predator priests, deserved as much deference as the rules of a golf club.

Connell is unlikely to resign. His friends say he may be old school, but feels every error is being transmogrified into a cover-up, and looks forward to clearing his name in an inquiry. Meanwhile, regardless of what happens to him, "the anger is huge," says one Irish priest in Rome. "You think you've heard it all and then you're hit again — and there's more to come." It will keep coming, the victims say, until the church is cleansed and reformed.