Letter to Baroness Scotland, new chair of the National Catholic Safeguarding Commission

FOR THE ATTENTION OF:

Baroness Scotland of Asthal
House of Lords

Saturday 19 March 2011

I understand that you have recently taken-up the role of chair of the National Catholic Safeguarding Commission and that the NCSC is the body responsible both for monitoring compliance with policies and for ensuring that the Church does all it can to respond to the Safeguarding needs of the community, including those who have been victims of abuse.

In light of this, I am hoping that you will be able to help me with an issue that I have been researching with growing concern for the past three years and which I believe demonstrates very clearly that the Church has failed to comply with policies the Bishops committed to in 2001; a failure which is likely to be to the detriment of those who have been victims of abuse. I am referring to the mismatch between the outcomes that would be expected, if Bishops were following Recommendation 78 of the Nolan Report (2001) and the actual outcomes in cases where Catholic clergy have been convicted of a criminal offence against children and sentenced to serve a term of imprisonment of 12 months or more.

In September 2001, the Nolan Committee recommended,

"If a bishop, priest or deacon is convicted of a criminal offence against children and is sentenced to serve a term of imprisonment of 12 months or more, then it would normally be right to initiate the process of laicisation. Failure to do so would need to be justified. Initiation of the process of laicisation may also be appropriate in other circumstances."

They also made it very clear that,

1. “…we were concerned to make plain that there is a level of seriousness, as demonstrated by the criminal courts, at which we would expect the process of laicisation always to be begun.”

2. “…laicisation does not mean that the Church has no further part to play in relation to the abuser. As with lay worker abusers who are no longer employed by the Church, the Church may nonetheless be able to assist with the rehabilitation and pastoral needs of the individual.”

3. By ‘laicisation’ they mean “…the consequence of a priest either successfully applying to be relieved from their priestly obligations, or the result of their dismissal from the clerical state by due process.”

In November 2001, the Bishops committed the Church to implementing the recommendations of the Nolan Report and in 2007, the Cumberlege Commission noted that “The duty of the Bishop or Congregational Leader, following a conviction or caution for a criminal offence, is straightforward and documented in national policies” and that “The Church is under a clear obligation to accept the consequences of a criminal conviction or a caution”; commenting also that “there can be no going back to a pre Nolan mindset; no relinquishing of the values implicit in Nolan; no reversing of the thrust of the work in this challenging area.”

However, it is increasingly clear that almost two-thirds of priests relevantly convicted and sentenced have been allowed by the Church to retain their clerical status as priests. Thus third parties, including victims of abuse are required by the Church to see these men as ongoing recipients of the sacred power which the Church teaches is communicated by the sacrament of Holy Orders and to accept that they will remain potential beneficiaries of Diocesan funds, under canon 384.

Indeed, COPCA / NCSC / CSAS sources suggest that only six clergy were laicised because of offences against children between 2001 and 2009, while, in September 2010, Antony Barnett from Channel 4 News reported that only eight (36%) of 22 priests identified in England and Wales as having been convicted of sexual offences against children, sentenced to serve sentences of 12 months or more and as serving all or part of their prison sentences, since November 2001, had actually been laicised.

Two of the 14 priests who had been relevantly convicted and sentenced, but not laicised, were priests from the Diocese of Salford. Both had been sentenced to prison sentences of six years and their cases provide illustrative examples of how Recommendation 78 appears to have been implemented or rather not implemented in real cases.

Thomas Doherty, the former parish priest of St Joseph’s, Todmorden, was convicted at Bradford Crown Court of five offences against a boy under 16 (indecent assault x 2, attempted buggery and buggery x 2) and sentenced on 19 February 1998 (Case No: T19971395), while William Green the former parish priest of Holy Family Roman Catholic Church, Wigan was convicted at Manchester Crown Court of 26 offences of indecent assault and sentenced on 1 October 2008 (Case No: T20080502).

In the absence of any public announcement that an exception had been made or was being “justified”, parishioners in the Diocese of Salford (including those such as myself who live in the neighbouring parish) assumed that Doherty had been laicised in accordance with Recommendation 78. However, during the autumn of 2010, around the time of his death, it emerged in the local press that Doherty had never been laicised, had been living in a house owned by the Diocese and that “the church paid towards it”.

Meanwhile, in September 2010, the local newspaper in Wigan highlighted the case of Green, saying that “church chiefs vowed that (Green) would never minister to the public again. But two years later he has still not been defrocked or “laicised”” and quoting one of Green’s former parishioners as saying, “It is an absolute disgrace that this man should still be part of the Roman Catholic clergy”. The newspaper returned to the story three months later, and reported that a spokesperson for the Diocese was, now, saying that “the laicisation was on-going and was out of their hands.”

I trust that the information I have provided demonstrates to you, why there is ongoing concern about what appears to have been widespread non-compliance with Recommendation 78 during the past decade.

I trust that you will give this matter your urgent attention and I look forward to receiving your comments on the issues I have raised.

Thank you.

Yours sincerely,

Philip Gilligan

Vatican told bishops not to report child abuse to the police

Associated Press in Dublin, Tuesday 18 January 2011 20.48 GMT

• 

• A copy of the 1997 letter from the Vatican, obtained by Irish broadcasters RTE and provided to AP, warning Ireland's Catholic bishops not to report all suspected child-abuse cases to police. Photograph: AP FOR A READABLE pdf VERSION OF THE LETER, SEE

  http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/world/Ireland-Catholic-Abuse.pdf?ref=europe
• A letter to Ireland's Roman Catholic bishops has been revealed by the broadcaster RTE that contradicts the Vatican's frequent claim it has never instructed clergy to withhold evidence or suspicion of child abuse from police.

  The 1997 letter documents rejection of a 1996 Irish church initiative to help police identify paedophile priests. Signed by the late Archbishop Luciano Storero, Pope John Paul II's envoy to Ireland, it instructs bishops that their new policy of making the reporting of suspected crimes mandatory "gives rise to serious reservations of both a moral and canonical nature".

  Storero wrote that canon law, whereby allegations and punishments are handled within the church, "must be meticulously followed"; any bishop who tried to go outside canon law would face the "highly embarrassing" position of being overturned on appeal in Rome.

  A 2009 Irish state report found this actually happened with Tony Walsh, one of Dublin's most notorious paedophiles, who exploited his role as an Elvis impersonator in a popular "All Priests Show" to get closer to children. In 1993, Walsh was defrocked by a secret church court, but successfully appealed to a Vatican court, and was reinstated in the priesthood in 1994. He raped a boy in a pub restroom that year. Walsh since has received a series of prison sentences, with a 12-year term imposed last month. Investigators estimate he raped or molested more than 100 children.

  Catholic officials in Ireland and the Vatican declined requests from the Associated Press to comment on the letter, marked "strictly confidential"; RTE said it had been given it by an Irish bishop.

  "The letter is of huge international significance," said Colm O'Gorman, director of the Irish section of Amnesty International. "It shows that the Vatican's intention is to prevent reporting of abuse to criminal authorities. And if that instruction applied here [in Ireland], it applied everywhere."

  Joelle Casteix, a director of the US advocacy group Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, described it as "the smoking gun we've been looking for." It was certain to be cited by lawyers acting for victims seeking to pin responsibility directly on Rome, not the dioceses.

  To this day, the Vatican has not endorsed any of the Irish church's three documents since 1996 on safeguarding children. Irish taxpayers, rather than the church, have paid most of the €1.5bn to more than 14,000 abuse claimants dating back to the 1940s.

  In a 2010 letter to Ireland condemning paedophiles in the ranks, Pope Benedict XVI faulted bishops for not following canon law and offered no explicit endorsement of child-protection efforts by the Irish church or state. He was widely criticised in Ireland.

  O'Gorman (who was raped repeatedly by a priest in the 1980s when an altar boy) said evidence is mounting that some Irish bishops continued to follow the 1997 Vatican instructions. A state investigation of Cloyne diocese is to come out soon, citing crimes concealed as recently as 2008.

Catholic church fails to act on abuse - 'Community Care' 14 October 2010

Paedophile priests remain in Catholic church

On 15 September 2010, Channel 4 News revealed that, in England and Wales, only eight of the 22 convicted priests who have been sentenced to terms of imprisonment of 12 months or more for offences against children, have, yet, been laicised (dismissed from the clerical state), while 14 have not (see http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/uk/catholic+church+abuse+paedophile+priests+remain+in+catholic+church/3767477 ).