“They were wrong, and children were left to suffer,’’ he said.
There was a similarly shocking investigation into decades of unchecked child abuse in Irish schools, workhouses, and orphanages run nationwide by 19 Catholic orders of nuns, priests, and brothers.
That report in May sought to document the scale of abuse as well as the reasons church and state authorities didn’t stop it, whereas yesterday’s 720-page report focused on why church leaders in the Dublin Archdiocese - home to a quarter of Ireland’s 4 million Catholics - did not tell police about a single abuse complaint against a priest until 1995.
By then, the investigators found, successive archbishops and their senior deputies - among them qualified lawyers - had compiled confidential files on more than 100 parish priests who had sexually abused children since 1940. Those files had remained locked in the Dublin archbishop’s private vault.
The investigators also dug up a paper trail documenting the church’s long-secret insurance policy, taken out in 1987, to cover potential lawsuits and compensation demands. Dublin church leaders publicly denied the existence of the problem for a decade afterward - but since the mid-1990s have paid out more than $15 million in settlements and legal bills.
The report cited documents showing how church officials learned about some cases only when devoutly Catholic police received complaints from children or their parents - but handed responsibility back to church leaders to sort out the problems themselves.
Yesterday’s report detailed sample cases of 46 priests who faced 320 documented complaints, although the investigators said they were confident that the priests had abused many more children than that. They cited testimony from one priest who admitted abusing more than 100 children, and another priest who said he abused a child about every two weeks for 25 years.
