DUBLIN — Ireland’s senior Roman Catholic, Cardinal Sean Brady, said yesterday that he would not resign despite conceding that he helped the church collect evidence against a child-molesting priest — and never told police about the crimes.
Brady, as a priest and Vatican-trained canon lawyer in 1975, said he interviewed two children about being abused by the Rev. Brendan Smyth. He said both children were required to sign oaths promising not to tell anyone outside the church of their allegations.
Smyth went on to molest and rape scores of other children in Ireland, Britain, and the United States before British authorities in neighboring Northern Ireland demanded his arrest in 1994. The Irish government at the time collapsed amid acrimony over why Smyth had not been extradited to Belfast.
Brady acknowledged his role in gathering evidence against Smyth because he has been named as a defendant in a Dublin lawsuit filed by one of Smyth’s victims. Lawyers in that case unearthed records of Brady’s involvement in gathering testimony from two Irish victims who said they were abused by Smyth about 1970. Martin Long, Brady’s spokesman, said both victims were boys.
Brady said it was the responsibility of his diocesan bishop, as well as the leader of Smyth’s separate Catholic order of priests, to tell police. But he said the church didn’t do this because of “a culture of silence about this, a culture of secrecy.’’
“Yes, I knew that these were crimes,’’ Brady said. “But I did not feel that it was my responsibility to denounce the actions of Brendan Smyth to the police. Now I know with hindsight that I should have done more, but I thought at the time I was doing what I was required to do.’’
The Vatican has been on the defensive over a widening array of child-abuse scandals in European countries, including the Pope Benedict XVI’s homeland of Germany. Since January, about 300 Germans have come forward to allege that priests assaulted, molested, or raped them in Catholic boarding schools.
Yesterday, the Munich archdiocese — which the pope oversaw from 1977 to 1982 — announced that a priest originally convicted of sexually abusing children in 1986 has been suspended from pastoral duties because he had broken a promise not to have contact with minors.
Smyth abused at least 90 children in Ireland, Britain and in US parishes in Rhode Island and North Dakota from 1948 to 1993. His Irish religious order, the Norbertines, gave him sanctuary in the Republic of Ireland in 1991 after one Belfast family told Northern Ireland police he had molested four of their children.
READER COMMENTS »
View reader comments » Comment on this story »