Cathal BarryLeading child protection expert has dismissed calls made by the ACP that clergy who abused children should be forgiven for past “mistakes” and allowed return to ministry.
A leading child protection expert has dismissed calls made by the Association of Catholic Priests (ACP) that clergy who abused children should be forgiven for past “mistakes” and allowed return to ministry.
Dr Helen Buckley, Associate Professor in the School of Social Work and Social Policy at Trinity College Dublin, told The Irish Catholicthat the Church cannot be “trusted to make objective decisions, particularly those that may bring perpetrators into contact with vulnerable people”.
Dr Buckley, one of the authors of a report into clerical child abuse in the Ferns diocese, was commenting on a report of a meeting between the representatives of the ACP and the National Board for Safeguarding Children in the Catholic Church in Ireland, in which Fr Tony Flannery said it is unfair to block priests from ministry who have “made a mistake or mistakes in their earlier life, and where there was no pattern of re-offending” from returning to their priestly duties.
Admitting Fr Flannery’s own experience of being abused as a child “gives him an insight into what it is like to be a victim of child sexual abuse”, Dr Buckley said “it doesn’t necessarily follow that his comments about showing leniency to certain perpetrators are appropriate or correct”.
“I accept there are different levels of abuse, some perpetrators may have abused once, while others have abused very many times and the law should treat them proportionately when cases come to Court. However, we have not yet reached a point where the Church can be trusted to make objective decisions, particularly those that may bring perpetrators into contact with vulnerable people,” she warned.
Clerical abuse survivor Marie Collins told this newspaper she is “shocked” that the ACP feels it is right to return priests, who have abused a child in the past, to positions of trust.
She said it was “insulting to adult survivors to refer to the acts that may have destroyed decades of their lives as just ‘mistakes’”.
Mrs Collins also criticised as “unforgivable” the ACP’s call for “a softening” in the presentation of child protection audits of dioceses and religious congregations.