Ferns is a diocese made up of County Wexford in the south-east of Ireland and parts of some of the bordering counties. The tribunal was set up by the Irish government because there seemed to be more clerical offenders in this diocese than in any other, and in reaction to a BBC documentary about abuse there.
Francis Murphy, the tribunal chair, was a former judge of the Irish Supreme Court, and this is the report of the tribunal's investigation.
Toibin says he expected to have confirmed a belief that the abuse arose from repressed homosexual priests.
If they had gone to Holland or San Francisco, I believed, they would now be happily married to their boyfriends. But as I read the report, I began to think that this was hardly the issue. Instead, the level of abuse in Ferns and the Church's way of handling it seemed an almost intrinsic part of the Church's search for power. It is as though when its real authority began to wane in Ireland in the 1960s, the sexual abuse of those under its control and the urge to keep that abuse secret and the efforts to keep abusers safe from the civil law became some of its new tools.
Ignoring his own "seemed" and "as though", he leaves me with the impression that he had this alternate thesis of frustrated hunger for power before he read the report.
No comments:
Post a Comment