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ALLEGATIONS OF serious sexual abuse against a priest were brought
to the attention of Dublin’s Catholic archdiocese by two sisters
in 1998 during Bishop Martin Drennan’s tenure as auxiliary bishop
there. The bishop was ordained auxiliary on September 21st, 1997,
and remained in Dublin until installed as Bishop of Galway on July
3rd, 2005.
He has also been invited to meet up to 60 survivors of child sex
abuse by priests in Dublin. ONE TELLING line in Bishop Jim Moriarty’s statement yesterday
will have made it extraordinarily difficult for fellow bishops and
others mentioned in the Murphy report to stay on in office. A charity has helped Florentina track her down, so she could make sense of her difficult past. "I said to her, 'You know I'm sick?', and she said 'No'; 'You know my problem?', 'No'; 'I have HIV', and then she cried." Florentina was one of 10,000 Romanian children who contracted HIV in the country's orphanages. Blood had been injected in to their tiny bodies as a nutritional
supplement. Back then, Romania didn't recognise the dangers of Aids,
so dirty needles were used. (A) BELFAST — Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams revealed that his father subjected family members to sexual and physical abuse. Adams, one of the most important figures in Northern
Irish politics over the past 30 years, said his father sexually abused
his children and his family were still recovering from the trauma.
The Irish Times – Saturday, December 19, 2009 PADDY AGNEW in Rome VATICAN: ON THE day after the resignation of the Bishop of Limerick Donal Murray, Vatican insiders were speculating that the Irish church could be headed for its most radical reorganisation in 800 years. While Italian media sources speculate that other resignations may
follow that of Bishop Murray, Vatican sources confirmed that in the
wake of his meeting last week with Cardinal Seán Brady and
Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, Pope Benedict XVI will call for a far-reaching
reorganisation of the Irish church.
By JOHN COONEY, CIARAN BYRNE and BRIAN McDONALD THE Archbishop
of Dublin, Dr Diarmuid Martin will seek to have four bishops fired
by the Vatican if they refuse to step down over the Murphy report
into child sex abuse cases in Dublin. The Irish Times – Monday, December 14, 2009 A PROMINENT survivor of clerical sex abuse in the United States has urged Irish Catholics to withhold their financial contributions from the church. Barbara Blaine broke off a family holiday to hand out a statement outside the Pro-Cathedral in Dublin yesterday afternoon. In it she called for Catholics to contribute to organisations that help children rather than to the church itself. Ms Blaine went public on the abuse she suffered as a teenager in
Toledo, Ohio, at the hands of a priest who was a family friend, Fr
Chet Warren. The government told the 18 religious orders that it wanted to inform
the survivors of institutional abuse before the offers made by the
Church bodies were made public, The Sunday Business Post has learned.
Filed Under Dublin Diocesan Report - Child Abuse. The Irish Times – Saturday, November 28, 2009 OPINION: The Roman Catholic Church’s great achievement in Ireland has been to so disable our capacity to think about right and wrong that parents of abused children apologised for the abusing priest. excerpt: The arrogance and obscurantism of a church leadership that
could rail against openness and frankness is in fact completely consistent
with the same hierarchy’s consistent preference for secrecy
over truth and for self-interest over the interests of children and
families. But in the case of the institutional Catholic Church we have an organisation
with an unusually powerful mechanism of self-protection: the capacity
to convince the society it is abusing to take part in the cover-up.
The damage the church has done to Irish society lies in the ways it
has involved that society in the maintenance of an abusive instrument
of control and power. read also: "Martin: Is there a paedophile ring?" Filed Under Dublin Diocesan Report - Child Abuse. Disturbing connections between abusing priests prompts Archbishop’s request to gardai for further investigation By MAEVE SHEEHAN Sunday Independent November 29 2009 THE ARCHBISHOP of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, asked the gardai (Irish Police) to investigate whether a clerical paedophile ring was operating in the archdiocese. Dr Diarmuid Martin
made the request to the National Bureau of Criminal Investigations
after he examined files on paedophile priests in recent years. He
was disturbed by close connections between a number of clerics who
were later convicted of child abuse, according to sources, and asked
gardai to investigate.
The complaints were made after publication in May of the Ryan report, which detailed horrific physical and sexual abuse perpetrated by members of religious orders. The revelation comes as gardai turn their attention to investigating priests in the Dublin Archdiocese who are the subject of the Murphy report, which was published this week. Bishops who served in the Dublin Archdiocese while children were being sexually abused were desperately resisting calls for their resignations last night. Pope Benedict
XVI remained silent over the devastating abuse report, which accused
the Church of "denial, arrogance and cover-up", with survivors
saying there was no regard within the Catholic Church for child welfare.
Auxiliary Bishop Eamonn Walsh made the comments in an interview with Bloomberg news service on Friday. The inquiry revealed that the Vatican and the Papal Nuncio in Dublin had ignored requests for information. The Vatican said the requests had not come through "appropriate diplomatic channels." However, Bishop
Walsh told Bloomberg he was disappointed and surprised by the Vatican's
attitude. **Advisory: Article contains graphic details** The Murphy report into the rape and molestation of 320 children by 46 priests in the Dublin Archdiocese has found the Church and a former Garda Commissioner covered up abuse. The 700 page report has just been published, it finds 4 Archbishops in Dublin did little or nothing to protect children from paedophile priests. The Government
has just published the report into the handling of clerical child
sex abuse in the Dublin Diocese.
Desire to protect Church meant crimes not reported: Dublin Diocese Inquiry Sunday Independent 22 November 2009 THE four Catholic archbishops of Dublin who preceded Dr Diarmuid Martin, were aware of complaints against priests for sexually abusing children — a practice that went on for over 35 years. But the most senior figures in the Irish hierarchy did not report these crimes to the gardai because of an obsessive culture of secrecy and a desire to preserve the power and aura of the Church and to avoid giving scandal to their congregations. The report of the Commission set up to investigate how the Dublin Archdiocese dealt with sex abuse scandals from 1975 to 2004 will find that there was little or no concern for the welfare of the abused children or other children who might come into contact with deviant and even paedophile priests. While the Commission
will find that there was no evidence of a paedophile ring operating
among priests in the Dublin Archdiocese, there were distressing connections
between more than 40 priests serving in parishes and religious orders
in the diocese.
The British government
said Sunday that Prime Minister Gordon Brown will apologize for 20th-century
child migrant programs that saw thousands of poor British children
sent to Australia, Canada and other former colonies until the 1960s.
Many ended up in institutions or were sent to work as farm laborers.
The Rev. Edward Maloney, a retired priest who served at St. Mark Roman Catholic Church, 1048 N. Campbell Ave., for 21 years until 1996, was removed from ministry several months ago, according to a letter from Auxiliary Bishop John Manz to parishioners. Maloney currently lives in Fox Lake. The abuse of two
male victims, now in their late 30s and early 40s, is alleged to have
taken place about 25 years ago, when the victims were in junior high
school and while Maloney was at St. Mark, a church official said. The chapter is understood to be significant because it deals with shortcomings in how the State and the Garda Síochána (Irish Police) dealt with allegations of clerical child sex abuse in Dublin, including the case of a priest alleged to have committed a large number of offences. Sources emphasised the absence of this chapter would, in their view, render the report skewed and unbalanced as it is “by far the longest, at approximately 60 pages, and one of the most important” chapters. The full report,
which makes findings on the handling of clerical child abuse allegations
by church and civil authorities in the Catholic archdiocese of Dublin,
was presented to Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern last July.
Primal Pain And Primal Therapy is a
Matter of Life And Death
The Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) has agreed to pay $525,000 to the girls for keeping public records from them. This is the most
money DSHS has ever paid in a public records lawsuit.
The Irish Times 31st October 2009 Saturday, October 31, 2009 The Department
of Education last night received a report by a Government- appointed
panel which was assessing statements of resources submitted by religious
congregations following publication of the Ryan report. Reviewing
the Ryan Report The story of the Ryan Report does not begin in 1999 with Mary Raftery’s television documentary States of Fear. It begins three years before, with Louis Lentin’s documentary Dear Daughter, which told the story of Christine Buckley, who had been brought up by the Sisters of Mercy at Goldenbridge Orphanage. Before this there
had been books, such as The God Squad (1993) by Paddy Doyle, but it
was Dear Daughter that really drew public attention in a major way
to the issue of child abuse in institutions run by eighteen Catholic
religious orders. This means that the issue of institutional abuse
has now been part of the public consciousness for thirteen years. Filed Under Newspaper Articles on Child Abuse Archive ANALYSIS: The report about to be published into child sex abuse by Dublin priests will shine a light on how some of the country’s most senior churchmen covered up their crimes, writes MARY RAFTERY ON THIS day, precisely
seven years ago, RTÉ television broadcast Cardinal Secrets
, the Prime Time investigation which uncovered widespread clerical
child abuse and cover-up within the Roman Catholic archdiocese of
Dublin. The government’s response was swift. Then minister for
justice Michael McDowell announced its intention to establish a commission
of investigation. This was to be one of the first of the so-called
fast-track tribunals – a lean operation designed to complete
its business rapidly.
Dumfries and Galloway
Council had been asked to approve payments to people identified as
having suffered abuse at the hands of Peter Harley.
They were promised
a better life but many were made to work as labourers, suffering physical
and sexual abuse. (A) Deported
children seek justice Such was the power of the Church, and of its then leader, Archbishop John Charles McQuaid, that the state bowed before its demands, ceding responsibility for the mothers and babies to the nuns. For them, it was not only a matter of sin and morality, but one of pounds, shillings and pence. Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1216191/Stolen-mother--sold-highest-bidder.html (A)
I just got a letter from Harvard Medical School. They want me to read one of their books, Coping with Anxiety and Phobias. Now why won’t I do that? Because there never is the phrase, “eliminating anxiety.” If all they can offer is coping I can do that on my own. And why can’t they offer “elimination?” Because they still don’t realize how deep and remote the origins of anxiety are. It is a pure vegetative state, mostly around the midline of the body. Those who write about it could not imagine that sometime in the middle of gestation things happened that imprinted fear or terror. This imprint later becomes anxiety when the person’s gating system is weakened. It is imprinted at a time when the inhibitory forces of serotonin are getting organized but are not yet in full force. If we do not understand
the imprint we will never be led to origins and therefore will never
get rid of this dread symptom. We see it in terms of butterflies in
the stomach, cramps, pressure on the chest, breathing difficulties;
all nonverbal elements that do not succumb to verbal therapies. It
takes route when the lower brain centers and the brainstem are the
highest level of brain function operating at the time. And, as I note,
a brainstem imprint is a brainstem symptom—colitis, ulcers,
breathing problems. (A) John Kelly, a leading member of Survivors of Child Abuse, (SOCA), said yesterday that he and other colleagues will show solidarity with Mr O'Gorman by attending the Mass at Drogheda's Augustinian church which commemorates the thirtieth anniversary of Pope John Paul II's visit to Ireland. "Instead of banning Mr O'Gorman from the pulpit, Cardinal Sean Brady and the bishops should be encouraging abuse victims to address parish congregations," Mr Kelly told the Irish Independent. "They
(the clergy) don't want the issue addressed except on their own terms."
PATSY McGARRY Religious Affairs Correspondent FORMER RESIDENTS of Magdalen laundries are not eligible for compensation from the Residential Institutions Redress Board, Minister for Education Batt O’Keeffe has said. “The Magdalen
laundries were privately-owned and operated establishments which did
not come within the responsibility of the State. The State did not
refer individuals to the Magdalen laundries nor was it complicit in
referring individuals to them,” he said.
The
damage and long-term-consequences of childhood abuse "Some
of the men really think they're doing women a favor by providing them
with an income and they don't think there is harm involved. A lot
of the men comment on being surprised to learn that prostitution is
not a victimless crime," Like
many children who’d committed the unforgivable crime of being
poor,….. Survivors of clerical abuse don’t come much more hard-headed than Paddy Doyle. The 58-year-old’s skull is a mechanical marvel of screws, staples and titanium plates, an armoured helmet of metal and bone. One of Doyle’s
most prized possessions is a cranial scan that reveals what he believes
is cast-iron evidence of a succession of experimental surgeries illicitly
conducted on his brain while he was a ward of the state. “It’d
make a great cover for a book,” he declared, holding the x-ray
up to the light. “It should be called Screwed! Compassionate
face of an arrogant Catholic Church ... But more,
much more, came out. It was deliberately sadistic, vicious, and institutionalised.
It was not the actions of a few disturbed or psychopathic men and
women. It was the system. Hundreds of thousands of children were subjected
to a regime which, under the United Nations definition, amounted to
torture: daily torture of years’ duration directed against suffering
helpless children who had committed no crime, but were poor or unruly. The
Magdalene Sisters Watch the contribute on YouTube: The Magdalene Laundries: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVLJaa6XYaA What the Irish People and State could do now to enable healing and restitution I was born in
1955 and was brought up in a psychologically and emotionally abusive
environment – my father was a bullying, dominating, angry and
uncaring alcoholic who had the ‘benefit’ of a Christian
Brothers education. Luckily we were not poor and my father was not
physically violent, but, nevertheless four of my five other siblings
have had, and still have, serious lifelong psychological problems
(four have spent various periods in Psychiatric hospitals). I was
lucky to attend a ‘better class’ of single-sex Catholic
school but, nevertheless, have spent the first 50 years of my life
trying to cope with the damaging effects of childhood fear, uncertainty,
guilt, self-doubt and loathing and feelings of being unlovable. Having
grappled with the very deceptive, but soothing, effects on the tortured
psyche of that all-pervasive drug in our society – alcohol ,
I can only now, with healing, leave it behind and begin to relax and
trust life again (having found a really loving partnership). Abused children have 49% higher cancer risk as adults Canadian research
showed adults who were abused as children had a 49% higher risk of
cancer than those who were not. The study team said multiple psychophysiological
factors could be at play in the association between abuse and cancer.
They suggested future research look at cortisol production dysfunction
as a possible factor. Canadian research showed adults who were abused as children had a 49% higher risk of cancer than those who were not. The study team said multiple psychophysiological factors could be at play in the association between abuse and cancer. They suggested future research look at cortisol production dysfunction as a possible factor. Ryan
taboo on warped sexual training of Brothers a cop-out A celibate sex-starved
self-flagellant drags a boy from his bed, interrogates him on his
sexual behaviour, and then ritually flogs his bare bottom for some
alleged sex offence – and the report doesn’t see that
this might have a sexual motivation. Readers around the world are
amused at the report’s unworldliness and dismayed at its evident
unfamiliarity with the extensive literature on the beating of children
for sadistic sexual satisfaction. Abuse
victim challenges rejection by redress board The board, in a written decision dated December 19th, 2008, rejected an application from “Peter” (not his real name) as being late and refused to find exceptional circumstances existed which would have allowed his application. The deadline for
applications to the board was December 15th, 2005. The only exceptions
allowed were for people suffering from a mental incapacity or where
there were exceptional circumstances. Such circumstances were not
defined in the 2002 Act that set up the board. Archbishop
‘couldn’t keep reading’ abuse details It has also emerged that publication of the Dublin Archdiocese Commission of Investigation report may be delayed, in whole or in part, due to ongoing court proceedings involving allegations of child sex abuse against men also investigated by the commission. One such case has been adjourned until November. More:
http://www.paddydoyle.com/archbishop-couldnt-keep-reading-abuse-details/ Paul Murphy reports that the five-volume report by the Child Abuse Commission details shocking cruelty to children: http://www.rte.ie/news/2009/0521/primetime_av.html?2548091,null,230
THE five-volume Report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse is a vast document. It attempts to cover six of the ten 10 years since Bertie Ahern made his public apology to those who had suffered abuse in the industrial schools and, together with Judge Mary Laffoy's Third Interim Report, published in December 2003, it completes the record of the commission's work. It is inevitably
flawed with omissions and misconception evident on a first reading
and with cursory attention to matters of historic importance. Much
of this will come to light as the extensive document is more fully
analysed. At this stage it is worth identifying the inexcusable examples.
By SHAWN POGATCHNIK DUBLIN (AP) — After a nine-year investigation, a commission published a damning report Wednesday on decades of rapes, humiliation and beatings at Catholic Church-run reform schools for Ireland's castaway children. The 2,600-page report painted the most detailed and damning portrait yet of church-administered abuse in a country grown weary of revelations about child molestation by priests. The investigation of the tax-supported schools uncovered previously secret Vatican records that demonstrated church knowledge of pedophiles in their ranks all the way back to the 1930s. More: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hG7UpOwvc_tTJz3KkFUHO9AUBnBAD98A7LA80 By SHAWN POGATCHNIK DUBLIN (AP) — A nine-year investigation in Ireland says Catholic priests and nuns terrorized thousands of children in workhouse-style schools beginning in the 1930s — and the government did little to stop the chronic beatings, rapes and other abuse. The 2,600-page report says several Irish Catholic religious orders covered up six decades of brutality and molestation of boys and girls assigned to their care in special schools, reformatories and orphanages. The commissioners have spent years hearing testimony from thousands of former students as well as from retired officials of church-run institutions. The schools themselves closed from the 1970s to 1990s. Wednesday's report says church officials encouraged ritual beatings and repeatedly shielded pedophiles from arrest. THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below. DUBLIN (AP) — A commission report into the abuse of thousands of Irish children in Roman Catholic institutions is published Wednesday after a nine-year investigation repeatedly delayed by church lawsuits, missing documentation and alleged government obstruction. The Commission
to Inquire Into Child Abuse will release a 2,575-page report in an
attempt at a comprehensive portrait of sexual, physical and emotional
damage inflicted on children consigned to the country's defunct network
of reformatories, workhouses, orphanages and other church-run institutions
from the 1930s to 1990s. The end of a decade of inquiry The Child Abuse Commission will next week deliver its final report, but the greatest difficulty it has faced is the sheer scale of the abuse it was established to investigate, writes MARY RAFTERY A DECADE AFTER
it was established, the Child Abuse Commission is at last to produce
its final report next week. After so many years, and an estimated
cost of more than €70 million, it has been one of the most secret
and arguably the most controversial of the many tribunals of inquiry.
The Commission’s initial presiding judge resigned in protest
at the behaviour of one of the government departments under investigation.
It has produced a few sensations in its time, but given that most
of its hearings have been strictly in private, much is riding on its
final report.
This article reviews the state-of-the-art research in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from several perspectives: (1) Sex differences: PTSD is more frequent among women, who tend to have different types of precipitating traumas and higher rates of comorbid panic disorder and agoraphobia than do men. (2) Risk and resilience: The presence of Group C symptoms after exposure to a disaster or act of terrorism may predict the development of PTSD as well as comorbid diagnoses. More: http://focus.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/abstract/7/2/254 Orthodox
Jewish Community Struggles With Abuse Allegations When
Joel Engelman was 8 years old, he says, he was called from his Hebrew
class to the principal's office at his Brooklyn yeshiva, a Jewish
religious school. His parents had recently told Rabbi Avrohom Reichman
that their son had been abused by an older boy at the school, he says.
Trauma is common
in women; five out of ten women experience a traumatic event. Women
tend to experience different traumas then men. While both men and
women report the same symptoms of PTSD (hyperarousal, reexperiencing,
avoidance, and numbing), some symptoms are more common for women or
men.
THOUSANDS of children were raped and abused by Catholic priests, many of them serial offenders in the Dublin diocese over a 30-year period, a shocking report on clerical sex abuse will reveal next month. The horrendous scale of the abuse between 1975 and 2004 was revealed yesterday by Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin, who urged his priests and Catholic lay people to receive the damning report by Judge Yvonne Murphy with "humility". Archbishop Martin
said that since he took over the running of the country's biggest
diocese five years ago, he had read secret files which he handed over
to the Murphy Commission and had heard the tragic personal stories
of victims. From published statistics and from listening to victims,
it was possible, he said, to name and identify at least 500 paedophile
priests.
Many
patients, whether medical patients or psychiatric patients, feel they Children
must be protected from the will of a conspiring Church HE looked old and he looked wrecked; a far cry from the plump, effervescently supercilious individual in the expensive tailoring who arrived in Cork from Rome in the Eighties. Even then, John
Magee had suffered an Icarus-like fall from grace. He had been at
the dizzy heights of a glamorous diplomatic career in that most complex,
conspiratorial and Machiavellian of institutions, the Roman Catholic
Church. He had served as private secretary to no fewer than three
Popes. What secrets must he have been privy to? What must his influence
have been? How extraordinary must have been his knowledge of the intricacies
of church and state around the world? Should
painful memories be erased? Catholic
bishops: Clergy abuse claims rose in 2008 Church leaders
paid less in settlements, attorney fees and other abuse-related costs.
Still, the amount reached just over $436 million, bringing the total
payouts for abuse to more than $2.6 billion since 1950, according
to studies commissioned by the prelates. Comment
to: Irish Times "Dear
Madam" Bishop
steps down after accusations of child abuse inaction Epigenetic Effects of Childhood Abuse Found in Adults Researchers at McGill University in Montreal have discovered that adult males who were the victims of significant physical and/or sexual abuse as children carried a genetic imprint of that abuse into adulthood. One group studied had committed suicide as adults, while another group consisted of suicides but without childhood abuse. A third group apparently consisted of living adults who had suffered no abuse. Men with significant
childhood abuse showed chemical markers on the glucocorticoid gene
receptor which mediates stress responses in the brain. Researchers
called the finding "quite significant." Childhood abuse
can "literally affect the genome and its operation," according
to researcher Michael Meaney. Slumdog
actor beaten by dad Only days after
walking down the red carpet in Hollywood the ten-year-old film star
was slapped and kicked by dad, Ismail, after refusing to be put on
display like a trophy. Details
of properties to cover abuse compensation revealed THE full details and values of the properties handed over by the Catholic Church in the €128m deal to compensate abuse victims was revealed for the first time yesterday. The Irish Independent
has learned the Church has already handed over several school properties
to the state, including Terenure Secondary School in Dublin (worth
€4.5m) and the Scoil Mhuire secondary school in Ennistymon, Co
Clare (worth €980,000). Germany
faces up to slavery of children in post-war years
Being
foremost a mother has value again. In a discussion with friends I was asked, what was most the most significant part of the Barbara Walters interview with Barack and Michelle Obama. Without hesitation
I named two short but very important sentences that send out a message
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