The abomination of child abuse is not a new phenomenon. There was a time when it was accepted as a normal feature of civilised society and – difficult though it is now to believe – as late as the mid-twentieth century it was a subject of music-hall jokes about mincing choir masters and lisping cub leaders. It is therefore not surprising that many Roman Catholic dignitaries regarded their Church as, at best, unlucky and, at worst, the victim of prejudice, when it was excoriated both for the existence of pederasts within its ranks and for the failure effectively to exclude them or ensure that they received proper treatment and punishment. Resentment that the Church’s failings had been so ruthlessly exposed was unjustified, but understandable. After six hundred years of persecution, followed by two centuries of only slowly diminishing prejudice, many Catholics took it for granted that the Protestant world eagerly seized every opportunity to denigrate their faith and its followers.
The bravest Catholics spoke out, and in October 1994 The Tablet was explicit about why the Catholic Church carried an especially heavy burden of guilt:
The effects of sexual abuse in childhood are so pervasive that they may even reduce the ability of the abused person to experience, consciously, the grace of God mediated through the sacraments. This is especially true when the abuse has been perpetrated by some-one who is said to be the representative of God. In such cases it may seem to victims, and others, that the abuse is ‘the will of God’.1
And there was a second reason why the Catholic Church was exceptionally culpable. It compounded the original offences – bad enough in themselves – by the way in which a significant minority of senior clergy reacted to the revelations of the rapes and indecent assaults that were being carried out in their midst.
In the worst cases there was a conscious decision to ignore the offence and, therefore, leave the offender free to offend again. Almost as bad were decisions to protect the perpetrators from prosecution by the civil courts and, in place of the punishment prescribed by law, impose some slight inconvenience – temporary exile from the parish over which they presided, or permanent transfer to another part of the diocese. And there were many senior churchmen – genuinely horrified by the revelations, determined to stamp out the evil and conscious, albeit sometimes in retrospect, that criminal priests must face the law – who argued that the incidence of paedophilia was no greater among the celibate Catholic clergy than among priests and ministers of other religions or the male population in general. In 1994, after Scottish Television broadcast a ‘special report’ on abuse at St Mary’s College in Blairs, Keith O’Brien – Archbishop of Glasgow – asked the Scottish public to ‘try to keep the present episodes in perspective … They are inexcusable but we must always remember that only a small percentage of abusers are Catholic priests.’2 Five years later – after further exposures and allegations that the Church had, at best, been complacent about the incidence of abuse – an angry correspondent complained to The Tablet that a conference of concerned priests had failed to make clear that ‘Catholic clergy are no more likely to abuse than any other section of society or clergy from other religious denominations.’3 That claim may be true – the evidence is inconclusive. And there is no doubt that some of the campaigns of exposure contained scarcely disguised anti-Catholic bias. But attempts to spread the guilt always sounded like a calculated diversion from the basic fact that the offences had been committed, that many of the offences had been left unpunished and, in some cases, the offenders had been left free to abuse again.
The underlying assumption of the Church’s critics – sometimes expressed and sometimes implied – was that the Catholic authorities cared less for the ruined lives of the victims of abuse than for the reputation of the Church itself. The second charge against the Church was a failure to face hard reality. In its cloistered naivety it did not realise that the only way to minimise the damage to Rome’s good name was an unqualified admission of guilt, a clear determination to prevent (as far as prevention was possible) a recurrence of the offences and the establishment of a system which guaranteed that offenders would be appropriately punished.
Some Catholic bishops did react to the exposures with a humble acceptance of guilt and a clear determination to put God’s House in order. Crispian Hollis, the Bishop of Portsmouth, told his diocese, ‘We are at fault … The Church is not the victim in all this – the children are.’4 Kieran Conry, who succeeded Cormac Murphy-O’Connor as Bishop of Arundel and Brighton – and therefore inherited one of the most notorious dioceses – wrote that the Church ‘deserved to be scrutinised and castigated’. Vincent Nichols, Archbishop of Birmingham after the retirement of Maurice Couve de Murville in the wake of a West Midland ‘cover-up’, was more precise and more emphatic in his demands. The Church’s first concern should be the creation of safeguards which prevented abuse as far as was possible, and punished abusers whose inclinations had not been detected.
Both the bishops who were robust in their calls for repentance followed by reform and those who seemed to temporise were subject to pressures which it is difficult for the laity – particularly the laity of other faiths or none – to understand. The Catholic Church was their family as well as their faith, and their instinct was to defend it with whatever flimsy arguments were available. History added to the pressures to cause near-panic. The Catholic Church – which by its nature has a long memory – had suffered from the consequences of an errant priesthood before. The declaration that Martin Luther had nailed to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg had included the denunciation of corrupt clergy. Nearer home, the Dissolution of the monasteries had been justified by stories of fornicating nuns and debauched monks. Cardinal Pole, sickened by the corruption in the sixteenth-century Vatican, had warned that sheep would not follow discredited shepherds.
The consequences of disillusion were not the only result of the calls for exposure and punishment that caused profound concern. There was a general, and justified, fear that feelings were so strong against paedophiles that accused priests would be disciplined before they were given an opportunity to prove their innocence. And there was another – to some Catholics insurmountable – obstacle in the way of implementing the only feasible and effective reform. Suspects, the argument ran, should be immediately suspended and reported to the police in order that the processes of the law could begin. But that law was civil law and the conduct of the priesthood was ‘properly’ regulated by canon law. After five hundred years the question of authority – temporal versus spiritual – had arisen again. Offences committed by previously obscure priests had reawakened the fundamental clash of principle that brought about the Reformation.
The Church’s position on the conflict had been reaffirmed in 1864 – almost exactly a century before child abuse became far too great an international scandal for Rome to maintain the exclusive right to discipline paedophiliac priests. The encyclical Quanta Cura (On Current Errors) left no room for doubt or flexibility. It anathematised ‘wicked, and so often condemned, innovators who dare, with signal impudence, to subject to the will of the civil authority the authority of the Church and of this Apostolic See given her by Christ Himself and to deny all those rights of the same Church and See which concern matters of external order’.5 Any suggestion that the principle had been eroded by time was confounded by a letter, sent in January 1997 to the Catholic Hierarchy of Ireland by the Pope’s envoy to Dublin. It warned the bishops that, if they adopted the policy of automatically reporting pederasts to the police, they would be breaking canon law.
The envoy relied for his ruling on incontrovertible authority. Clarification of canon law in 1917 and in 1983 had condemned the abuse of minors as an offence against ‘the sixth commandment of the Decalogue’ and prescribed a series of punishments including laicisation. But the directive Crimen Sollicitationis had made clear that the discipline must be exercised on the authority of the Church alone and that investigations, indictments, proceedings and sentences must all be kept secret. And those two requirements made it impossible adequately to deal with the growing number of complaints about the conduct of priests in the Catholic Church of nation after nation.
England did not stand condemned alone. The revelations of conduct that was both immoral and illegal engulfed the seminary at Blairs, in Scotland, and Bishop Roddy Wright was caught up in scandal. So was Eamon Casey (the former Bishop of Galway) and the whole Archdiocese of Dublin fell under suspicion. In the United States of America, the National Review Board for the Protection of Children and Young People issued a report which justified its title, The Crisis in the Catholic Church. Allegations were also made against priests in Spain, Holland and Austria. The accusations against German priests were substantiated with hard evidence. Cardinal Ratzinger, then Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, was said to be inundated by complaints from all over the world. He reacted with despair. ‘How much filth is there in the Church even among those who, in the priesthood, should belong entirely to God?’6 He then issued Sacramentorum Sanctitatis Tutela – a revision of Crimen Sollicitationis. It decreed that the Vatican must deal with all allegations against priests, and that both the charges and the subsequent proceedings must be kept secret. That instruction – effectively preventing civil prosecution – provoked a chorus of calls for Ratzinger, by then Pope, to resign. Asked, on television, if the calls were justified, Vincent Nichols, Archbishop of Westminster, chose his words with care. There was no ‘strong reason’ for him to do so.7
The increase in the number of complaints received from England was not, necessarily, the result of an increase in the number of offences. Putting aside frivolous, malicious and financially motivated complaints – the frequency of which was much exaggerated by the Church – the apparent growth in the incidence of assaults was not as severe as it seems. There had been abuse for years. The apparent increase was the result of a greater willingness, among victims and their families, to report offences. Accurate figures are difficult to find. At the turn of the century, when demands for reform were at their height, the Catholic Church itself reported that, in England and Wales, twenty-one priests – out of a total of 5,600 – had been convicted of offences against children during the previous five years, though more prosecutions were pending.8 During 1997 there were 250 claims for compensation – made against the Church on the grounds that it had failed to discharge its duty of care. Most of them were ‘historic’ and turned on the behaviour of two Orders of nuns in two children’s homes.9 The figures for more recent years reflect a willingness to face the fact of regular, if limited, sexual assaults. According to the Chairman of the National Catholic Safeguarding Committee, in 2014 the number of offences (not to be confused with convictions) was at the all-time high of ninety-one.10
During the twenty years since the scandals were first exposed, virtually every diocese in the United Kingdom has been revealed to include – or to have included – an active pederast. Some cases that surfaced years after the offence was committed came to be classified as ‘historical abuse’ – encouraging the suspicion that dozens more cases had been obscured and forgotten. Father Brendan Smyth was gaoled in 1994 for offences committed in Belfast (and reported to the Northern Ireland police) during 1990. In 2004, John Kinsey, OSB – formerly of Belmont Abbey, Herefordshire – was convicted of assaulting schoolboys during the mid-1980s. In 2012 charges that related to assaults which began in 1962 were made against former staff of St Ambrose Christian Brothers’ College in Altringham.
The details of those cases, and many more, were lovingly chronicled in tabloid newspaper articles – including one in the now (happily) defunct News of the World that was largely invention, against which it had been warned by the solicitor most involved with the campaign to obtain retrospective justice for victims of abuse. Two of the stories need to be told in serious detail because – as well as emphasising that the real significance of each assault is the effect it has on the often-traumatised victim – they chronicle the slow progress towards a radical shift in the Catholic Church’s response to allegations of clerical abuse.
The first of the two offences – or, in this case, series of offences – that led to change was committed by Father Michael Hill. In 1997 he was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for abusing boys over a period of two decades. On May 24th 1993, a programme in the BBC’s Everyman series examined events in the Birmingham Archdiocese which, earlier that year, had led to the conviction, for indecent assault on children, of Father Samuel Penney. The court accepted that the offences had been committed over a long period – hence the prison sentence of seven and a half years. The programme also claimed that the archdiocese had been warned about Penney’s behaviour as early as 1984, but had responded only by moving him to a new parish. A spokesman for the archdiocese insisted that the Church authorities knew nothing about offences until late 1991 and that they ‘immediately arranged an investigation’.11 He went on to claim that reporting Penney to the police was prevented by the victims’ families, who were anxious to avoid the attention of prurient newspapers. If that was so, they soon overcame their reticence. After the broadcast, three families went directly to the police and two sued the diocese for negligence.
Maurice Couve de Murville, the Archbishop of Birmingham, said that he felt ‘profoundly concerned for all who had been hurt’ and his spokesman conceded that, ‘with the benefit of hindsight’, the archdiocese agreed ‘that it should have taken legal advice and referred the matter to the police’. In future, when allegations appeared to be ‘well founded … The perpetrator would be placed under custodial care pending charges being made … there is no question of anyone being sheltered from the due processes of the law.’12 The Catholic Bishops’ Committee of England and Wales responded equally positively by setting up a committee to examine how to deal with allegations of abuse and the needs of victims. It came to nothing. Had positive proposals been swiftly put in place, the Michael Hill scandal would not have arisen.
Michael Hill was ordained in 1960 in the Diocese of Southwark and appointed assistant priest in Folkestone. After a brief second ministry at Hove, he joined the Southwark Diocesan Children’s Society and later gained a one-year diploma in childcare from the University of Newcastle. Shortly after the creation of the Diocese of Arundel and Brighton in 1965 he became the parish priest of St Teresa’s at Merstham in Surrey. It was there that suspicions about his perverse inclinations were first aroused. One parishioner – hearing and believing stories of bizarre practices – raised her concerns with the then bishop, Michael Bowen. She later reported the conversation to a solicitor who was seeking damages for the abused boys. ‘He told me that Michael Hill was a priest. Priests don’t behave in that way. As far as the bishop was concerned there was no substance in my complaint.’13 Despite further accusations, Hill remained at Merstham for five years before, ‘as part of a routine transfer procedure’, he was moved to St Edmund Church in Godalming and became a frequent visitor to St Dominic’s, a nearby residential school that was run by the Sisters of the Sacred Heart. The Godalming boys who were assaulted by Hill claim that their allegations were ignored by the St Dominic’s staff. The Church authorities deny that any accusations were ever made, but one complaint undoubtedly reached the authorities. A Godalming parishioner, whose son was one of the priest’s casualties, had received a confession of guilt from Father Hill. She showed it to the new Bishop of Arundel and Brighton – Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, the future Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster.
At a Godalming parish meeting, held on Friday October 3rd 1980, the bishop’s representative announced that Father Hill was moving to another parish. The move was represented as no more than routine, and unrelated to the unrest that his authoritarian manner was said to have caused among the parishioners. For some unexplained reason he was not inducted in Heathfield until early 1981. It was later assumed to be the result of Heathfield’s discovery of his perverse inclinations. Towards the end of his first year in the parish he was sent by the diocese to the Dympna Centre for counselling about his sexual attraction to boys. There is no doubt that the diocese knew about his habits and that the counselling was a failure. He assaulted boys in his new parish.
Hill was removed from Heathfield and spent some months under the supervision of Catholic psychotherapists, who reported to the diocese that he was likely to reoffend. While still receiving treatment, Hill discharged himself and began to seek secular employment. He found a job as an accounts clerk, but in February 1984 wrote to Bishop Murphy-O’Connor, pleading to be allowed to resume what he described as his calling. Murphy-O’Connor agreed to see him. ‘He cried with remorse and begged on his knees to be given some work as a priest.’14 Sentiment triumphed over reason. ‘The post at Gatwick Airport was vacant and I decided that he should go there as I believed there would be no prolonged contact with children on their own.’ The Bishop was mistaken. During his ministry at Gatwick, Michael Hill regularly assaulted young boys. He was convicted of abuse in 1997 and gaoled for five years and, after confessing further offences, was gaoled again in 2002. Murphy-O’Connor pronounced judgement on his own conduct: ‘Of course, I was very wrong.’ Several parents of victims – who shared that view – sued Murphy-O’Connor for negligence. Their claims were settled out of court, on condition that the proceedings remained a secret. To general surprise, the seventy-year-old Bishop of Arundel and Brighton was appointed Archbishop of Westminster.
Within weeks of his elevation the BBC’s Today programme broadcast the results of a long-term investigation into the Hill affair. It included leaked extracts from the previously confidential court documents. It was then that the Archbishop of Westminster was revealed to have admitted that he had allowed a known paedophile licence within his jurisdiction. When the Today programme unearthed what it implied was another example of Murphy-O’Connor’s indolent indulgence – Father Love, who had moved from Glasgow to Arundel following allegations that the police regarded as too insubstantial to warrant prosecution – The Tablet complained of BBC bias, and the Archbishop himself asked priests in the Westminster diocese to read out a personal statement at the end of the following Sunday’s morning Mass. ‘As you know, not only I personally, but the whole Catholic Church in England and Wales has been under attack from some quarters during these past few days … For myself I deeply regret any damage that has been done following a mistaken decision in the past … Failure, of course, has to be acknowledged, but we also recognise the gift of the Lord’s forgiveneness.’15 The statement could not have been less felicitously worded. It contained neither a direct personal apology nor an admission of personal guilt. Relatives of the abused boys were particularly offended by the reference to forgiveness. They were not in a mood to forgive.
The uproar that followed cast a deep shadow over Murphy-O’Connor’s first months’ succession to the much-loved Cardinal Basil Hume, but he seemed quickly to regain his cheerful composure. And what was a temporary catastrophe for him turned out to be a permanent blessing for the Catholic Church. Without the scandal there would have been no decisive action. Because of the weeks of turmoil, Archbishop Murphy-O’Connor set up the Nolan Commission both to examine past errors and to make recommendations on how, in the future, they could be avoided.
It was clear from the start that a Catholic commission, with a majority of non-Catholic members, would not have an easy passage. During the day in which its creation was announced, the Benedictines stated that they would not cooperate. But Lord Nolan – a retired Law Lord who had chaired the inquiry into Standards in Public Life – produced a substantial report, which was unanimously endorsed by the Bishops’ Conference. It acknowledged that the autonomous power of bishops made a unified approach difficult to achieve, but stressed the paramount need for:
a single set of policies, principles and practices … effective and speedy implementation in the parishes, dioceses and religious orders … an organised structure in the parish … a national capability which will advise dioceses and orders, coordinate where necessary and monitor and report on progress … the provision of adequate resources and support for these arrangements.
In practice that meant the appointment of a lay child-protection representative in every parish and the establishment of a National Child Protection Unit to coordinate the local work. In one particular the priesthood would, therefore, have their conduct monitored by the laity – some of whom would be women. That was bad enough in itself, but the proposal that parishes that failed to follow proper procedure should be reported to the appropriate bishop made it worse. Most controversial of all was the recommendation that all allegations should be reported to the ‘statutory authorities straight away without any process of filtering’. That raised the spectre of a priest, who was wrongly accused, facing the ignominy of being assumed guilty until he proved his innocence. All hope of the enquiries being kept secret were dashed by Nolan’s contention that ‘the person against whom allegations have been made may need to be withdrawn from any contact with the child concerned or any other child’. The attempt to soften the blow – ‘It is well understood in professions such as teaching that suspension in these circumstances does not imply guilt’ – only caused more offence. Priests do not regard the priesthood as being comparable to other professions and, in a sense, they are right not to do so. The high hopes of Nolan were not realised because of the unacceptability of an essential principle of any effective child-protection policy. When allegations of abuse were made, the committee could ‘see no grounds for treating clergy differently from lay people’.
To Nolan, it seemed obvious that claims of ‘historic abuse’ should be investigated and, where the accusations seemed justified, subject to criminal proceedings. It was ‘important to treat such allegations in the same way as current allegations’. In both circumstances conviction should, he recommended, be followed by laicisation when ‘right thinking members of the public … would feel that justice has not been done by any other course’. It was, however, not clear that the higher rank of the Church agreed. A plethora of investigations, most of them carried out by the BBC, unearthed a series of new scandals. Father Tim Garret, convicted of possessing indecent photographs of boys, was moved from the Portsmouth diocese to Arundel and Brighton, but remained a priest. Archbishop Murphy-O’Connor was notably unrepentant. Father Maxwell Stuart – accused of indecent assault, but acquitted because of lack of evidence – was judged, after a professional assessment, not to be a paedophile, but unsuitable for work with children.16 Bishop Kieran Conry, Murphy-O’Connor’s successor at Arundel and Brighton, attempted to restrict Stuart’s activities, but felt unable to enforce the rules of conduct to which the priest had previously agreed. The failure to safeguard vulnerable children from potential harm was certainly against the spirit, and arguably against the letter, of the Nolan Report. The Garret case so increased public concern that Cormac Murphy-O’Connor – realising at last the damage that was being done to the Church’s reputation – reacted by arranging for an independent review of the way in which allegations of indecent assault had been dealt with during his time in Arundel and Brighton. It found that ten had been investigated – with a variety of results – and one had been ignored.
The News of the World, conscious of its readers’ salacious appetites, joined in the pursuit of pederast priests and the Church’s alleged inclination to ignore their wrongdoing. The newspaper claimed that, back in 1977, a Father Michael Hollings – a war hero, chaplain to Oxford University and religious adviser to Thames Television – had behaved improperly with a boy put in his care by the probation service. The offences were said to have taken place in the Westminster diocese two years after Cardinal Hume had become Archbishop. So it was possible to implicate Hume by alleging that he either knew and did nothing or that he should have known. Although the newspaper contrived a confrontation between the accused and his accuser, nothing was ever proved and Hollings was given leave of absence, some of which he spent with the Duke of Norfolk in Arundel Castle. It was later discovered that Hollings had been censured by Cardinal Hume – for presiding at a service of blessing for David Frost and Carina Fitzalan-Howard after their registry-office wedding.17 The fact that some of the multiplicity of charges against the Church were unreasonable was of no consequence. Visible action was necessary.
When Eileen Shearer – who was not a Catholic – was appointed head of the Catholic Office for the Protection of Children and Vulnerable Adults it seemed, in her own words, that the Church had ‘listened to Lord Nolan’s recommendations and intends to implement them. It has taken these measures extremely seriously.’18 But what can only be described as institutional obstacles stood in the way of the undoubtedly good intentions. Chief among them was the clergy’s obligation to obey canon law. The main barrier to progress was reinforced by the argument that priests were more vulnerable than were members of other professions to malicious and frivolous allegations, and that they had no association to represent them and defend the unjustly accused.
They did, however, have the support of the National Conference of Priests. At its 2003 meeting, a resolution – carried overwhelmingly – called for canon law to be respected in every detail. Canon law does not empower bishops to suspend priests from duty during investigation. The Conference made the point in defence of priests’ rights. It was quickly taken up by canon lawyers as an irrefutable doctrine. Sacramentorum Sanctitatis Tutela was still in force and must be obeyed. In any case there was no question of implementing Lord Nolan’s proposals. They had not received the Vatican’s imprimatur. Until they did, the report was advisory, not mandatory.
Critics of the Nolan Report added force to their argument by asserting that canon law, properly followed, would have averted the crisis. They insisted – as traditionalists had claimed for five hundred years – that the Church’s problems would be solved by showing respect for established principles and practices, not by inventing new rules and regulations. The opponents of a fresh start argued that sexual abuse of minors is one of the most serious offences in the 1983 Code, one of the gravest delicta graviora for which penal standards, up to and including dismissal from the clerical state, are demanded.19 There was organised opposition to the introduction of a regime that required bishops ‘effectively to renounce their responsibilities under canon law’ and replaced them with action by ‘quasi-judicial bodies’.
There is, however, little doubt that, presented with a straightforward allegation of abuse, most dioceses would – after the new system got under way in 2002 – have reacted in the way that the Nolan Committee had recommended. It was the Church’s misfortune that it became involved in the case of Father William Hofton – the implications of which were far from straightforward. In 2004, Hofton had been arrested and charged with offences committed against two teenage brothers in the 1990s. Westminster – the priest’s diocese – did not know of the 1990s arrest. However, as a result of the publicity attracted by the case, it became known that Hofton had confessed to another ‘historic offence’. Initially the police, who had chosen not to prosecute, had been notified and the priest had been sent for psychiatric assessment. The assessment concluded that there was only a ‘low risk’ of Hofton reoffending and that he should return, under supervision, to parochial duties.
Hofton became an assistant parish priest in Kentish Town in north London. The local child-protection representative was not told of his record, and what little supervision he was under was provided by the parish priest. The discovery of his record outraged active parishioners who believed, with dubious justification, that they should have been told about his past. It also stimulated the newspapers into searching for other examples of pederasts ‘let loose’ in unsuspecting parishes. Several were found. Among them was the case of Father Neil Gallanagh, who – after committing offences in Derry – was transferred to the Leeds Diocese, where he became priest at St John’s School for the Deaf in Boston Spa. It is not clear whether most offence was caused by his appointment to such an unsuitable post or by the idea that Northern Ireland exported its problems to England. The prominence that was given to cases like Hofton and Gallanagh left the Church with no option other than respond to the renewed call to ‘do something’. Since it was not clear what that something should be, Baroness Cumberlege – a Catholic Conservative peer and former junior minister – was asked to report on the effect of the Nolan recommendations on child protection within the Church.
The publication of the Cumberlege Report coincided with the resignation of Eileen Shearer, the head of the Catholic Office for the Protection of Children and Vulnerable Adults. Shearer’s carefully worded statement seemed the less critical of the two documents:
The Catholic Church leaders in England and Wales have undoubtedly risen to the challenge of implementing A Programme For Action. Their serious and consistent commitment to developing sound national structure, policies and practices is very clear and safeguarding vulnerable people is increasingly woven into the fabric of the Church.20
But her encomium was directed towards ‘Catholic Church leaders’ who could take credit for ‘substantial progress at national level’. At local level, the work was seriously impeded by lack of resources and, more important, the principles on which the report was based were either rejected or misunderstood. ‘The task is far from done. If the tensions that have come to the fore in this review are left unaddressed by those in the Church with the authority to deliver, they risk a serious reversal of some of the important gains made to date.’ The problem remained the conflict between the canon-law prescriptions for disciplining priests and the need, under established child-protection policy, to suspend suspects. Baroness Cumberlege suggested that the way to break through the log-jam was the promulgation of an English decree of good practice that was sent to Rome for Vatican recognito. But that assumed that the Nolan Report, with all its implications, would be accepted by the Pope. And the Vatican had been notably reluctant to endorse recommendations which included setting aside a thousand years of precedents.
Scotland too had its scandals. The greatest – or at least the most spectacular – was the admission by Cardinal Keith O’Brien, the Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh, that, in the distant past, his ‘sexual conduct [had] fallen below the standards expected’ of a good Catholic. He resigned as Archbishop on March 3rd 2013, but – as if to confirm that the Vatican’s disciplinary wheels grind slowly – it was more than two years before the Pope, following the advice of a specially appointed personal envoy to Scotland, formally accepted it. Cardinal O’Brien was not, it seems, guilty of abuse as gross as that which had scandalised the Church in England. His victims appear to have been seminarians above what is now the age of consent. But he had clearly taken advantage of his status in a relationship that should have been characterised by his ‘duty of care’, and his offence was compounded by his public pronouncements on sexual morality. Until his exposure, Cardinal O’Brien had been unyielding in his opposition to licence and laxity. That, as much as the fact of his transgression, made his admission and resignation what Tom Devine, Catholic and Professor of History in Edinburgh University, called ‘probably the greatest single blow to have hit the Catholic Church in Scotland since the Reformation’.21
It was not the O’Brien affair that stirred the Scottish Catholic Church into activity. A series of less spectacular scandals had focused the collective mind of the Bishops’ Conference on the need for action. The result was a statement with the comprehensive title Awareness and Safety, published in the year that Cardinal O’Brien offered his resignation. Paragraph 5.4.1 was a positive, and unambiguous, instruction to take action, which some authorities argued was in conflict with canon law. ‘When a child, young person or an adult is at risk of immediate harm, contact the Police and or Social Work Services, giving full information.’ Unfortunately, the hopes of paragraph 5.4.3 – ‘following these steps ensures immediate avoidance of further abuse [and] immediate pursuit of the offender’ – were not realised. In August 2015 after the Scottish bishops had considered the subject again, the statement that was issued by Philip Tartaglia, Archbishop of Glasgow – far from celebrating the success of their established policy – was a literal apology, offered to ‘all those who have been harmed and have suffered in any way as a result of actions by anyone within the Catholic Church. That this abuse should have been carried out within the Church and by priests, takes that abuse to another level.’
There was some suggestion at the time that the bishops had found it easier to condemn past crimes than propose ways of avoiding new ones. But the call for a public apology to victims, which was included in the 2015 report of the McLellan Commission, was its most newsworthy, not its most important, recommendation. The commission – under the chairmanship of the Very Reverend Dr Andrew McLellan, former Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland and Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons – had been set up to examine ‘the current safeguarding procedure within the Catholic Church in Scotland’. It proposed that Awareness and Safety be completely rewritten to reflect ‘best practice’ as it had developed in the intervening years. No one could object to that. Two other recommendations were more controversial – not because of what they urged the Scottish Church to do, but because of what they implied had not been done in the past. The revised instructions for combating abuse must be seen to carry the ‘full authority of the bishops’ conference’ and their implementation must be guaranteed by ‘external scrutiny’. In the Scottish Catholic Church, as in the English, the potentially most effective procedures for combating abuse only work if they have the full support of the parishes and dioceses.
The Scottish Bishops’ Conference gave its unanimous support to the McLellan Report. But that decision, important though it was, should have been overshadowed by the Vatican’s announcement, on June 10th 2015, that the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith – acting on the recommendation of the Council of Cardinals and Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors – had assumed powers ‘with regard to crimes of abuse of office when connected to the abuse’ of children and young people. The Vatican had decided that the time had come to impose sanctions on bishops who chose to ignore their obligations to take swift and decisive action when they were told that priests within their dioceses were guilty – or, indeed, suspected of – sexual assault. And, knowing that good intentions had to go hand in hand with mechanisms that turn hope into reality, the Congregation proposed to set up a new office ‘to work as a tribunal in judgment of bishops who fail to act’.22 Vatican Radio elaborated on the Pope’s role in the implementation of the new policy. He would ‘continue to have final say on the removal of bishops, but he normally accepts the advice of his offices’. The reference – almost in passing – to the possibility of ‘removal’ added an unexpected rigour to the announcement.
The Report of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors was not the only sign that the Catholic Church was increasingly aware of its moral and legal obligation to protect young people against abuse. In England the 2015 report of the National Catholic Safeguarding Committee claimed success in at least part of its work. ‘The working party on pastoral support for survivors has made real progress … We believe we have a model that can be implemented gradually across all our Dioceses and Religious Communities.’
Not ‘will be’ but ‘can be’ implemented. The implied doubt is appropriate to all the measures and mechanisms which the Catholic Church has put in place to identify, whenever possible to deter and in all cases swiftly to act against paedophiliac priests. The policies and the procedures have to be implemented. And implementation is held back by misguided loyalty and the mistaken believe that inaction can avoid damage to the Church’s reputation. But the most important impediment to decisive action remains the reluctance to yield the rights of the spiritual authority, under canon law, to the temporal power. King Henry would understand.