Cardinal refuses to resign over child abuse revelations

The leader of Ireland’s four million Catholics has said he will not resign after a documentary accused him of helping to cover up 1970s child abuse by a priest who went on to assault scores of other children.

Cardinal Sean Brady said the BBC documentary, broadcast in Northern Ireland on Tuesday, exaggerated his role in his 1975 interviews of two teenage boys abused by priest Brendan Smyth.

The clergyman yesterday said he gave his report as instructed to his bishop, who should have told Smyth’s religious order leaders. They, not he, had the power to act and failed to do so, he said.

“I feel betrayed that those who had the authority in the church to stop Brendan Smyth failed to act on the evidence I gave them. However, I also accept that I was part of an unhelpful culture of deference and silence in society, and the church, which thankfully is now a thing of the past,” Cardinal Brady said.

His statement did not address why nobody in the church thought to call the police.

Nor did it mention that he, as the canon lawyer in two interviews with the abused children, required both boys to sign oaths of secrecy promising not to tell anyone outside the church of the abuse they had suffered. He previously has argued the oaths were to protect the rights of the children, not the reputation of the church. One of those victims, Brendan Boland, told the BBC that Cardinal Brady and two other priests involved in gathering his 1975 testimony made his father wait outside the room.

Mr Boland, aged 14 at the time, said he told the priests the names of five other boys and girls that were sexually assaulted by Smyth, including a Belfast boy who had been molested in Mr Boland’s presence.

The BBC interviewed all five and found their parents never received any message of warning from the church.

The Belfast victim, whose identity was not revealed, said he had been assaulted for another year, then Smyth turned to his younger sister until 1982, then to four of their cousins until 1988.

Colm O’Gorman, director of Amnesty International in Ireland, said Cardinal Brady failed to demonstrate the moral courage of Mr Boland “who came forward to ensure that no other children suffered like he did”.

“Cardinal Brady is offering the classic excuse of the Nazi death camp guard: I was only following orders. This is coming from an institution that is supposed to stand for love, truth and justice,” said Mr Gorman, who was himself raped by a priest when he served as an altar boy in his native Wexford.

Smyth, who allegedly also abused children in the United States, was imprisoned in Northern Ireland in 1994 after his conviction for molesting four children. He was later convicted of 74 counts of child sexual abuse in the Irish Republic and died in a military prison in 1997.

An Irish support group for child abuse victims, One in Four, said Cardinal Brady once declared he would resign if his actions had resulted in abuse of even a single child.

“The documentary suggests that many children could have been protected from the sexual predator if Cardinal Brady had not been so invested in protecting the church,” One in Four said in a statement.

But Brady, 72, insisted his pledge covered only the years since his 1990s elevation into church management. “In 1975, I was not a bishop,” he said.

He added that it had “crossed his mind” to resign, but he couldn’t justify this, given that he “did what I was expected to do to the best of my ability”.

When asked why he never checked to see what happened to Smyth or to the vulnerable children identified in his report, he said: “I don’t think it was my role to follow through.”