Sexual Abuse in Catholic Church

Sexual Abuse in Catholic Church

Introduction

After the Catholic famine, the Catholic Church emerged as a powerful force in Ireland and it has continued to exert tremendous influence in Catholic politics and society. In the early years of the Catholic Free State, governments were at pains to prove their loyalty and commitment to the Catholic hierarchy. In 1930 the Catholic government established diplomatic relations with the Vatican, and in elections President W.T. Cosgrave made much of his government's close relationship with the church.

Following a change in governments in 1932, Eamon de Valera, the head of the new Fianna Fail government, publicly declared his intention to govern “in accordance with the principles enunciated in the encyclicals of Pope Pius XI on the Social Order.” Later in the decade, he shared drafts of the 1937 Constitution with the Catholic hierarchy, ensuring that the finished document fully embraced Catholic social teaching. The constitution recognized the “special position” of the Catholic Church in Catholic Society, stopping just short of declaring Catholicism a 'National' religion. Unlike the separation of powers in the United States, Church and State were inextricably linked in Ireland throughout the twentieth century (Mary 2000).

Nowhere was this bond more in evidence than in matters of public morality and social welfare. In fact, the state ceded huge areas of social policy to the care of Catholic religious orders. The majority of Ireland's hospitals, schools, asylums, orphanages, and welfare agencies reported directly to the State and indirectly to members of the hierarchy. The power of the Church in these matters was such that in the early 1950s, Dublin's Archbishop John Charles McQuaid helped undermine a coalition government that dared to enact health legislation providing pre and post-natal care for mothers and children without the consent and approval of the church. The so-called “Mother and Child” bill infringed on what the Church saw as its legitimate remit, and the hierarchy would countenance no such breach of its powers. As recently as the mid-1980s, the Catholic hierarchy wielded enough power to publicly intervene in the constitutional referenda addressing the constitutional ban on abortion and the introduction of divorce legislation. But during the late 1980s and early 1990s the Church's ability to sway public debate on moral and socio-sexual matters declined: contraception was made freely available, homosexuality was decriminalized, and divorce was legally provided for in 1995 (Mary 2000).

While Church influence in Catholic society receded in the 1990's, allegations of church collusion in covering up numerous sexual scandals emerged. Since 1992 the church in Ireland has been beset by scandals that reveal an historic and systemic impulse on the part of the hierarchy to prevent embarrassing controversy regardless of the cost in terms of victims' pain and suffering. This seeming moral contradiction underscores the Catholic public's disillusion with a religious institution once regarded as all-powerful and untouchable. Many locate the origins of this crisis in the public revelations regarding a much loved and highly respected leader of the Catholic hierarchy, Bishop Eamon Casey of ...