The Vatican tried to stop Irish church leaders from defrocking a paedophile priest whose abusive behaviour was known about from the early 1970s, a previously censored chapter from a report on clerical child abuse in Dublin revealed today.
Father Tony Walsh, who was imprisoned for raping boys last week, is named in the report as one of the worst child abusers in the Dublin archdiocese.
The chapter describes how church leaders ordered the defrocking of Walsh in 1993 after receiving complaints of abuse over 15 years. The Vatican overruled the verdict …
…priests, canons, monsignors, bishops and even the archbishop of Dublin, Desmond Connell, knew about his behaviour…
…permitted to continue as a priest, even though a report to the archdiocese in 1988 described him as “a very disturbed man who is always going to be dangerous” and “could not be let near schools, children, confession
…a monsignor was outraged at a suggestion that the gardaí be informed of his activities….
You can read the Guardian story here.
You can also read the previously censored chapter 19 of the Murphy report here … and can you possibly guess which organization orchestrated the censorship of this chapter?
What is truly appalling is that the catholic religious cult still claims that they are the exclusive holders of truth and ultimate morality, and that everybody else is born in sin and truly wicked. So when faced with the real truth, the believers dismiss the facts and persist in embracing this myth. When challenged about all this, the church claims, “it was only a few bad priests, not all priests are like that”. That is a morally repugnant claim, because this is not just about the abusers, but also the fact that for generations, the church collectively chose to cover it all up … the net effect of this is that abusers were protected and left free to simply carry on destroying countless more lives. There is also no evidence that anything has changed apart from a little bit of window dressing and PR to take the pressure off.
When faced with claims that Catholicism is in some way moral and good … be skeptical, the cold hard facts that the institution struggled so very hard to suppress tell a very different story.
Think that they have changed their tune and its all different now? Well think again, when the Ryan report was published it was censored. The Ryan report outlined the systematic abuse for generation after generation inside Irish educational institutions run by the Catholic church, but did not name any names. They had a list of over 800 abusers they wanted to name, but the Christian Brothers took the commission to court and forced the censorship … this was just last year. To date not one of these abusers who destroyed so many young lives has ever been convicted … thats true catholic morality for you.
“Abuse was not a failure of the system. It was the system.” – The Irish Times 21-5-2009