Scottish Catholic Observer

Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny has launched an unprecedented and ferocious attack on the Catholic Church in parliament.

Mr Kenny (above) said yesterday that recent independent Cloyne Report, which claims to have found that allegations of sex abuse by priests in Cork had been covered up by the Vatican, showed change was urgently needed. The Irish government responded to the publication of the report last week by threatening to introduce legislation that would force priests to break the seal of confession and expel the Papal Nuncio to Ireland.

Mr Kenny claimed the report exposed elitism, dysfunction, disconnection, and narcissism in the Vatican and said that the historic relationship between Ireland and Vatican had been changed forever.

“The rape and torture of children were downplayed or ‘managed’ to uphold instead the primacy of the institution, its power, standing and ‘reputation,’” the taoiseach said. “The revelations of the Cloyne Report have brought the government, Irish Catholics and the Vatican to an unprecedented juncture.”

Mr Kenny twice referred to the dismay he felt with the Church as a practising Catholic and said the Cloyne Report was especially significant because ‘for the first time in Ireland, a report into child sexual abuse exposes an attempt by the Holy See, to frustrate an inquiry in a sovereign, democratic republic as little as three years ago, not three decades ago.’

In personal statement, Fr Frederico Lombardi, director of the Holy See press office, said the response to the report had been an overreaction.

“In attributing grave responsibility to the Holy See for what happened in Ireland such accusations seem to go far beyond what is suggested in the report itself (which uses a more balanced tone in the attribution of responsibility), and demonstrate little awareness of what the Holy See has actually done over the years to help effectively address the problem,” he said.

Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin has suggested the Vatican should respond to the Government by reiterating its support for the Irish bishops’ approach to child protection, by supporting the reporting of abuse cases to the Irish authorities and by backing further audits of child protection policies in individual dioceses. He suggested there were ‘cabals’ in the church, either in Ireland or the Vatican, who were refusing to recognise the Church’s rules on child protection.

“What do you do when you’ve got systems in place and somebody ignores them?” the archbishop said. “What do you do when groups, either in the Vatican or in Ireland, who try to undermine what is being done and who simply refuse to understand what is being done?”