Child Abuse and Sex Scandals Involving Catholic Clergy

Sex abuse scandals have taken the Church in Ireland by storm in March 2010. There has been tremendous pressure on Cardinal Sean Brady to resign after reports indicating that he did not inform the police about sexual abuse of children by Father Brendan Smyth, who is one of Ireland’s most notorious child abusers.

Sex Scandals inside the Irish Catholic Church

Of course, the Irish Church has been facing considerable embarrassment pertaining to these scandals since the mid-1990s. However, the saga of sex scandals inside the Catholic clergy reached a new high with the publication of two official reports that investigated cases of child abuse by Catholic priests.  The first report is the Ryan report, which investigated sexual abuse of children who were in Church-run institutions. The second one is known as the Murphy report, which had details of abuse by the clergy in the Dublin arcdiocese. Following these reports, the Catholic clergy and its association  with clerical sex abuse has rarely been left out of the Irish news headlines since then. 

The following factors pertaining to the Catholic Church in Ireland has been severely criticized:

• Hierarchical structure
• Ongoing cases of clerical sex abuse that continued to be hushed up due to the desire to protect the institution's reputation
• Canon law and the rule of celibacy for Christian priests

Canon Law Forcing Bishops to Oath of Secrecy

It is an established fact that Canon law, or Church law, lays down that anyone who takes part in its canonical investigation is required to take an oath of secrecy. In fact, this oath has now been blamed for forcing bishops to cover up allegations pertaining to child abuse and sex scandals.

Canon Laws on Child Abuse Were Not Followed

However, experts believe that canon laws were never implemented or respected by the priests themselves while dealing with investigations on child sex abuse involving the clergy. As a result, many offenders were neither prosecuted nor made accountable by the Church.   In contravention with canon laws, those priests who were accused of child abuse did not face a canonical trial nor were they subject to even a possibility of 'defrocking.'

What happened within the Catholic Church was hushed up and these priests were sent for therapy where once they were believed to be 'cured,' they were reassigned to the ministry. The morality and credentials of the Catholic Church is being questioned seriously. The bottom line is that if canon law had been followed properly, fewer instances of child abuse would have been reported.