Chapter 19
If you want to give yourself a shock, just search for Tony Walsh on Google News and behold the torrent of Irish coverage. Then start to read some of it. Read Mary Raftery’s article in the Irish Times.
Archbishops, bishops, chancellors, vicars general, parish priests – the list of senior clerics who knew of Walsh’s serial sexual abuse of children is virtually endless. From the very first complaints brought to the archdiocese, a bare two days after Walsh’s ordination in 1978, and for the succeeding 17 years, these pillars of the church sat on their detailed knowledge of Walsh’s abominable predations on children, shielding him from the law, deliberately deciding to keep his crimes hidden from the civil authorities. In the course of those 17 years, until the archdiocese finally decided in 1995 to co-operate with Garda investigations, Walsh abused well over 100 children according to the chapter published yesterday. Here we find out that archbishops Dermot Ryan, Kevin McNamara and Desmond Connell all had detailed knowledge of Walsh’s criminal activities.
…
Bishop Eamonn Walsh (a trained barrister, incidentally) was sufficiently well-aware of the criminal nature of Walsh’s activities to know that he should be reported to the Garda; and second, that Bishop Walsh did not report him, and nor of course did any of his fellow bishops. It consequently shows an extraordinary detachment from reality for Bishop Walsh to have claimed last year that merely suggesting that gardaí be informed of crimes committed in some way excuses or exonerates him from responsibility for his part in the culture of cover-up in the Dublin archdiocese.
Senior people. Masses of them. With detailed knowledge of what Walsh was doing. And they sat on it. For seventeen years.
Amen.
I knew it was bad but I’m still shocked by this. Ugh, I feel sick.
The blow-by-blow account at the RTE link must be read in full. It’s bloody horrific. From the very beginning already, when this pops up:
And from there it just keeps going on and on and on. It beggars belief that these bastards could keep on knowingly sacrificing helpless children to the same predator for years, in the name of nothing other than protecting the reputation of their rich, powerful and manipulative organisation. The few who wanted to do the right thing knew they’d be shouted down; the only individual perpetrator is Walsh, the rest were following company policy. The Church is too obscenely wealthy for it to have to declare Chapter 11 any time in the next few generations, but in the meantime it mustn’t be allowed to live down Chapter 19.
This one is also a must-read:
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2010/1218/1224285836856.html
Not just a must-read, a must-think deeply about all the ramifications of it.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Skeptic South Africa, Ophelia Benson. Ophelia Benson said: Chapter 19 http://dlvr.it/BgX9z […]
I can no longer be shocked by anything done within the influence of religion. The thing is, religion can’t ‘progress’ within itself without effectively destroying itself. And so the only way religion seems to preserve itself nowadays is to become more authoritarian and fundamentalist. This allows villains such as Tony Walsh to exploit religious systems for their own evil motives. Religion spreads evil because it is by nature about power and deception. Of course consequently, it also spreads ignorance and stupidity.
Thanks for that link Stewart.
‘He was in loads of houses in Ballyfermot and nobody knew.’
Unimpeachable evidence, if more were needed, that there was never any limit to the duplicity. None of it is shocking at this point, but it remains troubling how obvious it is that the attitude of the bishops, particularly early on, is that this is just how some priests are. Maybe just how some men are; the longer I live, the more I’m forced to accept that perversity is dirt common. But only within the Church are victims made to understand, by a trusted institution, that their seeking justice would be sinful.
Nobody knew… but… now we know that all through the recent scandals and exposures and the way the Church in Ireland and the Vatican have responded to them – well, now we know that they knew damn well that Tony Walsh was going to explode on them at some point. All their reactions thus far ought to be re-examined now in the light of that knowledge.
BTW, not that I expected to find anything on Tony Walsh at the Vatican website, but they do have a search function, according to which they have yet to acknowledge the existence of the Murphy Report. I suspect the closest they were able to get to it was this opening sentence from an article in the Dec. 15 issue of “L’Osservatore Romano:”
and people look to this church for moral guidance? Unfu**ing believable.
The more they follow the Church’s actual example, the more crime we’re going to see (and the very nastiest sorts, too).
This needs to be addressed and the Church persued for damages. However, as with most Church abuse cases everything is retroactive.
The child abuse now taking place, and which is fast increasing in frequency, and about which we can do something is not being addressed.
The numbers of child brides, for example and the instances of FGM, all of which are increasing exponentially in Western countries, are never ever talked about.
Walsh needs to be prosecuted, if that hasn’t already hapened, and some Church property sold off to pay indemnities to the victims.
HOwever, that’s the ernd of it. They guy was ordained nearly 33 years ago, and appears to have been put out of commikssion 15 years ago, and so all that’s left to do is to compensate his victims. Everything else about this is history.
On the other hand, instances of child-brides and FGM are only just beginning, are “sanctioned” by god and holy “scripture” and with virtually uncontrolled immigration will soon be so widespread as to make us all nostalgic for Irish Catholic pedophiles.
If any of you can understand french, you ‘ll be very interested by what was being said at this conference that took place in Paris on the weekend. It is absolutely depressing, and the direction things are taking make me wonder if, in another 30 or 40 years, and with the complete collapse of Christianity, it’ll still be possible to publically proclaim one’s atheism and secularism. When the religious parameters, the rules, change so radically a public proclamation of secularism becomes a blasphmous and criminal act, one requiring the death penalty.
Sorry for the french.
http://www.bivouac-id.com/billets/suivez-en-direct-les-assises-internationales-sur-lislamisation-sur-internet/
Oh really.