Thursday, May 03, 2012

Man abused by Brendan Smyth calls on Cardinal Seán Brady to resign

Seán Brady has been accused of lacking 'moral courage'Sam Adair, who was abused by Fr Brendan Smyth in the period after the then Fr Séan Brady investigated him, has joined calls for Cardinal Brady to resign.

Seán Brady has been accused of lacking 'moral courage'
Cardinal Brady, who is the Catholic Primate of All Ireland, is coming under increasing pressure to step down in the wake of the broadcast of the BBC documentary ''The Shame of the Catholic Church''.

The programme alleged that sexual abuse claims made by then 14-year-old Brendan Boland in 1975 - to a church inquiry - were not passed on to parents of other victims or to gardaí or police.

Mr Adair said that at the time of the investigation, Cardinal Brady was a skilled canon lawyer and not simply a note-taker.

Speaking on RTÉ's Morning Ireland, Mr Adair said that Cardinal Brady should step down and that the church should compensate Smyth's victims.

"This Titanic embarrassment, humiliation and injustice to Catholic children has never, ever, ever been dealt with by the cardinal whatsoever. Maybe someone else could step into the breach here and take this situation and solve this situation," Mr Adair said.

"He knew of five children's names and addresses and to have a rabid paedophile of the Catholic Church visiting those homes and sexually molesting those children, the very, very, very least he could have done was went (sic) and made sure that he slept at night with his clear conscience that the parents of these children knew that this tea-drinking, Marie biscuit-eating paedophile was not lurking around their houses. He did not keep these children from this devil in a dog’s collar."

Mr Adair said that times are different, but that the cardinal's own conscience should have been guideline enough to motivate him to ensure children were not further abused, saying that the cardinal had lacked "moral courage".

"Anybody walking through a park who saw some sort of instance of abuse, surely would have intervened or reported it to the police or made a phone call,” Mr Adair said.

"He done (sic) absolutely nothing and the most important part about this is that this isn't an ordinary man that's walking the streets - an ordinary 4x2. This is a man who is supposed to be the telephone line to God and people are relying on their eternal salvation on him. And this man hasn't even got the moral courage to report the child rape and the abuse of children."

Also speaking on Morning Ireland, Barnardo's Chief Executive Fergus Finlay said he firmly believed that Cardinal Brady should resign.

Mr Finlay said no restoration of the church's authority was possible until people with no association with the abuses of the past had taken over the leadership of the church.

He repeated his assertion that it was nonsense to suggest that sexual abuse was not understood in the 1970s, using his own experiences as an example.

Yesterday, Mr Finlay spoke publically about how he was sexually and physically abused as a child.

He said the sexual abuse took place in 1961 when he was 11 and the physical abuse took place two years later.