Irish Bishop Resigns Amid Scandal

BELFAST, Northern Ireland –– A Roman Catholic bishop announced his resignation Monday after admitting he hadn't done enough to stop a pedophile priest in his diocese, becoming Ireland's most high-profile casualty from sex abuse scandals.

Bishop Brendan Comiskey said he had tried but failed to control the Rev. Sean Fortune, who committed suicide in 1999 before his planned trial on 66 criminal charges of molesting and raping boys over nearly two decades.

Church superiors accepted the resignation of the 66-year-old Comiskey, who had overseen the southeast Irish diocese of Ferns since 1984 and was widely regarded as Ireland's most popular bishop. Comiskey, who will remain a priest, said he would personally present his resignation to the Vatican later this week.

Cardinal Desmond Connell and Archbishop Sean Brady, Ireland's two senior Catholics, said Comiskey's decision reflected "deep human suffering, both of victims of abuse and of himself."

They expressed their own "profound apologies" for the suffering caused by pedophile priests, a scandal unveiled in Ireland in 1994 and replicated in several other countries.

"The sexual abuse of children by priests is an especially grave and repugnant evil," Brady and Connell said in a statement. "It is a scandal which has evoked entirely justified outrage. The sexual abuse of children by priests is totally in conflict with the church's mission and with Christ's compassion and care for the young."

Fortune's victims said they wanted the Irish government to mount a wider inquiry and, potentially, to seek criminal charges against Comiskey and others who allegedly protected abusers.

Some politicians agreed, arguing Comiskey had long known about Fortune's perversions and done far too little.

Avril Doyle, a senator in Comiskey's home County Wexford, said locals knew details of three other priests in the area who had been accused of sexual abuse but had yet to face any charges. She said parishioners had seen files on Fortune "stacked from the floor to the ceiling" in Comiskey's office that should be handed to police.

Health Minister Micheal Martin, Justice Minister John O'Donoghue and Attorney General Michael McDowell scheduled a meeting this week to discuss prospects for a government inquiry and possible prosecutions.

One of Fortune's accusers, Colm O'Gorman, said he and five others would press ahead with a civil lawsuit naming Comiskey and Pope John Paul II as defendants.

In his resignation statement, Comiskey stressed that Fortune had been identified as a problem before he became bishop. He said he had tried to do the right thing but, in retrospect, had fallen short.

"I found Father Fortune virtually impossible to deal with," Comiskey said. "I confronted him regularly; for a time I removed him from ministry. I sought professional advice in several quarters, I listened to criticisms and praises, I tried compassion and I tried firmness. Treatment was sought and arranged.

"And yet I never managed to achieve any level of satisfactory outcome," he said, adding, "I should have adopted a more informed and more concerted effort in my dealings with him, and for this I ask forgiveness."

Pressure mounted on Comiskey after the British Broadcasting Corp. aired a documentary March 19 on Fortune's accusers titled "Suing the Pope." The program blamed Comiskey for not doing enough, and filmed him refusing to answer questions.

Comiskey provided the documentary team a letter saying he wanted to talk to abuse victims privately but would not take part in a TV show that could be "misrepresented as arguing in public against the survivors."

The program, to be broadcast Tuesday on Irish state television, accuses Fortune of driving four boys to commit suicide. It includes video footage of the priest having sexual contact with an unidentified 15-year-old boy who, the program says, used the video to force the priest to end his abuse.

Comiskey has remained a popular figure among the Catholic faithful in Wexford. At St. Aidan's Cathedral, he received a standing ovation from worshippers after giving a sermon about Easter's hope of resurrection and rebirth.

"Standing on today's pretty barren landscape, I, too, believe that the green grass of Easter is coming again, but only to humble and broken hearts," he told the congregation.

A skilled communicator with a folksy manner and good sense of humor, Comiskey had weathered previous personal scandals.

In 1995, he dropped from sight for five months after Irish newspapers reported he had made more than one solo trip to Thailand and stayed in a Bangkok hotel known for prostitution, including sex with underage boys.

Comiskey later said he had stayed at the hotel, but was on an innocent vacation and hadn't known about its seedy reputation. He also revealed he had been treated for alcoholism in the United States. That admission won him sympathy, but didn't allay suspicions about his Thailand travels.

TIME Magazine--Europe Edition: April 1, 2002/Vol. 159 No. 13

Sins Of The Fathers

Under fire for long ignoring sexual abuse of children by some of its priests, the Roman Catholic Church is now initiating a "culture of vigilance" to protect youngsters and restore its moral authority.

BY KATE NOBLE/LONDON

Colm O'Gorman is suing the Pope. Although his allegations of abuse against Father Sean Fortune led to legal proceedings against the priest on 66 counts of sexual, indecent assault and sodomy, O'Gorman has yet to receive an apology from the Catholic Church. He is also suing Fortune's bishop, Father Brendan Comiskey, who was reportedly first informed about allegations against the priest in the early 1980s, but nevertheless allowed him to continue to minister in the southern Irish town of Fethard-on-Sea.

The reluctance of the church to acknowledge the crimes of its representatives has forced O'Gorman and others to resort to the law. There have been many cases across Europe against men of the cloth who have abused their positions within communities to gratify their pedophile inclinations. The Vatican has only recently begun to admit that it's been slow to recognize the problem. In November last year Pope John Paul II used the Internet to issue a document that contained apologies to victims of sexual abuse by members of the clergy. And last week the Pope issued a 21-page letter saying that the church "shows her concern for the victims" of priests who have succumbed "even to the most grievous forms of the mysterium iniquitatis [mysterious evil] at work in the world."

At the presentation of the Pope's letter Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos, head of the Vatican Congregation for the Clergy, implied that, because of the cases in the U.S., the sex scandals were a problem only in English-speaking countries. But recent revelations in the Pope's homeland show that the problem is more widespread. In February, the Polish daily Rzeczpospolita published a story alleging that the Archbishop of Poznan, Father Juliusz Paetz, made a habit of sexually assaulting young clerics from the local seminary. According to the report, Paetz's behavior became so notorious that the rector of the seminary, Father Tadeusz Karkosz, forbade the archbishop to visit the college.

But the allegations were not new. The paper charged that Paetz's inclinations had been known for at least two years, with several students quitting the seminary after they claimed to have been molested. A month after the allegations first appeared Paetz issued a pastoral letter saying, "I deny all the information presented in the media."

In common with many other abuse cases, the church seemed unwilling to take action against one of its own. However, in a landmark case in France last year, Father Pierre Pican, Bishop of Bayeux-Lisieux, received a three-month suspended sentence for failing to inform the police after Father René Bissey confessed to him that he was sexually abusing children. Bissey was jailed for 18 years in 2000 for raping one boy repeatedly and abusing 10 others betwen 1989 and 1996. Pican's defense claimed that the bishop had been motivated by his priestly obligation to keep Bissey's remarks secret, even though Bissey admitted his actions outside the confidentiality of the confessional.

It has been the unwillingness of the Catholic hierarchy to take action on abusing clergy that has stored up problems for the church. In the case of Fortune, a BBC TV program last week alleged that he was abusing boys over a 20-year period, a situation that was so widely known that his parishioners complained about his predatory behavior to Bishop Comiskey's predecessor, Bishop Herlihey, as well as to the Vatican's ambassador to Ireland, the Papal Nuncio, and ultimately to the Vatican itself. The only result was that Fortune was moved from one parish and then sent off to study media communications in London and to seek psychiatric help.

If the church was unwilling to act, the state has sometimes stepped in. Since September 2000 people who had attended Ireland's 52 Industrial Schools until they were closed down in the 1970s have been giving evidence of the abuse they suffered to committees of enquiry set up by the Irish government. Some 3,000 men and women have come forward with stories of physical and sexual abuse against members of the Christian Brothers, the Sisters of Mercy and the Oblates of Mary Immaculate. Jacinta Madden, a lawyer working for a Dublin-based firm representing over 700 claimants, says that "the church is defending its stance very strongly, which is a little ambiguous, because recently they contributed $110 million to the fund for compensating these people." With the threat of legal action looming, the Christian Brothers took full page advertisements in the national press in March 1998 to apologize to anybody abused by members of the order.

That was one of the first acknowledgments that showed how concerned the church has become, feeling that its moral authority has been undermined and recognizing that its clergy has been severely demoralized by the seemingly endless allegations. In England and Wales, the church has set up the Catholic Office for the Protection of Children and Vulnerable Adults. This body is based on a report into tackling pedophile activity in the church made by a former Appeal Court judge, Lord Nolan. In presenting his report, Nolan said he hoped that it would "help to bring about a culture of vigilance where every single adult member of the church consciously and actively takes responsibility for creating a safe environment for children and young people."

The new body is chaired by the Archbishop of Birmingham, the Most Reverend Vincent Nichols, who believes that "We were behind with our understanding of pedophilia." He acknowledges that "the learning curve over the past 15 years has been very steep," but is sure that the new body will "not lag behind best practice, and in fact be a model for it." Now the French church has created a consultative committee on sexual abuse against minors and has taken its first action: advising the removal of Father Gérard Mercury from his parish in Bordeaux after he had been convicted of molesting minors for a second time.

Despite the attempts by the church to put its house in order, the underlying attitude of denial still makes it difficult for victims of sexual abuse to come forward. "Twenty years ago that bastard raped me," grieves a tormented O'Gorman, "and I am still now forced to be in a position where I have to fight to get somebody to acknowledge what they did or didn't do. It's not good enough." Given the opportunites that church has had in the past to deal with priestly crimes, there is the suspicion that it is only the lawyers' intervention that has brought action.

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