Dublin archdiocese says 102 priests suspected of abuse

Dublin archdiocese says 102 priests suspected of abuse

By Shawn Pogatchnik
Associated Press
Published March 9, 2006
Copyright © 2006 by the Associated Press

DUBLIN -- Rocked for a decade by sex scandals, the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland on Wednesday made its biggest admission yet: 102 of its Dublin priests past and present, or 3.6 percent of the total, are suspected of abusing children.

The disclosure precedes by a week the launching of a government investigation into how church and state authorities conspired to cover up decades of child abuse within the Dublin priesthood.

"It's very frightening for me to see that in some of these cases, so many children were abused. It's very hard to weigh that up against anything," said Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, a Vatican diplomat assigned to Dublin in 2003 to address the problem in Ireland's largest Catholic congregation.

Since his appointment, the archdiocese, which is home to more than 1 million Catholics, has been going over the personnel records of more than 2,800 priests who have worked in Dublin since 1940.

The conclusion: 102 are suspected of abusing children, 32 have been sued, and 8 have been convicted of criminal offenses.

The archdiocese already has paid $7 million, including $2 million in both sides' legal bills. Martin says the archdiocese probably will have to begin selling property to meet impending bills for 40 unresolved lawsuits and potential claims from hundreds more.

The government investigation, expected to run for at least 18 months, follows a similar inquiry into clerical abuse in the southeast diocese of Ferns. When the earlier report was published in October, it exposed a catalog of abuse, including a priest who molested a group of first communion girls on the altar but was never punished.

While the church has been on the legal and moral defensive in the United States in recent years, the sense of uproar and disillusionment has been more profound in Ireland, a predominantly Catholic country that once exported priests worldwide. Here, church and state were intertwined until the 1970s, a breakup being accelerated by the abuse fallout.

The first major scandal, in 1994, involved the government's failure to extradite a notorious pedophile priest to the neighboring British territory of Northern Ireland. The government of the day collapsed over it.

In 2001, Prime Minister Bertie Ahern apologized for state agencies' role in prolonging children's suffering and injustice and established a compensation-paying panel that exposed the taxpayer, rather than the church, to most of the bill for victims abused in orphanages, workhouses and other Catholic-run institutions.

Wednesday's report said Dublin church officials had positively identified at least 350 abuse victims and "a possible further 40 persons who may have been abused but who it is not yet possible to identify or trace."