There is hardly shock at revelations by the Jesuits that 15 of the congregation’s deceased members were likely to have been child abusers. Those are in addition to Fr Joseph Marmion, revealed as such in 2021, as well as Fr Paul Andrews and Fr Dermot Casey, both named as abusers by the congregation last year.
It follows a disclosure that the Jesuits are looking at files of 37 deceased members who have faced abuse allegations over the past 70 years, with the congregation saying they are not casting doubt on the credibility of people who alleged abuse by others but that more evidence is required.
These latest disclosures follow a now-familar pattern when it comes to the cover-up of child abuse by members. As the Murphy commission put it in its November 2009 report, following an investigation into the handling of clerical child sex abuse allegations by the Dublin Archdiocese, “the focus was on the avoidance of scandal and the preservation of the good name, status and assets of the institution and of what the institution regarded as its most important members – the priests”.
So it has been with the Jesuits, with the broader institutional Catholic Church, and with other churches too, as we’ve seen recently in the Church of England.
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However, the Jesuits are unique among Ireland’s religious congregations in taking the initiative to publicly name probable child sex abusers from among their own ranks. In so doing, they have ventured into fraught territory, which brought down the first iteration of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse in 2003, leading to the resignation of its first chair, Ms Justice Mary Laffoy.
Her reasons for resigning as chair of the commission included lack of co-operation by the Department of Education but also a High Court action by the Christian Brothers to stop her naming deceased members as abusers in the commission’s final report.
Subsequently the commission, chaired by Mr Justice Seán Ryan, succeeded in getting the Christian Brothers to drop their legal action by agreeing not to name deceased members as abusers in the commission’s final report, published in May 2009.
Clearly the spur behind the Jesuits taking this somewhat different route has been its new provincial Fr Shane Daly (51), appointed in February 2023. A late vocation, ordained just 10 years ago in 2015, he is of a different generation to many predecessors.
In February last year he set up an independent working group “to consider and advise upon the criteria to be applied by the Jesuit Order when deciding whether to publicly name a deceased Jesuit who was the subject of child sexual abuse allegations”.
The group is chaired by retired Supreme Court judge John MacMenamin, with psychotherapist/psychologist Dr Rosaleen McElvaney and social work adviser Paul Harrison.
What is of particular interest is how this group arrived at a decision to publish the names they did from the files of 37 deceased Jesuits looked at. Their selection followed the application of criteria which included the detailed nature of allegations made, the number of complainants, reports of the abuse made to other (mainly civil) agencies, contemporary concerns expressed by third parties, witnesses, and admission by an alleged abuser.
Each member of the group acted independently of the other two when carrying out an assessment of each file. In subsequent discussions, the group arrived at “a high degree of consensus” on the names to be published. So the working group concluded, based on information available to date, that 14 of the deceased alleged abusers could be named publicly. The Jesuits themselves added another name.
