Sex offenders are viewed as the lepers in our society and clerical sex offenders are "considered to be among the worst", a Catholic priest has said.
Father Eamonn Conway, head of the department of theology and religious studies at Mary Immaculate College in the University of Limerick, said as an institution the church "must share some blame for sexual abuse by clergy".
Writing in the Furrow magazine, Father Conway said those most angry at clerical offenders were fellow priests. As an institution, the church "must share some blame for sexual abuse by clergy," he said.
He said the fact a priest could continue functioning for years while missing or refusing God's offer of selfless love while supposedly ministering it to others, and desperately compensating for its absence in his life by manipulative sex and power games with little children, meant the institution had failed him.
It was a further failure of the institution that priests operated without "effective systems of accountability", and that priests did not feel they could turn to bishops or fellow priests for help, Father Conway said.
There was "clear and chronic institutional failure" also where priests, when the abuse situation became known, were not dealt with firmly but compassionately, and victims responded to with honesty and sensitivity.
Father Conway said the church also failed "to support the emergence and empowerment of a theologically educated laity that could have challenged these institutional defects".
There was also the appointment to senior positions in the church "of people who lacked the abilities needed to deal with these kinds of issues", he said.
He said the institution of the church had been complicit in the sexual abuse of children by clergy offenders, whether through weakness or sinfulness.
"To state, as John Paul II did last year, that we have been afflicted by the sins of our brothers 'who have betrayed the grace of their ordination' simply does not go far enough.
"As an institution and as a Christian community, we share in the weakness and sinfulness of our brothers.
"They are carrying, along with their own culpability, blame for our sins of omission and commission as well.
"For all these reasons the institution must accept that it has been part of the problem and so must acknowledge its duty of care for clergy offenders," he said.
