Betrayal Of Trust

By AM Wednesday, March 23, 2011

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Father Brendan Smyth was evil. He raped and buggered children, boys and girls, who came into his life. He often chose the children of families who regarded him as a trusted friend first and foremost. And then secondly as a priest – Chris Moore

We might have seen it all before, known it all before, heard it all before, read it all before, but when it was laid bare before us the behaviour of a criminal class of objectively disordered people in the Irish Catholic hierarchy had lost none of its jolting potency. It can still send tremors to the human foundations.

Brendan Smyth because of intense media coverage was a household name in the 1990s, albeit one that no one would want near their house. He was a notorious child rapist who used his position as a Catholic priest to sexually abuse numerous children. When he was uncovered the Church quickly moved him on, allowing him access to fresh children, and pushing aside with a prayer book and the sign of the cross both the information it had on him and the concerns of those convinced he would rape again.

Betrayal of Trust tells the story of a West Belfast family’s struggle for justice against a cynical Church hierarchy. Smyth, who the parents revered as a trusted friend, had repeatedly abused the three children in the family. What was paraded in front of viewers was a gang of Catholic clerics who could rest easy with the rape of children so long as the good name of the Church was not besmirched. At every step of the way the family was frustrated. Prevarication and procrastination were the standard responses, plus of course, ‘we will remember you in our prayers.’ What a loathsome nest of snakes.

There is one scene which is a classic on how powerful bodies respond to those who refuse to acquiesce in their demands for submission. Anybody who has ever made a challenge to authority or probed further than authority was comfortable with has experienced the standard put down. The journalist Chris Moore was told by a senior cleric whom he needed to interview that he had no interest in protecting children but only in making a name for himself. Chris Moore the self- promoting journo was now the problem not the Church’s rape victims.

How the criminal clerics who covered up, withheld information, browbeat families and victims into silence and tried to keep Brendan Smyth away from court, did not appear in the dock should beggar belief but it doesn’t. The Catholic Church was a powerful institution and even the RUC, an agency with no reputed love for Catholics, walked on eggshells when dealing with Church related controversies. The smarmy pond life that would tell people ‘god bless and get on with it’ must have felt they had got away with it.

The makers of this two part showing framed the culpability of Cardinal Cahal Daly. If their depiction of his role is accurate, here was a man quite at ease lecturing all and sundry on morality, yet prepared to do absolutely nothing to move against a child rapist, preferring instead to shelter behind canon law. Daly allowed the brute to remain in the Church. And with the Church more than willing to protect him from children making accusations, Smyth continued to abuse kids in their schools, their own bedrooms, anywhere he chose to. One girl who complained to a nun in a Belfast orphanage where Smyth assaulted her was battered over the head with a bunch of keys by the female thug who ordered the terrified child to keep quiet. If that tramp was ever publicly identified I do not recall it.

Courtesy of paedophile trafficking by Church authorities, Smyth was even provided with a safe haven in America where he pillaged his way through children there.

At one point a total sense of surrealism emerged when an idiot priest was deeply concerned that Chris Moore’s car should not go unblessed. It was otherworldly. How could a guy like this seriously interact with humanity or tell people how to live their lives? Yet fools of this ilk are foisted upon us as moral guardians.

The Church in Ireland emerged from this dramatisation as a repugnant band of men many of who were guided by criminal intent. The current cardinal Sean Brady failed lamentably when he imposed a vow of silence on two of Smyth’s victims in 1975. It took almost two decades for action to be initiated in the courts against Smyth. Brady must bear major responsibility for this. Yet, like Smyth, he was allowed to remain in the Irish Church and eventually become its leader. Last year Chris Moore acerbicly wrote of Brady:

He heard the heart-rending story of pain suffered by two children. They described to Cardinal Brady just what happened to them … He got them to sign away their freedom of speech. Excommunication if they didn't? And this he says with a straight face is not a cover-up. Silence the witnesses. Isn't that what Hitler did? Preserve the good name of the Catholic Church. Evil wins when good men stand by and do nothing. Perhaps something will prick Cardinal Brady's conscience, but judging by his performance up to now we should not hold our breath … How he can really expect us to accept his assertion that by making the witnesses of abuse by Smyth sign an oath of silence that he is not perverting the course of justice and creating a cover up? His position is untenable.

The defenders of the criminal class within the Church hierarchy will seek to rubbish this dramatisation on the grounds of input by the Hole in the Wall Gang. Tim McGarry of Gang fame was one of the writers. At the heel of the hunt it is so much easier to take the gang of comics seriously than it is the gang of clerics who plied their trade to cover for a rapist in their midst.