DUBLIN - Dublin Archbishop Diarmuid Martin slammed Irish Catholic orders on Monday for concealing their culpability in decades of child abuse and said they needed to come up with much more money to compensate victims.
The comments from Martin, a veteran Vatican diplomat, were the harshest yet by a Roman Catholic leader following last week's report detailing widespread abuse in scores of church-run industrial schools from the 1930s to 1990s.
Martin said the nuns and Catholic brothers who ran the workhouses must drop their refusal to renegotiate an intensely criticized 2002 agreement with the Irish government over compensation for victims. The orders offered to pay only euro128 million (US$175 million) to the government to be protected from victims' civil lawsuits, while taxpayers are picking up a much larger bill to compensate over 14,000 victims of physical, sexual and mental abuse.
The archbishop -- who leads an archdiocese containing more than 1 million of Ireland's 4 million Catholics -- said in an Irish Times column that the church in Ireland has lost credibility because of its weak response to 15 years of revelations of chronic child abuse within its ranks.
Martin said it was incomprehensible why other church leaders remained "in denial" following a nine-year investigation by a child abuse commission, which published its devastating 2,600-page report last Wednesday.
He said the report documented beyond any doubt "church institutions where children were placed in the care of people with practically no morals." The last of those workhouses for Ireland's poorest children closed more than a decade ago.
The archbishop also accused the orders of reneging even on the amount promised to the government, which is funding more than euro1.1 billion in payouts to victims and their lawyers. Martin said the church's failure to complete transfers of cash, property and land worth at least euro128 million over the past seven years "is stunning."
"There may have been legal difficulties, but they are really a poor excuse after so many years," he wrote.
Martin said the orders must identify "creative ways" to redeem their reputation as educators of the poor.
"In many ways, it is your last chance to render honor to charismatic founders and to so many good members of your congregations who feel tarnished," he said.
The Conference of Religious in Ireland, the umbrella body for the church's semiautonomous orders of Catholic brothers and nuns, declined to respond to Martin's comments. Last week it said none of its members intended to make any additional financial contributions -- provoking a furious response from victims and some politicians, but not from the government.
The Dublin-born Martin, 64, became the church's leader in Dublin in 2004 with a mission to handle the fallout from sex-abuse scandals in the country's biggest archdiocese. Martin previously served as the senior Vatican diplomat at the United Nations and in many international conferences and negotiations.
Martin last month warned Dublin's Catholic faithful they will be shocked and outraged when the next investigation into clerical sex abuse -- in Martin's own archdiocese -- is published this summer.
That Justice Department-commissioned probe seeks to detail how hundreds of priests molested and raped children in Dublin from the 1940s onward while church and state agencies failed to report, punish and stop the abuse.
