Roman Catholic Church leaders in Dublin spent decades sheltering child-abusing priests from the law and most fellow clerics turned a blind eye, an investigation ordered by Ireland’s government concluded Thursday.

Dublin Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, who handed over more than 60,000 previously secret church files to the three-year investigation, said he felt deep shame and sorrow for how previous archbishops presided over endemic child abuse — yet claimed afterward not to understand the gravity of their sins.

Martin said his four predecessors in Ireland’s capital, including retired Cardinal Desmond Connell, must have understood that priests’ molestation and rape of boys and girls “was a crime in both civil and canon law. For some reason or another they felt they could deal with all this in little worlds of their own.

“They were wrong, and children were left to suffer.”
That report in May sought to document the scale of abuse as well as the reasons why church and state authorities didn’t stop it, whereas Thursday’s 720-page report focused on why church leaders in the Dublin Archdiocese — home to a quarter of Ireland’s 4 million Catholics — did not tell police about a single abuse complaint against a priest until 1995.

By then, the investigators found, successive archbishops and their senior deputies — among them qualified lawyers — already had compiled confidential files on more than 100 parish priests who had sexually abused children since 1940. Those files had remained locked in the Dublin archbishop’s private vault.

The investigators also dug up a paper trail documenting the church’s long-secret insurance policy, taken out in 1987, to cover potential lawsuits and compensation demands. Dublin church leaders publicly denied the existence of the problem for a decade afterward — but since the mid-1990s have paid out more than euro10 million ($15 million) in settlements and legal bills.
It was not until 1995 that then-Archbishop Connell allowed police to see church files on 17 clerical abuse cases. At that time, Connell actually held records of complaints against at least 29 priests, the report found. Connell later pursued a lawsuit against the investigators in an abandoned bid to keep them from seeing more than 5,500 files documenting the church’s knowledge of abusive priests.

The report said all four archbishops sought “the maintenance of secrecy, the avoidance of scandal, the protection of the reputation of the church, and the preservation of its assets. All other considerations, including the welfare of children and justice for victims, were subordinated to these priorities.”

The investigators lauded a handful of priests and mostly low-ranking police who pursued complaints and prosecutions, almost always unsuccessfully, from the 1960s to the 1980s.
The government also apologized for the state’s failure to pursue Dublin priests accused of child abuse until recent years.

Justice Minister Dermot Ahern, who received the Dublin Archdiocese report in July but delayed its publication for legal vetting, vowed that the state would never again treat the Catholic Church with deference.

“A priest’s collar will protect no criminal,” he said.

But pressure groups representing more than 15,000 documented victims of abuse by Irish Catholic officials said the government was not doing enough to end the danger of Catholic child abuse — in part because the law still stops short of requiring bishops to report abuse complaints to police.
And she forecast that, because abused children often do not seek justice until they reach adulthood, children today were still being abused by priests. “It’s very likely in 10 or 15 years’ time that the children who are being abused today will bring forward allegations,” she said.

“As Irish people we like to think we live in a civilized society,” she said, “but we need to hang our heads in shame.”