LETTERS
The sins of the Brothers
Sir: Kevin Myers's explanation of the sexual habits of Irish priests (Strange habits of Irish priests', 7 October) relies as heavily on what he describes as the post-Vatican II changes that occurred in the Church as on what he calls the sexual revolution of the 1980s and 1990s. I think him wrong on both counts.
In the 1950s and 1960s, child migrant boys were sent from the United Kingdom to Christian Brothers' orphanages in west- ern Australia. These orphanages were run by Christian Brothers whose religious for- mation was typically 19th-century Irish Roman Catholicism: Irish Bishops over them, Marianology, Gregorian chant and fierce Irish nationalism. They were also run by Brothers who were paedophiles. The Christian Brother historian, Barry M. Col- drey PhD, has written a report lodged as evidence in the Supreme Court of New South Wales in a civil action against the trustees of the Christian Brothers. That report is entitled Reaping the Whirlwind — The Christian Brothers and Sexual Abuse of Boys in Australia 1920-1994. A Secret Report for Congregational Executives. It describes how paedophile rings of Christian Brothers operated in the four western Australian orphanages, and how they molested boys, some of them up to 50 each, often the same boys. The report notes that there had been a serious, even pervasive, problem of sexual abuse in the Christian Brothers' Australian provinces since 1920 at least, and it notes that congregational leaders in Dublin and in Rome had been made aware of the abuses but dealt with them internalbe.
Had clerical child abuse been just the product of post-Vatican II theory, church architecture and the sexual revolution, as Myers has claimed, then these abuses from the 1920s would not have occurred. Hun- dreds of English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish boys exiled to enclaves of Irish Roman Catholicism would not have been abused in institutions. Myers's article seems to be say- ing that the choice in the Church now is not Gregorian, but Greg or Ian. I don't think this is so, I think it is a matter of gutlessness. Had the Church's hierarchy not been so gutless about so-called scandal, it would have removed the perpetrators from the occasions of sin and been done with them. The hierar- chy was gutless then, it is gutless now.
Oliver Cosgrove
21 Bendick Road, Coolbellup WA 6163, Australia
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