Experts: Bishops covered up priests' child abuse

DUBLIN — Bishops of the Roman Catholic Church in Dublin covered up decades of child abuse by priests in order to protect the church's reputation, an expert commission reported Thursday after a three-year investigation.

Abuse victims welcomed the commission's report on the Dublin Archdiocese's mishandling of child abuse cases — one of several government investigations into chronic child rape, beatings and other cruelty in Catholic-run schools, children's workhouses and orphanages in 1975-2004.

The government said the investigation "shows clearly that a systemic, calculated perversion of power and trust was visited on helpless and innocent children in the archdiocese."

"The perpetrators must continue to be brought to justice, and the people of Ireland must know that this can never happen again," the government said, also apologizing for the state's failure to hold church authorities accountable to the law.

This is the second major government-ordered report this year exploring how and why Irish authorities permitted widespread abuse of boys and girls at the hands of the Catholic Church throughout most of the 20th century, the gravest scandal in the history of independent Ireland.

The 720-page report — delivered to the government in July but released Thursday — analyzes the cases of 46 priests against whom 320 complaints were filed. The 46 were selected from more than 150 Dublin priests implicated in molesting or raping boys and girls since 1940. Eleven priests convicted of child abuse are named in the report, but 33 are referred to by aliases and two have their names blacked out because they have yet to face justice.

The report rejected past bishops' key claim that they were ignorant of both the scale and criminality of priests' abuse of children, showing that the Dublin Archdiocese negotiated a 1987 insurance policy for future legal costs of defending lawsuits and compensation claims.

At the time, bishops knew of at least 17 priests linked to abuse cases, the report said, and "the taking out of insurance was an act proving knowledge of child sexual abuse as a potential major cost to the archdiocese."

Investigators spent three years poring over 60,000 previously secret Dublin church files. They were handed over by Dublin Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, a veteran Vatican diplomat appointed to Dublin in 2004 with a brief to confront the scandal. Among the files were more than 5,500 that Martin's predecessor, retired Cardinal Desmond Connell, had tried to keep locked in the archbishop's private vault.