Irish priest: Sex abuse victims lost to suicide could have been saved / National Catholic Reporter

“… criticizing the mentality of protecting the institution which dominated the church’s approach to child abuse in the past …”

One of Ireland’s best known priests, who is one of six clerics in the Irish church censured by the Vatican in recent years, claimed that a number of women who were sexually abused by notorious pedophile Norbertine Fr. Brendan Smyth, later committed suicide because of their ordeal.

“In an interview with the Irish magazine, Hot Press, popular BBC radio presenter Passionist Fr. Brian D’Arcy, says he personally knew ‘young women, who took their own lives because of what Brendan Smyth did to them.’

“Criticizing the mentality of protecting the institution which dominated the church’s approach to child abuse in the past, D’Arcy suggested these women ‘could have been saved, if it [the abuse by Smyth] had been reported earlier.'”

By Sarah Mac Donald, National Catholic Reporter — Click here to read the rest of this story.

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

  1. Leave a comment

Comment here

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: