Top Irish Catholic faces new abuse cover-up claims

The leader of Ireland's 4 million Catholics, Cardinal Sean Brady, faced renewed pressure to resign Wednesday after a BBC documentary accused him of helping to cover up child abuse committed by a notorious pedophile priest in the 1970s. Brady already has admitted he took written testimony in 1975 from two abused teenage boys and gave the report to his bishop, not the police. The revelations became public after victims sued Brady and the church for damages and won confidential settlements. One of those now-adult children, Brendan Boland, told the BBC he also alerted Brady to five other children being abused by the same priest, but Brady didn't tell their parents of the danger. The priest, Brendan Smyth, spent two more decades abusing children in Ireland and the United States before being imprisoned. Boland said his own father had not been allowed in the room when Brady questioned him about Smyth's sexual assaults, contradicting Brady's claim that his father was present. Brady had the 14-year-old boy sign an oath of secrecy - a measure that the church insists was designed to protect the boy, not the church. A prominent Irish support group for child abuse victims, One in Four, said Brady previously declared he would resign if his actions had resulted in unnecessary abuse of even a single child, and should follow through on that promise now. "The documentary suggests that many children could have been protected from the sexual predator if Cardinal Brady had not been so invested in protecting the church," One in Four said in a statement. Brady, 72, is expected to respond to the new allegations later Wednesday. Boland said he told Brady the names and addresses of five children who, like him, had been taken by Smyth on road trips, then sexually assaulted in guesthouses. He said he personally witnessed Smyth molesting one boy from Belfast, while others told him of their dread of being taken on the trips because of the assaults. Unlike the others, Boland quickly told his parents, who went to the church rather than police. The family received verbal assurances that Smyth would be barred from further contact with children. Instead, Smyth's Norbertine order of priests transferred him to a series of Irish and US parishes in what it billed as an effort to deter him from forming "attachments" with particular boys and girls. The BBC said it interviewed the other five now-adult children, who confirmed that they were abused by Smyth and church officials never told their parents. The Belfast victim, whose face and identity were shielded on the program, said he had been assaulted for another year, then Smyth turned to his younger sister until 1982, then to four of their cousins until 1988. When the cardinal's role in the 1975 church investigation of Smyth's crimes became public in March 2010, Brady expressed shame and begged forgiveness at a St. Patrick's Day sermon. But he insisted it would be wrong to resign, because at the time he was only a priest following his bishop's instructions. Brady interviewed Boland alongside two other priests and, on his own, took evidence from a second 15-year-old boy who has never gone public with his abuse complaint. Both boys signed documents promising to tell nobody outside the church. The church in Ireland has suffered 18 years of scandal over its systemic cover-up of child abuse within its ranks. In Ireland, where the church still runs many hospitals and most schools, its standing has plummeted. A recent poll commissioned by Irish priests found that barely a third of Catholics still attend weekly Mass, down from 90 percent before the era of scandals began. Three state-ordered investigations since 2005 have documented how dioceses in Dublin, Wexford and Cork shuttled pedophile priests from parish to parish at home and abroad, and didn't tell police about any cases, until the mid-1990s when the Irish church began to face a torrent of lawsuits. Four bishops have resigned in response to the probes, but others implicated in cover-ups have refused with the Vatican's backing. The Irish government in 2001 apologized for its failure to supervise church-run orphanages and residential schools and established a compensation board that over the past decade has paid more than ?1 billion ($1.3 billion) to 14,000 abuse claimants and their lawyers. A parallel investigation found in 2009 that tens of thousands of children suffered sexual, physical and mental abuse in those workhouse-style institutions, while the church officials inside them enjoyed effective legal impunity, from the 1930s until the last of them closed in the mid-1990s. The latest investigation published last year revealed that a County Cork bishop was still providing cover to pedophile priests as recently as 2008 in violation of the Irish church's own abuse-reporting rules since 1996. Prime Minister Enda Kenny accused the Vatican of driving the culture of cover-up and failing to respond to the investigators' letters seeking evidence. Ireland closed its Vatican embassy in what it billed as a cost-cutting move. The Irish church's first child-abuse scandal centered on Smyth, who was extradited to the British territory of Northern Ireland in 1994 and convicted of 17 counts of child rape, molestation and assault against four children in the same Belfast family. The Irish government of the day collapsed amid recriminations over why it had taken so long to arrest him. Smyth later was convicted of 74 counts of child sexual abuse in the Irish Republic and died in a military prison in 1997. He was never charged with crimes in the U.S. states of Rhode Island and North Dakota, where dozens of his former child parishioners say he molested or raped them. Brady comes from the same Irish border county, Cavan, that was home to Smyth's Norbertine order. Brady was ordained a priest in 1964, received a doctorate in canon law in 1967, promoted to archbishop of Armagh in 1996, and became a cardinal in 2007. As archbishop in Armagh, a Northern Ireland town that is the ecclesiastical capital for all of Ireland, Brady serves as the Catholic Church's senior figure on the island.