THE GRAND JURY REPORT

I have just read the Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report on child sex abuse in the Catholic church in the State of Pennsylvania. I have read the main report which runs to just over 300 pages, and skimmed the rest.

It is a disgusting document, the more so because it is a report by ordinary people who don't mince their words. Their outrage is palpable. The language is simple and direct and, as well as making the report very readable - if you have the stomach for it - increases its impact.

If that seems hard to understand, think about Julianne. She was taught without question that priests are superior to other adults, even superior to her own parents - because "they are God in the flesh." So when one of these flesh gods put his fingers in her vagina, who was she going to tell? Julianne was 14 when she was assaulted; now she's almost 70.

If that is not fairly direct language, I don't know what is. The point being discussed there is why it takes many of those abused so long to come forward and why the law should facilitate them when they do.

The style throughout is more like a conversation than a report. It is very direct and economical but no punches are pulled along the way.

Many readers are reported to have been upset at the sexual abuse passages. I found myself maybe less so. We here have been through so much of this. I was more upset by the reaction of the authorities than the abuse itself.

The report picks out a few examples of abusers from each diocese and retails their history in detail, reproducing original documents, most of which had been stored in secret archives until they were subpoenaed by the grand jury.

A summary version of every abuser is given in an appendix which runs to another 569 pages.

Morgan Costello

I couldn't help feeling I'd like to see a full report, on the lines of their examples, on Morgan Costello - his abusing but also the reactions of his superiors, his use of God and the little black book, his shielding by civil and canonical lawyers, his eventual defrocking, his subsequent accommodation by the diocese, his attempted trial, his death and why his funeral was private and the location of his grave not known.

Like many of the priests in the grand jury report he had direct access to altar boys, except in his initial assignment to the Cenacle convent in Killiney where we were under the wing of Mother Ross, God Bless her.

A narrow escape perhaps.