Pope Defrocks Two Sex-abuse Priests in Ireland

December 17, 2004

Pope John Paul II has defrocked two Catholic priests convicted of sexually abusing children in Ireland.

It's an unprecedented move in this predominantly Catholic nation.

"The diocese confirms that two priests, previously convicted of child sexual abuse, have been dismissed from the clerical state," said the Reverend John Carroll, spokesman for Ireland's southeast Ferns diocese, which has been particularly hard hit by sex abuse scandals.

The church declined to identify either man, but only two priests from the Ferns diocese have been convicted of such abuse: Donal Collins and James Doyle.

Collins received a four-year sentence in 1998 for abusing several boys, while Doyle received a one-year suspended sentence in 1990 for abusing one boy.

The church rarely defrocks priests, even those found guilty of crimes.

But announcements of defrockings have been on the rise since 2002 in the United States, where bishops have suffered the greatest public pressure to crack down on those who abuse children.

While bishops have the power to suspend priests from duty - a much more common practice - only the pope has the power to remove them from the priesthood.

The Vatican provides no global statistics on the number of priests it has dismissed.

In this case, Ferns Bishop Eamonn Walsh sent a file to the Vatican requesting the two men's dismissal, a request granted last month by the pope in what Carroll called "a supreme decision" that cannot be appealed.

The announcement came shortly before the government's expected publication of an investigation into how state agencies and church leaders mishandled abuse allegations in Ferns from the 1970s to 1990s.

In the most prominent case, the Reverend Sean Fortune committed suicide in 1999 while awaiting trial on 66 criminal counts of molesting and raping boys over nearly two decades.

Ferns' previous bishop, Brendan Comiskey, resigned in 2002 after admitting he had done too little to stop the abuse being committed by Fortune and about a half-dozen other priests.

Sex-abuse scandals have taken their toll on the Catholic Church from Canada to Australia. But nowhere has been harder hit than Ireland, which specialised in exporting priests worldwide until the 1980s.

The church's moral standing, Mass attendance and enrolments to the priesthood have plummeted in Ireland since 1994, when the first major scandal involving a paedophile priest triggered the collapse of the government of then-Prime Minister Albert Reynolds.

Since then, both church and state have struggled to come to terms with the scale of abuse being committed by parish priests and in church-run schools, orphanages and workhouses.

Prime Minister Bertie Ahern in 2001 apologised on behalf of the state for its failure to oversee church-run institutions adequately and opened a system for victims to claim financial compensation.

The Residential Institutions Redress Board, which is investigating claims of physical and sexual abuse from the 1940s to the 1980s, said last month it has paid nearly 2,000 claimants an average 77,000 euro ($A135,444) each.

The board estimated it could eventually face up to 7,000 claims and pay out 650 million euro ($A1.14 billion).

As part of a controversial 2001 deal, the church is paying a maximum 127 million euro ($A223.4 million), much of it in properties donated to the state, while taxpayers pick up the bulk of the bill.

But the deal doesn't cover the cost of lawsuits being pursued by hundreds of alleged victims against parish priests and their superiors.

In Ferns, Bishop Walsh last month said the diocese and its insurers had paid out nearly 2.8 million euro ($A4.93 million) to settle 17 cases, but several more are pending.

© 2004 AP