I have always found the fact that Roman Catholic (and some high Anglican) priests are called “Father” rather odd. I mean, they are officially precluded from being parents. Having members of their congregations address them a with a more formal version of “daddy” just makes me feel rather uncomfortable.
Amongst the fifteen Jesuits accused of sexual and other abuse of children who were named recently there are several of whom I have never heard. One such man was “Father” Kevin Laheen SJ who died, aged one hundred, in 2019.
The blameless Sir Terry Wogan and “Father” Kevin Laheen SJ at Belvedere House
I now know that Laheen, who has been described to me variously as obnoxious, vain, narcissistic, bullying, clever, talented and shameless, fathered a child with a married woman in 1965. He had met her in the confessional and pursued her outside it, eventually becoming a part-time resident in the family home.
Here he treated the woman’s long-suffering and very devout husband “like a servant” and sexually abused one of her children from the age of about four. Laheen destroyed her family.
The online Jesuit archives give very little detail of Laheen’s career. I know that he taught briefly at his old school, Belvedere, and at Mungret in Limerick. He spent time in the Jesuit retreat houses of Tullabeg in Offlay and Manresa in Clontarf.
A senior Jesuit told one person at Laheen’s funeral that he had been kept away from people in his later years as “he was so unpleasant” and “he behaved obnoxiously”. Clearly he became too much for his minders in Cherryfield in Milltown Park and he died in a private psychiatric hospital.
In the early 1960s a complaint was made to the Jesuits about Laheen’s conduct of a retreat in a girls’ school where his behaviour was reported as inappropriate. In 1999 he was reported to Gardaí for child sexual abuse but the DPP decided that there was insufficient evidence to prosecute.
This is all I know about Laheen but I also know that a former Provincial said to one of my informants that “Marmion was far from the worst of them.” I wonder if he was thinking of Laheen. And I wonder what else this deeply unpleasant man did to other children and to vulnerable adults. I would be most interested to hear from anyone with a story to tell – in confidence, of course.
An interesting and once again a well-written piece this Tom.
The use of the term “Father” is interesting. As Freud observed, the term ‘father’ encourages obedience and respect to an authority figure. Whenever I hear Catholics call a priest by his first name such as ‘Shane’ say, you get the impression that they have a little liberated glow - ‘aren’t I being cheeky’ - going on inside them.
Then reinforcing terms such as ‘flock’ ‘shepherd’ and ‘sheep’ provides a heavy emphasis on obsequiousness.
Related terms I’d like to see introduced are “fleeced” and being “shorn” of authority. Now moving on from the ovine:
I hope it’s okay to raise another thought here about the ‘bad apple’ theory. I came across this paragraph in an article in the Economist:
“Estimates from around the world, from a variety of scholars, have found that 6-9% of priests and members of celibate orders, such as monks, may be abusers. Statistics on the general population are hard to pin down, but Britain’s National Crime Agency estimated that 1-3% of adult men have urges to abuse children; a much smaller share act on their urges.”
July 14th 2022
Using the Economist data, clerical celibates are over 3 times more likely to be pedophiles than the average adult male: 6-9% versus 1-3%.
My own figures for Castleknock and the Vincentians in the 1970’s is higher than this - a small sample admittedly of around 12 or 13 clerics - but it was above a third. At least 4 were pedophiles. All 4 of them escaped censure and 3 have already died comfortably in their beds.
It ought to be feasible to get numbers on the proportion of clergy for some of the orders who have had sexual abuse abuse claims made against them and have this expressed as a percentage of that particular order. I take your point that there are different categories of allegations and some have allegations which already have been considered as ‘credible’ - which is a term I am not greatly enamoured with as the implication is that other accusations are less than credible but I accept that the term ‘credible’ in this context has a specific meaning.
I think the language deployed is often interesting: “father” “credible” etc.
The ‘bad apple’ interpretation is one that needs some - and possible lends itself to - statistical scrutiny and context. A quick AI calculation by ChatGPT suggests over 30 per cent of Jesuits in Ireland were ‘bad apples’. As I said to you before, the term Dutch Elm disease might be a more apt description if that happens to be closer to the pedophile prevalence and such data ought to inform the government’s discussions with the religious orders.
It should not need stating: the higher the prevalence of pedophilia within the orders, the closer we get to recognising wilful negligence and conspiracy by them. It would also suggest long spoons for those dealing with their representatives. A third eh?