The Reward of Failure

John Dardis SJ as an expert in safeguarding

(Photo: Jesuits Ireland)

RTE’s Drivetime aired an important story by journalist Barry Lenihan on 3 October 2024 concerning a senior Jesuit in the Society’s Curia in Rome. You can listen here

John Dardis SJ was Provincial of the Irish Jesuits in 2004 when I revealed that Joseph Marmion SJ – without naming him – was a predatory paedophile and a violent bully. He prepared a statement to be issued if my story gained traction in the media. In the event, it didn’t and the Jesuits simply kept their heads down.

They were eventually forced, by my former classmate Donal Ballance, to admit the truth in 2021. Some of those upon whom Marmion preyed could have been helped in 2004 and were beyond help by 2021. Years of suffering could have been alleviated had the Jesuits had the decency to admit what they knew when Dardis drafted that statement.

And despite the shameful nature of this, the Jesuits and some former pupils appear to revel in the notion that the Order has been clear and open, that it has always been concerned with the truth. This is nonsense. The Jesuits had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, to acknowledge that they had harboured, fostered and protected even, the vile character that was Joseph Marmion SJ.

John Dardis SJ went on to great things after his Provincialate. Some say that he may be in the running to become “the black pope” i.e. the global head of the Society of Jesus, although his handling of the Marmion affair may have scuppered his hopes, or at least handicapped him in the race.

His current titles is General Counsellor for Discernment and Apostolic Planning, having also been Director of Communications in the General Curia of the Society of Jesus until earlier this year.

In March 2024 he addressed a meeting of international delegates who had travelled to Rome for a meeting of the Jesuit Initiative to Promote a Culture of Safety and Protection. The jokes, none of them in particularly good taste, write themselves.

The Irish Jesuits gave the following statement to RTE when approached for comment: “It is our understanding that John Dardis SJ was sharing the learnings from his experience in Ireland with participants at the conference in Rome. The same applies to his work in the Jesuit Curia in Rome, where as Director of Communications, he brought insights he learned in Ireland to the work he has been doing over the past years in Italy.”

I won’t comment on the comment. It speaks for itself.

Donal Ballance wrote to each of the delegates and gave them some context for Dardis’s address and he has kindly allowed me to reproduce his letter here:

23 June 2024

Re: Fr. John Dardis SJ - General Counsellor for Discernment and Apostolic Planning

Dear [Safeguarding Delegate],

I write to you because of your involvement in the Jesuit initiative to Promote a Consistent Culture of Safety and Protection. In March, at a conference in Rome, you and others were addressed by Fr. John Dardis SJ on the topic of communication guidelines when facing cases of abuse.

Providing context for this letter, as a 13-year-old child in 1973, I was sexually abused by Fr. Joseph Marmion SJ, a faculty member of Belvedere College in Ireland. In 2021, following my complaint about Fr. Marmion, the Irish Province issued a statement admitting to their concealment of Fr. Marmion’s crimes. To date, over ninety previously unknown victims have now come forward to describe the devastating impact of this abuse and have received support from the Society of Jesus.

In 2004, a memoir (Muck & Merlot) was published by Tom Doorley, a journalist and former student of Belvedere College in which he described the serial abuses carried out by Fr. Marmion in that school during the 1970’s. The Irish Provincial in 2004 was Fr. John Dardis SJ, also a former student of Belvedere College, and familiar with Fr. Marmion both as a teacher and as a colleague.

Fr. Dardis’s role prior to becoming Jesuit Provincial was as Director of Communications for the Archdiocese of Dublin from 1995 to 2000. His public role during this turbulent period of scandals involving clerical abuse of children (and the Irish Church’s concealments of their abusive clergy), gave him a unique insight into the lifelong damage caused to victims of childhood sexual abuse.

Fr. Dardis became aware of the information concerning Fr. Marmion in Mr. Doorley’s book at the time of publication in 2004. In anticipation of media enquiries, Fr. Dardis and his advisors prepared a draft public statement containing an appeal for victims to come forward. Fr. Dardis and his advisors also decided that the author of the book would be contacted for more information.

Inexplicably, given the disturbing nature of its subject, the chapter pertaining to Fr. Marmion and Belvedere never received media attention. Consequently, Fr. Dardis and the Society never published the draft statement and neither Fr. Dardis nor anyone else ever contacted the author. Nothing more was heard from Fr. Dardis or the Society on the matter from 2004 until 2021, when survivors demanded answers for why Fr. Marmion’s crimes had been concealed for so long.

Fr. Dardis has made an apology for his failure to act appropriately, but the apology has been offered with little more than a vague hypothesis for why he and his advisors prepared the appropriate response but then abandoned that response when the Society did not need to answer to the media.

It is a fact that Fr. Dardis and the Society already knew, prior to the publication of the book, that at least eleven cases of abuse by Fr. Marmion were known of or suspected. Yet Fr. Dardis offers in defense of his lack of action: “The scale and depravity of the abuse by Fr Marmion...was not known.” Oddly, the possibility that eleven victims of Fr. Marmion already existed did not rise to the Society’s benchmark for ‘scale and depravity’. The possibility or probability that many more unknown victims existed, as indicated by the book, never merited any investigation whatsoever.

As a result of the Society’s cynical concealment of Fr. Marmion in 1977, over ninety victims were failed by the Society, and because of the Society’s continued shielding of Fr. Marmion in 2004, those victims were not just failed again, they were abandoned. It would take a further seventeen years and a forced admission to bring any support to these victims, irreparably harmed as children.

I have brought this matter up with Fr. Dardis, with the Irish Provincial Fr. Shane Daly SJ, and most recently with the Superior General Fr. Arturo Sosa SJ. While the facts are irrefutable, there is resistance, at every level of the Society, to demanding anything more accountable than an apology from those who preferred the protection of the Jesuit reputation over the plight of victims. It is my view, as a victim of Fr. Marmion, that anyone involved in this abhorrent subterfuge has no contribution to make in the safeguarding of children or in any response to abuse by the Society.

Since 2004, Fr. Dardis has lectured internationally as an expert on communications around abuse. Perversely, in the one case in which he could have communicated appropriately and expertly to aid victims, he did nothing. Had the Society not been eventually forced to admit to the Marmion concealment, it is unlikely that Fr. Dardis would ever have come forward to admit to his omissions.

Therefore, in consideration of my correspondence and the irrefutable facts of this case, and failing his resignation, I have asked the Society to remove Fr. Dardis from any role that touches on the Society’s PCCP initiative or on the Society’s response to sexual abuse. If the Society’s mission is to be, as Fr. Sosa terms it, a “relentless pursuit of a Culture of Protection”, and the Society and its safeguarding officers are to set an example to others, then the example must surely be set at home.

For over two years, I have followed a respectful protocol in trying to resolve this matter, but I have learned that the Society will continue to defend Fr. Dardis, as it has with delinquent and criminal Jesuits in the past, until a more public outcry demands otherwise. Reluctantly, I am left with no option but to extend the reach of this information, not just within the Jesuit network, but to those media and social media networks whose voices will be more strident than mine can ever be.

Sincerely,

______________

Donal Ballance

Reference Material: Fr. Joseph Marmion - A Narrative Record - Appendix 8, Page 202 - Statement of Fr. John Dardis SJ