The Spiritans are not very willing

And their tone is grudging

The Spiritans, the clumsily rebranded Holy Ghost Fathers, have decided to be “accountable at this time for what happened in another time.” When this is translated into English, it means something like “it seems that members of our congregation raped boys in the past and although these events have nothing to do with us, we have been shamed into offering some compensation.”

When I said to one of their victims that the tone of statement by the head of the Spiritans, Brendan Carr, was grudging at the very least and added that they are obviously very slow learners, he responded with “They will never learn.”

I see what he means.

“Child sexual abuse is a devastating crime. It shatters the lives of victims and causes deep and lasting harm to families and friends,” he blathered in what seems to be an afterthought and possibly using a form of words drawn up by the Spiritans PR company.

He then sympathises with the staff of Spiritan schools. “Too often, you have found yourselves having to respond to situations in which you had no involvement and over which you had no control,” he said.

Er… well, yes. The sexual abuse of children happened in your schools. And the reputational damage – because that’s what Carr is talking about – is only to be expected. There may well be adequate child safeguarding measures in place these days in these schools, but you have to own up to what happened in the past. It happened to your “brand”.

I understand that when Leonard Moloney SJ was agonising over the question of naming Marmion, one of the loudest voices arguing against came from Belvedere, decades after he last taught a class there. And even one of those who had played a role in Marmion’s downfall expressed concerns to me about the reputation of the school if the monster were publicly acknowledged for what he was.

Doubtless there are Spiritans who feel depply ashamed of the Order’s failure to protect children but I have a feeling that Carr is not one of them. Perhaps I am wrong. I hope so, but he says that the Spiritans have, until now, “engaged through what we understood to be the standard mechanism available – legal negotiations conducted between legal representatives for the Spiritans and the persons making the legal claims”.

In other words, anyone who was sexually abused – raped in many cases – by Spiritans were welcome to seek compensation through an adversarial system in which the Order’s lawyers had a duty to fight tooth and nail to save the Spiritans money. That was the standard mechanism available if you wanted to make it as hard as possible for victims - even in just coming forward. It was not a mechanism informed in any sense by Christianity or, if you like, the Holy Spirit.

Given this, it strikes me that the Spiritans didn’t give a toss about victims until now and their new-found concern is rather hard to credit. Carr says “we Spiritans believe we have a moral and collective obligation to respond to and offer atonement”. But they knew of the accusations, of the abuse, for many years, and yet refused to acknowledge it. So yes, clearly, they didn’t give a toss about the victims.

So, when did they have this Damascene conversion? Last week? Last month? Or when they realised that they would be shamed into it?

I have no doubt that the Jesuits were advised by a legion of lawyers and PR people but their expression of regret at what Marmion had been allowed to do, and its cover-up, sounded sincere.

What the Spiritans are saying, in effect , is “it all happened a long time ago and it has nothing to do with us and we’re not made of money.”