The Irish Times – Monday, January 18, 2010
PATSY McGARRY Religious Affairs Correspondent
THE FIRST person in Ireland to have gone public – in 1995 – about his abuse by a Catholic priest has formally left the Catholic Church.
Andrew Madden, who was abused when an altar boy in Cabra parish in Dublin by Ivan Payne, wrote to the Dublin archdiocese before Christmas saying he wished to leave the Church. He received notice of his “cessation of church membership by formal act of defection. . .” from church authorities last week.
He also received a letter, dated January 11th, from Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin expressing sadness at the decision to leave and saying it made him wonder whether the church could learn from it.
In a response to Archbishop Martin at the weekend, Mr Madden said that following publication of the Murphy report, he was “appalled, as I believe you may have been, by the behaviour of your fellow bishops as they did everything to try and hold onto office, four of them failing”.
The bishops “added insult to injury by a collective failure to immediately offer their resignations in acknowledgement of what they had done, or failed to do, and out of respect for the experiences of children sexually abused by Catholic priests in Dublin”.
He continued: “A church whose leading members behave in this way is not a church I want in my life, not even in name only. A church whose bishops shielded paedophile priests is not a church I want in my life.
“A church whose priests congregate to express support for those bishops continuing in office in direct opposition to what many victims asked for is not a church I want in my life. “A church which finds Bishop Drennan acceptable in its episcopal ranks, despite having been part of a church in Dublin between 1997 and 2004 which covered up the sexual abuse of children is not a church I want in my life . . . A church which parades itself as a state when it wants to avoid accounting to the citizens of a country whose children it has abused is not a church I want in my life.”
He said: “No priest will ever preach to me standards his own church doesn’t even try to live up to. No priest will ever comfort me when I am sick. No priest will hear my ‘sins’. No priest will instruct me in penance. No priest will bless my relationship with my beautiful partner, Alan. No priest will pray over my coffin when I am dead. And no priest will bury me in ‘consecrated ground’,” he added.
He recalled that in 1983, the church in Dublin decided he was not suitable for the priesthood.
“Two years earlier the same Catholic Church had allowed Ivan Payne to continue as a priest despite knowing that he had sexually abused me for 2½ years when I was aged 12-14 years.”
Martha: yours 20.01.10
Like Andrew Madden and Paddy Doyle, I was an altar server at one time. I was pressed into service not because I was a little holy Joe – I certainly wasn’t – but because I could parrot all that Latin mumbo-jumbo. The priesthood must have seemed a logical career move for some altar servers. But it wasn’t for me. Missionary priests of St Columban visited my school regularly, fishing for recruits for Ireland’s mission to the Far East.
I was about ten years old when they first tried to recruit me. The priesthood had certain attractions for Irish boys with otherwise limited horizons. It was promoted to me as a rather glamorous career offering the opportunity for foreign travel. Join the priesthood and see the world, as it were. And not only see the world, but save the world for Jesus. Somebody had to bring the benefits of Irish civilisation to all those Chinese savages and it could be you –so I was told. What more worthwhile career could there be?
The missionary recruiter showed me glossy brochures with pictures of smiling priests working with Chinese children. He gave me copies of an illustrated magazine called The Far East containing stories about Irish missionaries saving children from ignorance and damnation. I was instructed to take this literature home and discuss my possible vocation with my parents. The priest said that he would visit my school again soon and that in the meantime I should listen for the voice of God. I hadn’t a clue what he was talking about but I was too polite to ask.
My parents were educated secularists. They had high ambitions for me, and so did I. And those ambitions did not include converting China. My family and I found the whole idea a big hoot. When the recruiter next visited the school he asked me if I had heard the call from God. For some reason, I felt I had to humour this priest. I said I’d been listening but I hadn’t heard anything from God. The priest looked disappointed but continued with his sales pitch – more glossy pictures and more tales about the evil communists in China. I told him that I wanted to be an astronaut when I grew up. I can still see his downcast expression. Ireland’s mission to China had to manage without my talents. I’m still awaiting the call from NASA.
Recruitment drives in the schools were scarcely necessary in those days because there were always more aspirants than posts – even though the RC church was probably Ireland’s largest employer. It was very big business indeed. By the 1960s the Irish Church boasted a huge workforce: 6000 priests, 13,000 nuns and 2000 Christian Brothers in Ireland, plus 6,500 missionaries in 70 countries and 4,400 priests ordained for service in English-speaking countries. The numbers were largely maintained from among the brainwashed children in Ireland’s national schools.
The Ireland of my childhood was a failed State. By the late 1950s the revolutionaries who came to power by violence in the 1920s had made the country unfit for human habitation. The country’s economy was on the rocks. The works of nearly every modern writer were banned. Three quarters of the country’s children left school at 14 barely literate. The country was imprisoning ten times as many children per head as England. Ireland’s best and brightest were deserting the country at the rate of 40,000 a year. By 1961, the population had reached its lowest point since 1841 (about 2.8m).This appalling country, which routinely abused and neglected its own children, had the deluded arrogance to think that it was destined to save the children of China. Thousands of brainwashed Irish boys must have grown up nursing an ambition to make China Irish. Nobody ever remarked the insane absurdity of that imperialist dream.
All Irish children are indoctrinated in superstition and nationalist dogma. If we are ever to be fully human we have to free ourselves from that childhood brainwashing. We each do it our own way and in our own time. Evidently some take longer than others to throw off the yoke – and most never do. I was fortunate in being able to reject the ideology of my oppressors at an early stage in life.
For all its pretence of progress, Southern Ireland remains largely a nation of brainwashed RC zombies inhabiting a medieval past and with ambitions to spread its culture of ignorance and cruelty worldwide. Irish missionaries are now more active than ever before.
Jim Beresford, former Artane child prisoner 14262, Huddersfield, England
jim.beresford@btinternet.com
Hello Martha, Welcome to Planet Earth. Firstly, the fact of my wanting to become a priest goes right back to early childhood and has nothing to do with my upbringing, I had a vocation. Secondly don’t call my parents ignorant. Thirdly I didn’t ask the Church if I could leave – I instructed them to ammend the baptismal record to note my formal defection from the Church and further instructed them to confirm when this had been done, no one needs permission to leave. Now fuck off back to lala land.
Andrew Madden.
Andrew
Thanks for your formal action and public statements. Good for you, good for all.
Paddy’s comment on a desire to be a priest is something quite ‘natural’ I believe.
Normality could be the condition you know through your formative years. Normality to an African child might mean being a witness to famine and genocide. To an Irish child, it might mean witness/prisoner to child prisons, torture, abuse and deliberate destruction of childhood in any form available. Normality might/did mean peers who are a constant and immediate dander to you.
At the time of transition to a new phase in life, leaving an institution/abusive home or major change of some kind as young person, you become aware of the deep seated risk of going into a world that might in fact be worse than the normality you have come to know. In this respect, it would be therefore be logical to play out the option mentally of rejoining in some form the very very organisation that tortured you. Better the devil you know.
That’s my experience also and my tuppence worth.
RB
from N.Germany, home of Martin Luther the Great.
I’m not here to speak for Andrew or for anyone else for that matter. What I can say Martha is that I too wanted to become a priest when I was young. I was an altar boy and took great pride in what I saw as the status it afforded me. I fail to see why you make reference to Andrew’s parents and even to blame them for what he wanted to do. I wonder what you’d make of my wish to become a priest when both my parents were dead by the time I was four years old. And incidentally, I don’t or didn’t have to “validate my parents” ignorance” Could it possibly be that I was “validating my own ignorance” as a young boy? I very much doubt that Martha.
“He recalled that in 1983, the church in Dublin decided he was not suitable for the priesthood.”
Whilst I admire Andrew Madden, he must ask himself WHY he wanted to become a priest as a teenager? Surely, he should be asking his own mother why he was so inclined???
I too was born and bred in Holy Catholic Ireland, but I wouldn’t dream of “asking” the Catholic Hierarchy (The Vatican) for their permission to leave their organisation. I mean, its not as if Andrew joined their club on a voluntary basis. So why validate his parents ignorance?
Good for you! I will do the same and anyone that was in the Gulag, that is still involved with that lot is in bad need of help or being paid. William Delahunty
Andrew,
You have put it into words how I feel about the church. I admire what you have done.
May
For anyone who wants to leave the Chruch formally go to http://www.countmeout.ie/ Since CountMeOut was set up over 5900 have downloaded the forms. All it takes is three easy steps……..
If you have not formally left they still count you as one of “theirs” and it’s from there they derive political clout.
Andrew, we are many who will follow you out of darkness and in to the light.The one thing the Catholic Church fears most has begun, a revolt by the laity . Defection and revolt, two words worth bearing in mind and which we will see through out these coming months. The absence of a revolt by the catholic laity so far can only be explained by the shock of realising that their church is kidnapped by very sinister and evil men and women.
I agree Paddy.
I will write to the Bishop in my area tonight.
Andrew, you are to be commended. Perhaps there are more of us that should consider your move and shake up the “doddery old men in skirts”. I salute and I support you. Paddy.