John Crown (Independent)

I am being courteous to Senator Ó Domhnaill who asked a question of me. Senator Mullen read a densely typed script.

I will put my cards on the table. I was raised a Catholic, I served as an altar boy and I was a member of the Legion of Mary. I received a wonderful education from the Sisters of St. Joseph in New York, the Irish Christian Brothers and Carmelite priests. I never once encountered anything other than extraordinary kindness and responsibility from anybody with whom I interacted. I had a fine education and I was one of the three in four. The education I had gave me an ethnical framework which I carried forward in my life, I will admit, somewhat selectively but, on many of the issues I feel deeply about, I see inspiration in the stories that were told me.

This was the church of Mother Teresa and Fr. Damien who voluntarily exposed himself to leprosy and, ultimately died from that dreaded disease in pursuit of his work with the lepers of Molokai. This was the church of the kindest man in history, St. Francis of Assisi, and of Fr. Max Colby, who put his own life on the line for holocaust survivors but this is a church with a dark side as well. This is the same church that tortured and caused and tolerated to be burned alive Jews and heretics throughout much of its history. This is the church that condoned and facilitated slavery and colonisation. The kindness and abuses existed side by side because it was populated by the same frail humans that populate every other organisation. The abuses did not stop because the church reformed itself; they stopped because humane, civic power grew up around it and constrained its activities to the spiritualist sphere where they should be maintained.

Theocracies, in particular, do not give up power voluntarily. It must be acknowledged that over the past months representatives of the US diplomatic service had to serve civil litigation papers on the Vatican because of child abuse allegations and charges that had arisen in a school for the deaf in Milwaukee. These papers had repeatedly been refused by Vatican recipients and functionaries. When those trying to serve them arrived, they dropped their hands to their sides like a deadbeat dad refusing to take child maintenance orders and said they were not required or desired. Ultimately, those trying to serve them had to go to the diplomatic service to do so. Parenthetically, the lawyers came from a law firm in St. Paul, Minnesota; I love the irony.

In general, we must have rigid, unshakeable civic control over civic functions and the functions of church and State must be separate. There is a bigger lesson to be learned form this. I regret that good colleagues whose judgment I value in many areas have chosen to delete the word "deplore" from the motion. It should be reintroduced and the amendment withdrawn. No word other than "deplore" adequately characterises our feelings for the cover-up by people from an organisation, which despite the great good it has done in many ways, we have seen through history is capable, because it is populated by the same frail humans as these Houses and other organisations, of committing great evil.