Belfast BT1 1EB

Dear Sir/Madam

The appalling accounts of sexual abuse by paedophile priests which have been revealed in the Ferns Report and in letters to Writeback are still shocking, even though those offences were first reported several years ago. The number of offenders, the years of abuse and the fact that offences were happening both here and in America, have created a burden of shame which the Roman Catholic church will carry for many years.

Equally shocking, however, is the way that the church authorities were more concerned to cover up the crimes and to hide the guilty, than they were to help the victims and to protect the innocent. The church likes to present itself as a parent caring for its family of parishioners, but in practice it acted like a ruthless corporation, protecting its public image and hiding the evidence of abuse.

Let us not forget Crimen Silicitanis. That was a Vatican document sent in 1962 to every Catholic bishop in the world. It required everyone connected to a clerical sex scandal, whether clergy or laity, witness or victim, to take an oath of secrecy, on pain of excommunication. It also required every bishop to maintain the utmost secrecy about the document itself. These actions show that the church was more concerned to protect itself and its own public image than to unmask sexual predators, including paedophile priests.

The recent revelations cast a new light on the intransigence of the Roman Catholic church over integrated education. The church has always maintained that its objections were based on doctrinal matters. Now it seems that it was merely acting out of self-interest. A church which thinks and acts like a ruthless corporation sees integrated education as a threat because it weakens its grip on young recruits. It ignores the benefits to the whole society from having children meeting across the sectarian divide and opts instead for social division and mutual suspicion. It even consigns its own people to decades of second-rate education, as it did between 1922 and 1960, rather than accept any dilution of its power.

It is time that the Government took stock of these revelations and reconsidered its commitment to funding the apartheid system of education that we have here. We have duplicate schools, duplicate administrations and duplicate teacher training, all to satisfy clerical prejudice and all funded out of the public purse. The segregated system is grossly expensive, socially divisive and totally unnecessary. Opinion polls have repeatedly shown that the vast majority of parents would prefer an integrated system. The Government should be listening to them, not to those who put self-interest first.

Les Reid

Belfast Humanist Group