Shamed cardinal’s descent into disgrace
IN 2010, he was the church leader who welcomed the Pope to his home in Edinburgh for haggis, neeps and tatties.
At the time, Cardinal Keith O’Brien said he did not know if His Holiness would respond to long-held concerns about clerical sex abuse in the Church. Given what is now known, the most senior Catholic in Scotland must fervently have hoped not.
Less than three years later, O’Brien’s secret life as an abuser was revealed. It brought a distinguished career to a disgraceful end and paved the way for the independent review of Scottish Catholic Church sex crimes.
The apology which Archbishop Philip Tartaglia offered yesterday to all survivors of sex abuse in the Church was largely the result of the Cardinal’s flagrant conduct over many years until being forced into hiding in 2013. It was in February of that year that O’Brien stepped down from the archdiocese of St Andrews and Edinburgh after three priests and a former priest made allegations against him of inappropriate behaviour. At first, the Cardinal denied any wrongdoing. That only aggravated his crimes.
It was alleged by the former priest that O’Brien made an inappropriate approach to him in 1980, after night prayers, when he was a seminarian at St Andrew’s College, Drygrange. The man, now married, said he resigned as a priest when Cardinal O’Brien was first made a bishop.
In his complaint, he said: ‘I knew then he would always have power over me. It was assumed I left the priesthood to get married. I did not. I left to preserve my integrity.’ Another priest reported inappropriate contact when O’Brien visited him, while a third said he had had to deal with ‘unwanted behaviour’ by the cardinal in the 1980s. The fourth complaint came from a priest who said the cardinal used night prayers as an excuse for inappropriate contact.
At the time, Cardinal O’Brien was supposed to be helping to choose the next Pope after Benedict XVI announced he was to retire. Instead, the outgoing Pope ordered him to stand down at once. The crisis was described by Professor Tom Devine, Scotland’s leading historian and authority on Catholic matters, as possibly ‘the biggest crisis in the history of Scottish Catholicism since the Reformation’.
Worse was to come. As O’Brien slunk into hiding, a former priest said he would sue O’Brien, claiming he had groped and kissed him as a 19-year-old seminarian. O’Brien was also accused of trying to grope a priest in 2003 in Rome at a drinks party to celebrate his becoming a cardinal – and of having a longterm physical relationship with one of the complainants.
This year it was alleged that young clerics were encouraged to let O’Brien hear their confessions and the religious act was used for sexual grooming.
Hard on the heels of the scandal, diocesan ‘safeguarding audits’ detailing abuse from 2006 to 2012 were published, giving a breakdown of incidents reported. In total there were 46 allegations, 55 per cent of which related to sexual abuse.
The painful review, now complete, became unavoidable.