The Cardinal Connell Files No 1 – Fr McGennis
February 10, 2008 at 12:20 am 1 comment
In 1960, Father Paul McGennis, who was chaplain at Our Lady’s Hospital for Sick Children in Crumlin, sexually assaulted at least two young girls who were patients in the hospital, and took photographs of the abuse. One of his victims was Marie Collins, who was then thirteen. In the late 1970s, the same priest repeatedly sexually assaulted a nine-year-old girl in County Wicklow.
Here is how the Catholic Church dealt with this case. >>>
The Response to the Crimes of Father Paul McGennis
In 1995, Marie Collins complained to the Catholic Church about Father McGennis. Monsignor Alex Stenson, a senior figure in the Dublin archdiocese, interviewed Father McGennis and confirmed to Marie Collins that the priest had admitted sexually abusing her.
However, Cardinal Connell refused to allow Monsignor Stenson to tell the police about this, because Stenson had not warned McGennis that his admission could be used in evidence against him. Cardinal Connell also refused to give the police the Church’s file on Father McGennis.
In 1996, the Irish Bishops issued guidelines about informing the civil authorities about clerical child sex abuse. Later that year, Cardinal Connell met Marie Collins, who accused him of being in breach of the church’s own guidelines.
She said that Cardinal Connell had replied that they were only guidelines with no force in either canon civil law, and that he was acting on legal advice not to co-operate. Connell later said that that what he had said was that the guidelines superseded both canon and civil law.
But Father James Norman, a priest who had also been at the meeting as a support person to Marie Collins, supported Marie Collin’s version of what Cardinal Connell had said.
Father Norman also confirmed that Cardinal Connell had told Marie Collins that she was trying to ruin Father McGennis’s good name over something that had happened thirty or forty years before.
Father McGennis was eventually sentenced to eighteen months in prison for these crimes.
The Cardinal Connell Child Sex Abuse Files
The Cardinal Connell Files No 1 – Fr McGennis
The Cardinal Connell Files No 2 – Fr Payne
The Cardinal Connell Files No 3 – Fr Reynolds
The Cardinal Connell Files No 4 – Fr Walsh
The Cardinal Connell Files No 5 – Fr Naughton
1.
CASNI | July 14, 2011 at 8:00 pm
CATHOLICABUSESURVIVORSNI.COM: typical child abusing priest vile , the problem is not the offender or the crime it has always been the the irish and british goverments unwillingness to apply the law to this unbiblical copy of the one true church as written in the book !!, father d’arcy rightly points out that it was and always is the states responsibility not the church of rome, maybe the penny or dare i say meteorite has dropped.