Irish church to get much better at covering things up

A damning report into child abuse in the Dublin archdiocese has criticised the Catholic Church hierarchy for being almost comically bad at covering up the abuse.

The report highlighted years of systematic incompetence in keeping things behind closed doors, ensuring the abuse was essentially the ‘worst kept secret in the world’.

“There’s not a person on the planet who doesn’t know that catholic priests have had a reputation for taking a shine to young boys,” said the investigating committee.

“You can show a picture of a priest to a native of a remote Amazonian tribe and they’ll quickly hide all the children.”

“As cover ups go - it’s a pretty spectacularly bad one.”

Examples

Despite the criticism, four archbishops have been held as shining examples of how not to air your dirty linen in public.

“Over a period of twenty years, these clergymen flatly refused to report abusers to the police.  So at least they tried.”

One victim said, “I tried to report it once, but I was told that everybody already knew about it.”

“They said, ‘yes yes, you’re an altar boy - we get it’ everybody knows about this already.  Say a few Hail Marys and be gone with you.”

The Police are one of the few organisations to come out of the investigation with their secret-keeping reputation left intact.

“We found that the police generally considered priests to be above the law,” continued the report.

“And like any good secret-keeper, they quite deftly returned any abuse complaints back to the source, allowing the church to ‘investigate’ and then accidentally leak the details all over the place.”

A church spokesperson told us, “Mistakes have been made, and for that we apologise.”

“This will never happen again - but if it does, I guarantee you won’t hear about it.”

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