One younger bishop proposed that all Irish bishops should offer their resignations at a December meeting, reports say. This move would have left Pope Benedict an entirely free hand as to who and when to reappoint.
The proposal did not go down well, meeting with a mixture of bemusement and incredulity, the Irish Times reports.
All of this has a bearing on reports at the weekend that Archbishop Diarmuid Martin had "his wings clipped" at the historic meeting between Pope Benedict and the Irish bishops in the Vatican last week.
While many Vatican observers were said to be alarmed by Dr Martin's absence from the Irish bishops' Rome news conference immediately after the meeting with Pope Benedict, it would be misleading to interpret this as an indication he had lost the pope's backing, according to sources.
However, as the Vatican's own press release admitted when expressing the hope that the meeting would "help to unify the bishops", it is clear the Holy See realises that not all the Irish bishops are on the same page as Dr Martin on the way forward about clerical sex abuse, the Times says.
Vatican sources also say the Holy See is still concerned about Irish church governance.
In that regard, the Holy See would still like to see the Irish church radically reorganised (perhaps through reducing the number of dioceses from 26 to eight) but acknowledges that such a reorganisation has already encountered resistance from the bishops.
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