The second highest ranking clergyman in Ireland,
Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin, launched a blistering attack last
week on the corruption at the heart of his own church saying that it had
overstepped the mark in Ireland and taken on a role that was
illegitimate.
Martin said that the child abuse
scandal was only a symptom of a bigger malaise at the heart of the
Church. He said it was self-centred and arrogant.
Archbishop
Martin made his remarks during mass at the Church of the Assumption in
Ballyfermot, the former parish of ex-priest Tony Walsh who was jailed
last week for sexually abusing three boys.
They also came a day after
the WikiLeaks revelations that the Vatican was offended by requests for
information from the Murphy Commission into clerical sex abuse.
Archbishop
Martin told parishioners in Ballyfermot, where he grew up, that he had
come to renew his apologies for the church’s hushing up Walsh’s
horrendous catalogue of abuse during the 1970s and 1980s.
“I apologise
unreservedly,” he said.
“As I look back, I see more clearly that the
catastrophic manner in which the abuse was dealt with was a symptom of a
deeper malaise within the Irish church.”
The church
had drifted into a position where “its role in society had grown beyond
what is legitimate”, he said.
“It acted as a world apart. It had often
become self-centred and arrogant. It felt that it could be forgiving of
abusers in a simplistic manner and rarely empathised with the hurt of
children.”
The Murphy Report identified 320 people who complained of child sexual abuse between 1975 and 2004 in the Dublin archdiocese.
SIC: NSS/INT'L