TWO IRISH Catholic bishops asked that priests of their dioceses,
stood down from ministry because of allegations of child sexual abuse,
be allowed officiate at weddings or funerals in Dublin, Archbishop of
Dublin Diarmuid Martin has revealed.
It was “sometime back”,
Archbishop Martin said.
The only reason he referred to it at all was to
illustrate the problems that could arise when it came to interpreting
the church’s child protection policies, he said.
It was why the
church’s watchdog, the National Board for Safeguarding Children, had
such “an important role”, he said.
Only such a body had authority within
the church to review decisions and files in such cases and to give a
determination on how they were being handled.
In the two cases
referred to, he said he and both bishops discussed matters and agreement
was reached that the priests concerned remained out of ministry.
Archbishop Martin was speaking to
The Irish Times to answer follow-up questions to his address at Marquette University in Milwaukee, in the United States, on April 4th.
Titled
The Truth Will Make You Free: A Personal Journal , the talk was
a frank account of his experiences in dealing with the clerical child
sexual abuse issue since his return to Dublin in 2003.
In the
address, he said that “within days of the first ritualistic expressions
of regret about what the Murphy report had revealed, people were quickly
encountering a ‘church of silence’.
“No one was accountable.”
Asked about this, he responded, “Am I wrong in that interpretation?
“The
first meeting of priests we had before the Murphy report people said to
me ‘this has nothing to do with us. We didn’t abuse children and we
didn’t cover it up. You did and the bishops did’.”
People
encountered “a church of silence . . . That left me very uneasy. I
didn’t feel it was enough simply to say ‘I didn’t know everything’.” It
was why he went on RTÉ’s Prime Time programme on December 1st, 2009,
after publication of the Murphy report, and said he was “not satisfied”
with responses to that point.
He called on people to “respond
appropriately”. He said, on the programme: “Everyone should stand up and
take responsibility for what they did.”
He told
The Irish Times that in making those comments on
Prime Time : “I was not referring
to any individual. I was
referring to a culture . . . It is a culture we have to look at in the
church, about accountability, in other countries as well.” He was “not
talking about resignations. What [Bishop] Jim Moriarty said was the
classic and very nice formulation of what accountability is about: ‘I
don’t want to exaggerate my role. I don’t want to underestimate my role,
I now realise I should have done something earlier.’ I believe that Jim
Moriarty earned enormous respect by doing that,” he said.
Bishop
Moriarty, a former auxiliary bishop of Dublin, resigned as Bishop of
Kildare and Leighlin following publication of the Murphy report.
Archbishop Martin said that, after his
Prime Time appearance then, he “got noticeable support for doing that, very specifically for doing that”.
He
did not believe the dispersal of diocesan files dealing with clerical
child sexual abuse in the homes of some auxiliary bishops and
chancellors of the archdiocese, and alluded to in his Milwaukee address,
was intended as a cover-up.
“Documents were all over the place and
people not always willing to let go of them,” he told
The Irish Times .