The archbishop of Dublin was beginning to sniffle.
He could not get through a story about “a really nasty man” - an Irish
priest who sexually abused, physically tortured and emotionally
threatened vulnerable boys - without pulling out his handkerchief and
wiping his nose, writes Maureen Dowd in the New York Times.
“He built a swimming pool in his own garden, to which only boys of a
certain age, of a certain appearance were allowed into it,” Archbishop
Diarmuid Martin told me recently.
“There were eight other priests in
that parish, and not one of them seemed to think there was something
strange about it.”
Two years after learning the extent of the depraved and Dickensian
treatment of children in the care of the Irish Catholic Church — a fifth
circle of hell hidden for decades by church and police officials — the
Irish are still angry and appalled.
The only church leader who escapes their disgust is the no-nonsense,
multilingual Martin.
He was sent home to Dublin in 2003 after 27 years
in the Vatican bureaucracy and diplomatic corps and found the Irish
church in crisis, reeling from a cover-up that spanned the tenures of
four past Dublin archbishops.
I went to see him at his
office in Drumcondra in north Dublin because he is that rarest of things
in the church’s tragedy: a moral voice.
In February, Martin held an unprecedented “Liturgy of Lament and
Repentance” at a Dublin cathedral, where he asked forgiveness from God
and victims of abuse and praised the courage of those who had come
forward.
Wearing a simple black cassock, he helped wash the feet of eight
victims and conceded that the church “will always bear this wound within
it.”
The frustrated Martin has criticized the Vatican’s glacial pace on
reform and chided the church: “Denial will not generate confidence.”
He has mourned the lack of faith among young people in Ireland, where
fewer than one in five Catholics go to Mass in Dublin on Sunday.
(A
victims’ support group is called One in Four, asserting that’s how many
Irish have been affected by the sexual abuse scandal.)
In return for doing the right thing, he has been ostracized by fellow bishops in Ireland and snubbed by the Holy See.