THE CATHOLIC Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin has admitted to having felt abandoned at times in his dealings with the clerical child sex abuse issue.
“There have been moments when I thought I can’t handle this . . . At times I have felt very much abandoned. But I’m strong. I’m thick-skinned . . . all I can do is follow my own conscience,” he told RTÉ’s Miriam O’Callaghan.
He was speaking on the programme Miriam Meets , broadcast on RTÉ Radio One last Sunday morning. The archbishop was accompanied on the programme by his brother Séamus, a former foreign correspondent with The Irish Times.
Archbishop Martin said he would “go to the grave with this problem still acute”.
It affected “not just the abused themselves but their spouses and their children today. It’s a huge problem.”
Asked why he appeared to have more empathy for abuse victims than seemed to be the case where many other senior church figures were concerned, he said: “I responded to what I encountered . . . There were times when emotions emerged in me that I never knew I had.”
But, he said, “My dominant emotion on meeting victims is anger.”
He reflected how “a very small number of serial paedophiles in Dublin did extraordinary damage. The numbers they abused are appalling.”
Where the church was concerned, he said it was natural for an institution under attack “to close ranks. But we have to get over that.”
He acknowledged being in “a twilight zone” when he came back to Dublin in 2003 after being the Vatican’s permanent representative to the UN in Geneva. He said: “I didn’t know what I was coming back to as coadjutor . I didn’t know where I was in that twilight zone.”
He added: “I don’t think there was the same awareness” of the abuse issue then. Generally there was “no idea of what it is to meet victims, to listen to them, to hear their stories, to see the devastation that they’ve gone through. That I think was something you couldn’t be prepared for . . . terrible stories people whose lives were ruined. Still are.”
Archbishop Martin also remarked: “In all the discussion that went on there was very little concern for the children.”