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 Timesto 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 Timesthat 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 Timeappearance 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.
