Bishop Martin Drennan of Galway has said his conscience is clear and he has no intention of resigning from his post at present despite calls for him to stand down as the fallout from the Murphy report continues.
Calls for the resignation of Bishop Drennan, one of five serving bishops named in the report into the handling of child abuse complaints, increased after Bishop of Limerick Donal Murray stepped down yesterday.
Bishop Drennan served as auxiliary bishop of Dublin from 1997 to 2005. He is named in the report in connection to reports of inappropriate behaviour relating to Fr Guido involving male teenagers in 2002 and 2003. In the commission's view "the archdiocese acted correctly in immediately addressing concerns and suspicions in this case".
During an interview on RTÉ's News at One programme today Bishop Drennan said as a bishop he needed to be "a source of unity for the people and priest in his diocese".
“If I couldn’t be a source of unity for the diocese I wouldn’t want to stay on but at the moment I think I am.”
Bishop Drennan said although reaction to a local radio interview he gave this morning was mixed, 80 to 90 per cent was positive.
He said he felt Bishop Murray did the right thing in resigning as “he was no longer a source of healing in the diocese, no longer a source of unity and in that situation any of us would resign”.
Bishop Drennan said on a personal level the whole situation is “distressing” and he couldn’t see any end in sight in the immediate future. “There’s a lot of anger out there even among our very best people and that anger has to be channelled into positive directions.
He said that he wasn’t called to give evidence to the investigation into the handling of clerical child sex abuse and that as far as he knew he had “handled the cases as best I could”.
The bishop said that as not all the information was shared, there may have been situations where he didn’t know the full details but “as far as I know there wasn’t any situation that I should have reported”.
“I’m not claiming to be a saint by a long way, but as far as I remember I handled it as best I could, and I have no regrets of the way I handled events there.”
In response to Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin's public call on Prime Time for those named in the Murphy report "to stand up and accept the responsibility for what they did," Bishop Drennan said he had written to him on the matter.
“I think he said my name was scarcely in the report at all. I can’t clear myself from this case, I don’t know whether Archbishop Martin intended that or not but it has put a question mark over my integrity.”
Bishop Drennan said it would be helpful if Archbishop Martin would clear him from the list. “Now that I’ve responded to him and given him the evidence he needs he might want to reflect on that and see what response he should make to it,” he said.
“I can understand that people are angry, and very good people are very angry because what happened was appalling but taking the route of revenge and forcing resignations is not necessarily going to bring any healing.”
