Saturday May 23 2009 POPE Benedict has assured Catholics that he is determined to rid the Church of paedophile priests, according to his personal representative in Ireland.
The assurance was conveyed last night by the Apostolic Nuncio, Archbishop Giuseppe Leanza, who told the Irish Independent that people needed to remember Pope Benedict's "forthright and constant condemnation of child abuse in all its forms".
Archbishop Leanza pointed to the meeting between Pope Benedict and the Irish bishops in Rome in 2006 after the publication of the damning Government report into child clerical abuse in the diocese of Ferns. At the meeting, the Pope instructed them to clean up the Irish Church of any vestiges of abuse.
However, weaknesses in adhering to a zero tolerance policy against pervert priests were revealed in the failure of Bishop John Magee to follow child protection guidelines in the diocese of Cloyne.
When the disgraced Bishop Magee refused to resign several times, Pope Benedict intervened and removed him from office and appointed the Archbishop of Cashel, Dermot Clifford, as apostolic administrator.
Despite Archbishop Leanza's comments, pressure continued to mount last night for the Pope to make a more direct intervention.
Murphy’s commission...
team wrote to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) in September 2006 asking for information about the promulgation of its crimen sollicitationis (solicitation within the confessional) document and any information about child abuse it received from Dublin. The CDF did not reply. Instead, the office, headed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger until he became Pope Benedict XVI in 2005, contacted the Department of Foreign Affairs to complain that the commission had not gone through the appropriate diplomatic channels.
“The commission is a body independent of government and does not consider it appropriate to use diplomatic channels,” last week’s report states.
The following year, in February 2007, the commission wrote to the papal nuncio, the Vatican’s ambassador to
Ireland, requesting all documents in his possession relevant to its terms of reference. Again, no reply.
The commission tried once more. Earlier this year, it wrote to the papal nuncio enclosing extracts from its draft report which referred to him and his office, as it was required to do. That letter too met with silence.
Kardinale Gotspe head Congregation Clerics
May 23 2009
Maynooth 2009:
... The message from the Cardinal and the Archbishop was that the Pontiff had entrusted them with a three-fold task:
taking steps to prevent any repeat of such abuse and
ensuring victims got justice.
Three significant clues as to how the bishops might accomplish this papal mission were elicited in a brief question session. Cardinal Brady had met representatives of religious orders on Sunday evening on his return from Rome to give them the first account of Pope Benedict's wishes.
Firstly, and pointedly, Archbishop Martin dismissed the public's perception of deep differences between the bishops and 18 religious congregations over additional financial contributions to abuse victims.
Secondly, Archbishop Martin indicated there was likely to be a follow-up intervention by the Pope once he had digested the reports being assembled by heads of six departments of the Roman Curia with whom he and the cardinal met in Rome. The driving force will be Cardinal Bertone, the pope's prime minister.
Thirdly, as part of what Archbishop Martin called "soul-searching", the Irish Church will accelerate its installation of a unified child-protection system and embark on a period of analysis of how the Irish Church is now notorious worldwide for the sheer scale of abuse.
To do so comprehensively and transparently will involve academics, psychiatrists and other scientific experts, as well as the abused -- and members of the Oireachtas, the clergy and the Catholic laity -- in the diagnosis of what is now called "the Irish disease".
This will require an opening up of the closed clericalist doors of Maynooth.
But before this can be accomplished, the bishops know that the fuller and grimmer picture is yet to come, with the even more shocking revelations of the abuse and cover-ups that will be contained in the Dublin Archdiocese report.The many bishops I spoke to yesterday did not know when this report would be published, though many of them suspect it may be before the end of June.
And after that there will be the Cloyne diocese report.
The absence of Bishop John Magee from their ranks was a ghostly reminder to them that in the post-Ryan climate of public distrust of the Church, the position of no Lord Bishop is now secure or life-long
Quitting bishop to meet Pope in Rome over abuse scandal
By John Cooney Religion Correspondent
February 10 2010
THE outgoing Catholic Bishop of Kildare will be among a delegation of 24 diocesan bishops attending next week's summit talks at the Vatican with Pope Benedict on the child clerical abuse crisis.
Bishop Jim Moriarty offered to resign two months ago, and Pope Benedict's delay in accepting the resignation came under renewed criticism last night from victim Marie Collins.
Bishop Moriarty formerly served as an auxiliary bishop in the Dublin archdiocese which acknowledged collective responsibility for cover-ups.
Accepting Bishop Moriarty's sincerity, Ms Collins last night questioned why the Pope had delayed so long in confirming this resignation compared with how quickly he accepted the stepping-down of Donal Murray -- another Dublin auxiliary -- as Bishop of Limerick.
Ms Collins also called on Pope Benedict to demand the resignation of the embattled Bishop of Galway, Martin Drennan, for having been part of the church culture of cover-ups operating in the Dublin archdiocese when he was an auxiliary bishop there from 1997 to 2004.
Bishop Drennan, who was named in the Murphy Report, has become a divisive figure in the episcopal ranks after telling Archbishop Diarmuid Martin that he did no wrong and was not resigning.
Summit
"My hope is that Pope Benedict backs the position of Archbishop Martin," said Ms Collins. "If not, there will be no way forward to recovery for the Irish Church. It will be a disaster."
Meanwhile, the Irish Independent last night learned that the Irish Catholic Bishops have retreated to the west of Ireland to seek spiritual guidance ahead of next week's crisis showdown with Pope Benedict. The bishops, led by Cardinal Sean Brady and Archbishop Martin, gathered unannounced yesterday afternoon at the Marian Shrine in Knock, Co Mayo.
Last night, the spokesman for the Bishops' Conference, Martin Long, said the annual two-day retreat was arranged well in advance of the Rome summit. But informed senior church sources told the Irish Independent that the spiritual retreat was also being used by the bishops to prepare for the meeting.
Twenty-four of the 26 heads of dioceses will attend the unprecedented Rome summit.
But absent will be the former Bishop of Limerick, Donal Murray, whose resignation has already been accepted by Pope Benedict; and the former Bishop of Cloyne, John Magee, who last year was removed from office by the Pope after being found not to have applied agreed national child protection rules in his Cork diocese.
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