Post #65

Excerpt from Irish Times: Pope retains bishops

DECISION by Pope Benedict XVI not to accept the resignations of Dublin auxiliary bishops Eamonn Walsh and Raymond Field will shock many people. It sends the most contradictory of messages to the faithful about the church’s willingness to reform and is a slap in the face to the man most closely identified with it, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin.

Both bishops, who clearly unwillingly tendered their resignations last Christmas, had protested their innocence vigorously, and supporters have pictured them as scapegoats, sacrificed to a media campaign. It is true they came out of the Murphy report, if not unsullied, certainly less tainted than most of their brothers. Dr Field, a bishop since 1997, gets a passing mild rebuke over one case, and Dr Walsh, auxiliary since 1990, has hinted that his attempts to report crimes to the civil authorities were in some way thwarted by the diocese. But, as he appeared to be referring to a case absent from the Murphy report, it is difficult to verify what happened.

Yet what emerged most clearly from Murphy, beyond the tragedy of individual cases and their cover-up, was the collective institutional failure of the diocese and its managers, a failure for which individual cogs in the machine, however lowly, must take individual responsibility. And both bishops participated at the regular diocesan meetings at which abuse cases were discussed.

On resigning last December the Bishop of Kildare and Leighlin James Moriarty argued rightly that: “The Murphy report covers far more than what individual bishops did or did not do. Fundamentally it is about how the leadership of the archdiocese failed over many decades to respond properly to criminal acts against children ... With the benefit of hindsight, I accept that, from the time I became an auxiliary bishop, I should have challenged the prevailing culture”.

It was a point addressed most emphatically by Dr Martin in a speech to the Knights of Columbanus in May last year. He had been “struck by the level of disassociation by people from any sense of responsibility”. In addition, “while people rightly question the concept of collective responsibility, this does not mean that one is not responsible for one’s personal share in the decisions of the collective structures to which one was part”.

Unfortunately these are benchmarks the Pope has decided not to live up to – yet why then was Dr Moriarty’s resignation accepted? The decision will only cause further disillusionment among the faithful and undermine the authority of the much-admired Dr Martin.

Sources include
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2010/0812/1224276632328.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy_Report
http://www.catholic-hierarchy.org/bishop/bwalsheo.html
http://www.catholic-hierarchy.org/bishop/bfieldr.html
http://www.catholic-hierarchy.org/bishop/bmoriarty.html
http://www.catholic-hierarchy.org/bishop/bmartind.html
http://ncronline.org/blogs/all-things-catholic/why-rome-scorns-resignations-and-great-week-wonks