IRELAND
Irish Independent
He is misguided but Bishop Kirby doesn’t deserve a Chinese whispers campaign, writes Eilis O’Hanlon
Think of it as the Irish bishops’ raffle. Every month they all put their names into a hat, then whoever’s name is drawn out has to say something incredibly stupid to draw the ire of the anti-Catholic brigade and take the heat off the rest for a while.
This week’s losing raffle ticket belonged to Bishop John Kirby of Clonfert who, in the course of apologising for moving two paedophile priests to different parishes in the Nineties where they went on to abuse further victims, tried to explain his decision by saying in retrospect: “I saw it as a friendship that crossed a boundary line.”
His words naturally provoked howls of protest, not only from victims of clerical abuse, who have every right to be outraged, but also from a host of the usual suspects who really should try harder to conceal their glee at fixing another Catholic priest in the firing line lest it start to look as if they’re enjoying the blood sport too much. They wanted Bishop Kirby to resign. They wanted him censured. Some even wanted him sent to jail. How, they demanded to know, could a bishop fail to understand the difference between child abuse and an inappropriate friendship?
The short answer is: of course he knows the difference. He’s not an idiot. When he spoke to Galway Bay FM about the cases in Clonfert which have been brought to light by the internal audit into the handling of child abuse recently carried out by the National Board for Safeguarding Children, that’s exactly what he was talking about: the two specific cases which came to his attention during the period in question: “I literally thought … that if I separated the priest and the youngster, that it was a friendship that crossed the boundary line. I literally thought if I separated them I would have solved the problem. I have learnt sadly since that it was a very different experience.”
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