SCOTLAND
Telegraph
This is a guest post by Tom Gallagher, professor emeritus of politics at Bradford University and an expert on Scottish Catholicism. Like an earlier post by Prof Gallagher, it will make painful reading for Cardinal Keith O’Brien.
On 8 May Pope Francis took to task worldly figures in the Catholic Church who exploited the authority held by their offices for personal advantage. His words are worth pondering in light of the pit which the Catholic Church in Scotland has fallen into:
“We think of the harm inflicted on the People of God by men and women of the Church who are careerists, social climbers, who ‘use’ the people, the Church, brothers and sisters—those they should serve—as trampolines for their own personal interests and ambitions. But these do great harm to the Church.”
A week before, Keith O’Brien, for a decade a member of the college of cardinals, had shown up in Scotland as if life could continue for him as normal. He had quit as archbishop on 26 February after he had been reported to the Vatican for allegedly inappropriate acts with three priests and one ex-priest in his archdiocese. Legal action was briefly threatened by him and then dropped. Instead, on 3 March he issued a statement admitting that “there had been times that his sexual conduct had fallen below what is expected of a priest, archbishop and cardinal”.
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