SCOTLAND
The Tablet
30 August 2013
The Bishops of Scotland are expected to commission an outside body to examine their child abuse files when they meet next week.
It is understood that they will ask an independent academic expert to assess cases of clerical abuse in dioceses going back decades.
Last week, in a letter to The Tablet, the Archbishop Emeritus of Glasgow, Mario Conti, claimed that Cardinal Keith O’Brien had blocked a planned investigation into the files dating back 60 years when he was President of the Bishops’ Conference of Scotland.
According to a spokesman Archbishop Conti was referring to a meeting of the bishops’ conference in September 2012.
This week the Bishop Emeritus of Motherwell, Joseph Devine, said he believed that Cardinal O’Brien had blocked the review of his St Andrews and Edinburgh diocese’s files because it might have uncovered something that “could prove very damning” for the Church, given that the review went back many years.
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