IRELAND
Crux
The bishops of Ireland say that in the case of a child fathered by a Catholic priest, the priest should not walk away from his responsibilities – legal, moral and financial. The guidelines written by the Irish Bishops’ Conference were written as the Vatican faces a deadline to respond to UN recommendations to “assess the number of children fathered by Catholic priests, find out who they are and take all necessary measures to ensure that the rights of those children to know and to be cared for by their fathers is respected.”
If a priest father’s a child, the needs of the child should be given the first consideration, according to guidelines agreed to in May by the Irish Catholic Bishops’ Conference.
The guidelines have not been published on the conference website, nor on any individual diocesan website, but were obtained by The Irish Times newspaper.
The document – called “Principles of Responsibility Regarding Priests who Father Children While in Ministry” – was written in consultation with Vincent Doyle, an Irish psychotherapist whose own father was a diocesan priest.
Doyle helped found Coping International, which seeks to protect the rights of the children of priests. (Doyle’s story was the subject of a feature last week in The Boston Globe.)
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