IRELAND
The Irish Times
[Commission of Investigation Report into the Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin (Murphy Report) via BishopAccountability.org.]
Archbishop says not enough was done to help priests after the report’s publication
Patsy McGarry
Sat, Apr 19, 2014
Not enough was done to help priests after the Murphy report into the handling of allegations of clerical child sex abuse was published in 2009, Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin has said.
In an interview to mark 10 years since he became archbishop in April 2004, he said it was “a fair criticism” to say that not enough had been done to deal with “the trauma of priests” after the publication of the Murphy report, but add- ed that the atmosphere “became so difficult that it wouldn’t have been easy to do that”.
A lot of priests were “genuinely traumatised” and “a polarisation came out of that”.
Soon meetings “were not about the Murphy report”. Instead, much of the reaction “was about church personalities, not about the children”.
‘No denial’
He noted that now there was “a certain revisionism of the Murphy report abroad”, which he rejected. “The pope himself has said that he wants to take/assume a responsibility within the church for what happened. There can be no denial of that and there can be no denial that the church in which that happened had got it severely wrong,” he said.
What upset Martin most after the publication of the Murphy report was “the sort of bland apologies. It just wasn’t, to me, the sort of reaction that should be coming from a situation within the church of Jesus Christ in which you had the sort of thing said to me, ‘I studied law and in all my course there was never mention of paedophilia’.”
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