IRELAND
Crux
Charles Collins March 10, 2017
EDITOR
The Vatican’s representative to Ireland, New York native Archbishop Charles Brown, is being transferred to Albania after five years of service. He is credited with repairing the relationship between the two states after the leader of the Irish government accused the Vatican of ‘dysfunction, disconnection, elitism and narcissism’ after revelations of clerical sexual abuse.
ROME – The Vatican’s representative to Ireland, Archbishop Charles Brown, is being transferred to Albania after five years of mending ties between the two states.
It’s hard to overestimate the intensity of the crisis that gripped Vatican-Ireland relations when Pope Benedict XVI appointed Brown, then an official at the Vatican’s doctrine office, to the post in 2012.
Michael Kelly, the editor of The Irish Catholic weekly newspaper, told Crux diplomatic ties at the time were “at an all-time low.”
The previous Vatican ambassador to the country, Italian Archbishop Giuseppe Leanza, had been accused by the government of not cooperating with official investigations into the clerical sexual abuse of children. In 2011, Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Enda Kenny famously told the nation’s parliament this showed the “dysfunction, disconnection, elitism and narcissism that dominate the culture of the Vatican to this day.”
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