Dublin Archbishops Nifty Footwork over Child Abuse Reports Is Annoying His Colleagues, Damian Thompson, Telegraph, July 1, 2009

Dublin Archbishop's Nifty Footwork over Child Abuse Reports Is Annoying His Colleagues

By Damian Thompson
Telegraph
July 1, 2009

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/damianthompson/100001720/dublin-archbishops-nifty-footwork-over-child-abuse-reports-is-annoying-his-colleagues/

Religious orders say Martin 'scapegoated' them

Archbishop Diarmud Martin of Dublin is busy cultivating Irish public opinion before the publication of a presumably catastrophic report into clerical child abuse in his diocese. He was made so angry by documents in his archives that he “simply threw them to the ground,” he has told the press.

Well, he should be angry. But some of his brother bishops suspect that Archbishop Martin is engaged in some preemptive personal damage limitation. The Irish religious orders, meanwhile, have accused him of “throwing us to the wolves” - their phrase - after the revelations of decades-old abuse in the Ryan report. They are absolutely furious with him.

Do you remember that fuss when Archbishop Vincent Nichols made some innocuous but deliberately misinterpreted remarks about the pain felt by religious orders whose reputations were ruined by past crimes? Archbishop Martin rebuked Archbishop Nichols without apparently checking the context in which the comments were made. I remember thinking at the time: “Someone’s thinking of his own skin.”

That’s the conclusion, too, of religious orders. As Clerical Whispers reports:

Fr Tony Flannery, a Redemptorist priest, has revealed that many members of the congregations [orders] feel “terrified”, “ashamed”, “hurt” and “betrayed”, not only because of the actions of the guilty among their own colleagues, but also because of the actions and public statements of the Archbishop of Dublin and other members of the hierarchy who, he said, have led the public criticism of members of Ireland’s religious congregations.

Fr Flannery has said “there is enormous anger among religious (members of the congregations). They feel that they have been scapegoated, particularly by one member of the hierarchy, the Archbishop of Dublin.”

In Archbishop Martin’s defence, many secular commentators find it refreshing that at least one senior churchman isn’t making excuses on behalf of the church authorities. But underneath all his public soul-searching and the sound of documents hitting the archiepiscopal floor, I think we can hear the sound of nifty footwork.