IRELAND
CBS – 60 Minutes
(CBS News) An Irishman named Diarmuid Martin says the Catholic Church in Ireland has reached a breaking point, a crisis that he says results from the sexual abuse of children by priests and the cover-up by the Church. Martin has provided tens of thousands of pages of evidence against specific priests, and his words and actions carry extraordinary weight. That’s because Diarmuid Martin is the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Dublin. Bob Simon reports.
The following script is from “The Archbishop of Dublin” which aired on March 4, 2012. Bob Simon is the correspondent. Tom Anderson, producer.
The head of the Catholic Church may be in Rome, but its heart has always been in Ireland. From the early fifth century, when Saint Patrick was named a bishop and started converting the Irish, Catholicism has been more than a religion. It’s been a culture and a way of life.
But in recent years – the faith of the Irish has been sorely tested, not their faith in God necessarily, but their faith in the Church, after several damning investigations provided appalling detail on the sexual abuse of children by priests.
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