NORTHERN IRELAND
Farming Life
Published on Monday 7 May 2012
The Vatican has miserably failed the victims of child sex abuse within the Catholic Church, Stormont’s Deputy First Minister has claimed.
Amid continuing calls for Irish Primate Cardinal Sean Brady to resign over his involvement in a controversial Church probe that did not stop notorious paedophile priest Brendan Smyth’s reign of abuse, Martin McGuinness shifted focus to Rome’s attitude to historic clerical sex crimes.
“The issue of Cardinal Brady’s position in all of this is important for a lot of people but of more importance to me is the attitude that pertains in the Vatican and I believe that the major failing that exists in the Catholic Church resides in the Vatican,” said the Sinn Fein politician.
Mr McGuinness hit out at how Rome had approached previous inquiries into abuse scandals and warned the Catholic authorities that if they failed to co-operate with a forthcoming investigation into institutional abuse in Northern Ireland they would be compelled to do so.
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