ROME
Global Pulse
Robert Mickens, Rome
March 24, 2015
Italy
There are good reasons why Cardinal Keith Michael Patrick O’Brien of Scotland should have participated in the last Conclave.
(I’ll get to that in a minute.)
Instead, he resigned as archbishop of St. Andrews and Edinburgh just before the papal election got underway. Four men had gone public and accused him of pressuring them into having sex years ago when they were junior priests (one was actually an adult seminarian). The papers ran wild with the story and the cardinal could no longer deny it.
“I… admit that there have been times that my sexual conduct has fallen below the standards expected of me as a priest, archbishop and cardinal,” he finally confessed publicly on March 3, 2013, before going into seclusion.
Last Friday, a full two years later and following a Vatican “investigation,” a note from Rome announced that Cardinal O’Brien had freely relinquished “the rights and privileges” — but, bizarrely, not the title — of a being a cardinal. Even weirder, Church officials said he could continue wearing his cardinal attire, but only in private.
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