IRELAND
Irish Times
Patsy McGarry
Ireland’s Catholic bishops have been praised by the papal nuncio, Archbishop Charles Brown, for the compassion with which they dealt with marriage-equality issues before May’s referendum.
He also says that the description of the referendum result as a defeat for humanity by the Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, was more nuanced in the original Italian than translation.
The nuncio warns against Catholics becoming a caricature of themselves through a seeming preoccupation with moral issues to the exclusion of all others and rejects criticisms that there has been less consultation before the appointment of bishops since his arrival in Ireland, in 2012. He will not be drawn on whether priests have declined invitations to become bishops. …
On the Vatican’s handling of the clerical child sex-abuse crisis generally, he believes there was a growing awareness of the gravity of the issue through the 1990s but that there had been differences of approach by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, where he worked for 17 years before his arrival in Ireland, and that of the Congregation of Clergy.
The declining number of priests in Ireland is a huge problem, he said, but he remains very positive about the faith of the people.
His office as nuncio played no role in the disciplining of Irish priests by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, such as that of Fr Tony Flannery, but he says was kept informed in such cases.
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