DUBLIN (IRELAND)
Reuters
August 18, 2018
By Padraic Halpin
The Archbishop of Washington, Cardinal Donald Wuerl, withdrew on Saturday from next week’s World Meeting of Families in Dublin, the second senior cleric to pull out of the Roman Catholic event amid clerical sexual abuse scandals in the United States.
The meeting, a major congress held every three years, will be closed by Pope Francis during the first papal visit in almost 40 years to Ireland where a series of abuse scandals has also rocked the church’s standing in the once staunchly Catholic country.
The withdrawal from the Dublin event followed a bombshell grand jury report this week that detailed widespread abuse by hundreds of priests in Pennsylvania and a systematic cover-up campaign by their bishops over a 70-year period.
Wuerl, who was Bishop for the Diocese of Pittsburgh in western Pennsylvania from 1988 to 2006, has not himself been accused of any wrongdoing against children.
The report found that Wuerl notified the Vatican in 1989 of several priests who had been accused of sexually abusing children but that over subsequent years he granted requests by some to be reassigned to other parishes or to retire early, and in one case approved a loan to assist one such priest with personal debts.
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