IRELAND
Irish Times
September 14, 2018
Psychotherapist and former Benedictine monk who knew that ‘all trails led to Rome’
His major book, A Secret World: Sexuality and the Search for Celibacy, concluded that 6 per cent of priests (later revised to 9 per cent) had had sexual contact with minors and that at least a third of clergy were homosexuals.
For years his research work was called into question by the American hierarchy, but he has been posthumously vindicated with the removal from ministry and resignation of retired US cardinal Theodore McCarrick, Archbishop of Washington DC, followed by the shocking findings of more than 301 children being raped over 70 years by clergy in six dioceses in Pennsylvania. Sipe was critical of how Pope Benedict XVI, in his 2010 apostolic letter to the Catholics of Ireland in the wake of the Murphy report, ignored Rome’s culpability and attributed failures by bishops in the Dublin archdiocese to their ignoring canon law.
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