UNITED KINGDOM
The Guardian
Andrew Brown
The Guardian, Monday 29 September 2014
Kieran Conry’s resignation as the Roman Catholic bishop of Arundel and Brighton at the weekend highlighted traditional faultlines in a church contending with how to handle divorce, birth control and other matters of personal and sexual morality.
The popular bishop left a message to be read from all the pulpits of his diocese in which he confessed to having been “unfaithful to his promises as a Catholic priest”, after the Mail on Sunday published an extract from a love letter he had written to a woman whose husband is divorcing her.
Conry told the newspaper that this relationship was not sexual, and said he was resigning over another relationship that had happened six years ago. He provided no further explanation as to his decision.
Conry was previously in charge of press relations for the Catholic church in England and Wales, and was widely liked and trusted. “He showed how a Catholic priest could be a human being,” said one observer. “Now he has shown us in a way he’d rather not have done.”
The husband of the woman involved in the present case is threatening to sue the Catholic church on the grounds that Conry’s behaviour must have been well known to them.
Traditionalists were jubilant at his resignation. The rightwing blogger Damian Thompson paid tribute to Conry’s human qualities – “he didn’t give us any bullshit and let slip the odd bit of gossip” – but then accused him of bullying a traditionalist parish that was using the Latin Mass, something on which Thompson is a great deal keener than the present pope.
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