Dublin Archbishop's Nifty Footwork Over Child Abuse Reports is Annoying his Colleagues

07/01/09
Original article
IRELAND
Telegraph (United Kingdom)
Damian Thompson

Archbishop Diarmud Martin of Dublin is busy cultivating Irish public opinion before the publication of a presumably catastrophic report into clerical child abuse in his diocese. He was made so angry by documents in his archives that he “simply threw them to the ground,” he has told the press.

Well, he should be angry. But some of his brother bishops suspect that Archbishop Martin is engaged in some preemptive personal damage limitation. The Irish religious orders, meanwhile, have accused him of “throwing us to the wolves” - their phrase - after the revelations of decades-old abuse in the Ryan report. They are absolutely furious with him.

Do you remember that fuss when Archbishop Vincent Nichols made some innocuous but deliberately misinterpreted remarks about the pain felt by religious orders whose reputations were ruined by past crimes? Archbishop Martin rebuked Archbishop Nichols without apparently checking the context in which the comments were made. I remember thinking at the time: “Someone’s thinking of his own skin.”