an Irish archbishop doing what no American bishop has done

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Dec 02, 2009

What would happen, do you think, if one American bishop had challenged his brothers to admit their culpability for the sex-abuse scandal? Would the sky have fallen in, if one determined bishop had stood up at that June 2002 meeting in Dallas, and said in public that some of his colleagues were morally obligated to resign?

It didn’t happen. It still hasn’t happened. To this day, we haven’t seen any American bishop say, for the record, that some of his colleagues betrayed their responsibilities so thoroughly that they can no longer be considered fit to act as successors to the Apostles.

One diocesan bishop has no power over another; Bishop X cannot require Bishop Y to resign. But he can ask him to resign; he can exhort him to resign; he can explain why resignation is the only proper option. Or, short of demanding a resignation, he can acknowledge that at a minimum Bishop Y needs to come clean, to acknowledge his guilt, and to make amends.

It hasn’t happened in the US. But something along those lines is happening right now in Ireland. Dublin’s Archbishop Diarmuid Martin is saying—in public, for attribution, repeatedly—that bishops who participated in a cover-up of sexual abuse should acknowledge their wrongdoing. “Everybody has to stand up and accept the responsibility for what they did,” he said. Amen to that.

Archbishop Martin isn’t naming names. He doesn’t need to; the implications of his statements are clear enough to anyone who is paying attention. For instance, there is Bishop Donal Murray, who now heads the Limerick diocese, and has said that he has “entered into a process of engagement with the people and priests of his diocese as to whether his ministry is a hindrance or help to the diocese.” Not good enough, says Archbishop Martin: “It is not enough to say this is a matter for other dioceses where they are now.” He explains: “My view is they (the bishops) should publicly come forward and answer the questions to the people where these abuses took place.”

Admitting one’s guilt, the archbishop argues, is far better than being found guilty in the court of public opinion, as the evidence piles up. Explaining his preference for bishops to come forward now, he says: “I would much prefer to be in that situation than to be hunted or pushed.”

Amen to that, too. How many times has an American bishop come forward to admit his guilt—perhaps prodded by a fellow bishop—before the facts were splashed across the headlines? The count remains at zero, I believe.

Bishops are reluctant to criticize their fellow bishops, and rightly so. But where in the Scriptures is it written that a bishop should not allow his differences with another bishop to become public? Not in the 15^th chapter of Acts, certainly; not in the 2^nd chapter of Galatians.

Public criticism of a colleague is an extreme measure, to be used only in extreme circumstances: when the institution is in crisis, when its credibility is in jeopardy, when revelations of corruption make it imperative to demand reform. Archbishop Martin seems to think that the Church has reached that point in Ireland. We reached it in the US nearly a decade ago.