THE POPE had always supported him in his handling of clerical child sex abuse issues, even when “not everyone did”, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin said yesterday.
He also expressed worries about the apostolic visitations to Ireland, announced by the Vatican at the end of May, and felt opinion poll findings published in The Irish Times yesterday were “very hard to judge”.
Those findings showed 76 per cent of adults in the Republic believed Cardinal Seán Brady should resign. They also showed 83 per cent of those polled believed the church had not responded adequately to the Murphy report.
Responding to those findings yesterday Cardinal Brady told The Irish Times he accepted “that they represent an amount of anger against the church, against me, in the country”.
He continued: “But I am also aware that I enjoy a lot of support and prayer and help at this time and that is what keeps me going, doing the work that I’ve got to do and promoting the renewal called for in the pope’s letter which we’ve been discussing this morning.”
He was speaking in Maynooth during a break at the Irish Episcopal Conference’s summer meeting.
Speaking at the same venue Archbishop Martin, when asked whether he was an isolated figure among his brother bishops and priests, said: “Yeah, I do what I have to do in my own conscience. I try to work in consensus. I get a lot of support from priests as well, people who may be less vocal . . . but I’m beginning to sound like a politician . . .”
Asked particularly about isolation among the bishops, he said: “From bishops, I think . . . some bishops might look on me as an uncomfortable figure, but I think the majority . . . when I say something people listen.”
As to whether the Vatican was happy with his performance in Dublin he said: “The pope has always been very supportive of me. In that sense he was unusual. Not everyone did. I think . . . I’m watching the statements of the pope in recent times. You could see a position which is becoming much more explicit and strong, and I am very happy to see that.”
He had not met the pope since the Irish bishops did so last February, but since then he had “been in the Vatican for meetings, but these matters didn’t come up”.
He said he was worried about the apostolic visitations announced last month for Ireland’s four Catholic archdioceses and the seminaries at Maynooth and Rome.
“I am worried that the visitations . . . We’ve to know exactly what is to be looked at, what is the originality.
“I said in a talk the other day that Dublin runs the risk of being the most investigated diocese in the world. I’d be interested to see the specific thing, what it is that this visitation is going to bring out that won’t be in Ian Elliott’s audit or the HSE audit, or the Murphy report or the Garda [investigation].”
As to what the visitation might involve, he said he knew “nothing . . . I await to know exactly the details of the visit. I think it would be inappropriate for me or any of the visitors to start making comments until they know exactly the nature of their . . .
“I belong to the old tradition that until you present your credentials you don’t carry out any business. It’s important. The danger is that if individuals go off on their own making assumptions, the details are simply still not there,” he said.
Of the poll findings published in this newspaper yesterday he said it was “very hard to judge them. However, I believe it says something about all of us, rather than just about Cardinal Brady. There is a crisis of confidence there”. He felt the people polled “were really saying that, as yet, the response of the church doesn’t satisfy us.”