"It is sad when people you respect are in serious disagreement with each other," the Bishop of Clonfert, Most Rev John Kirby said yesterday.
He was referring to the High Court action being taken by Cardinal Desmond Connell to prevent the Commission of Investigation from looking at 5,586 documents presented to it by Archbishop Diarmuid Martin on order. The Cardinal has claimed the documents are privileged to him.
The bishop repeated the assurance that Ireland's Catholic bishops were going to do all they could "to ensure maximum transparency this issue [ clerical child sex abuse] out and open and clear, once and for all." That "for me and for all the bishops, is the bottom line," he said.
He did not believe the Cardinal's High Court action would make that impossible. "It is a stumbling block, as Archbishop Martin has said, but I believe they will be able to deal with it legally," he told Seán O'Rourke on RTÉ Radio's News at One yesterday.
A spokeswoman for the Archbishop said yesterday that neither the Vatican or the papal nuncio had made contact on the matter of the Cardinal's action. However, the Archbishop had a brief meeting with the Cardinal at the Irish College in Rome last Friday, when the Archbishop was attending a wedding in the city.
The bishop said yesterday it was for Rome to decide on when his former colleague Bishop Eamonn Casey could say Mass in public. It was "not a matter for me to adjudicate".
Asked by Seán O'Rourke whether he felt there was an injustice involved, he replied: "I don't know."
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