- Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin
Saw this in the news - Pope rejects bishops' resignations.
There's a post about this at America magazine's blog - Pope 'unresigns' Irish bishops, and David Gibson writes at Politics Daily ....
If Pope Benedict XVI is trying to dig the Catholic Church out of the sex abuse scandal, he only seems to be making the hole deeper.
That's the apparent consensus after it was reported that the pope has rejected the resignations of two bishops in Ireland who asked to quit last December after they were named in an independent report for their lack of diligence and action in the country's awful history of the sexual and physical abuse of children by priests.
The bishops, Eamonn Walsh and Raymond Field, are auxiliary, or assistant bishops, to Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin, who was sent to Dublin to clean up the abuse mess. Martin, who was profiled by PoliticsDaily earlier this year, had pushed Walsh and Field to resign, which they did in Christmas Eve letters to the pope .....
"The Vatican [was] not impressed with the way Diarmuid Martin went on PrimeTime [an Irish television news program] and called on other bishops to be accountable," Garry O'Sullivan, editor of the Irish Catholic newspaper in Dublin, told The Associated Press. "It's not the way business is done in Rome." .....
Other analysts suggested that behind the Vatican's rejection was the fear of a "domino effect" in which any bishop or cardinal implicated in the abuse crisis could be pushed to resign, which is a nightmare scenario to a tradition-minded pope like Benedict XVI.
"In other words, there may still be many Irish bishops with 'mishandling/bureaucratic,' sex abuse skeletons still in the cupboard who would also have to resign," Paddy Agnew wrote in The Irish Times ....
Last week there were posts all over Catholic blogdom about what a dope Anne Rice was for leaving the Catholic Church, how jejunely questionable were her reasons for doing so. Some asked with what seemed like sincere bewilderment how she could see a discrepancy between what Jesus preached and what the hierarchy of the church practices. Others opined that being a Catholic isn't really about what Jesus preached. What exactly is it all about? :(
