International News
Abuse victims urge Pope to replace bishops
Posted on: Thu February 11, 2010
International Highlights
DUBLIN: Prominent Irish victims of Catholic clergy sexual abuse have written to Pope Benedict XVI asking him to take responsibility for the church s concealment of child molestation by forcing out bishops implicated in the decades of cover-up.
Their plea, published on Tuesday, comes one week before a special Vatican summit involving the pontiff and Ireland s bishops to craft a response to mammoth abuse cover-up scandals in the Irish church.
Three bishops have already tendered their resignations after a government-authorised investigation published in November found that Dublin Archdiocese authorities habitually concealed evidence of pedophile priests from civil authorities for decades.
But the letter-writers - among them Andrew Madden, a former altar boy who in 1995 became the first Irish person to go public with a lawsuit against the church - said the pope needed to do much more than accept those three resignations. They said dozens of bishops who failed to report accounts of abuse to the police should be replaced.
And they criticised the pope and his diplomat in Ireland, Archbishop Giuseppe Leanza, for refusing to respond to letters from Irish investigators into the extent of abuse and cover-up.
Survivors find it incomprehensible that the Vatican and your representative in Ireland, the papal nuncio, saw fit to hide behind diplomatic protocols to avoid cooperating, they wrote.
Courtesy :The News