THE US: The Irish-born Bishop of Palm Beach, Florida, has offered the Pope his resignation after admitting to an inappropriate relationship 25 years ago with a teenage seminarian, plunging the beleaguered Catholic Church in the US into yet another sex abuse scandal.
The announcement on Friday by Bishop Anthony O'Connell (63), is doubly embarrassing for the church. The resignation of a bishop in such circumstances is clearly deeply damaging only weeks after the Geoghegan case in Boston, but Bishop O'Connell was also appointed to Palm Beach three years ago precisely to help the diocese recover from the resignation of its then bishop,the Most Rev Keith Symons, on similar grounds.
Neither Bishop O'Connell nor a diocese where he had previously served had apparently thought to inform Rome that in 1996 they had given a former priest, Mr Christopher Dixon (40), $125,000 in a confidential settlement of a claim that he had been abused as a teenager by the bishop, then rector of the St Thomas Aquinas Seminary in Hannibal, Missouri.
Mr Dixon says that he had gone to Father O'Connell to report that he was being abused by another priest in the school. "But under the guise of trying to help me come to terms with my own body, he ultimately took me to bed with him," Mr Dixon has said. "
At the time he was 15, but had suffered from abuse at the school and in a previous one from the age of 11.
Bishop O'Connell acknowledges what he calls a misguided attempt on his own part, repeated several more times over years, to help the young man face up to sexual problems and has referred to the period as one in which Masters and Johnson were encouraging sexual experimentation.
"Foolishly and stupidly and naively, I attempted to work with him to help him deal with those problems without . . . any greater awareness of consciousness we have today in regards to sexual abuse. I was smart enough, I should have known better," he told journalists.
The bishop, who is the popular leader of a diocese of 224,000 Catholics spread across 5,115 square miles in five counties, asked people to pray that he be forgiven.
Bishop O'Connell was born in Lisheen, Ballynacally, Co Clare. He went to school first in Lisheen, then with the Presentation Brothers and Christian Brothers in Cork and Ennis, and then to the Jesuits-run Mungret College in Limerick.
In 1958, he emigrated to the US, where he received his theological education in the Saint Louis, Missouri area, at Kenrick Seminary in Shrewsbury. Five years later he was ordained a priest.