VATICAN OBSERVERS last night said there was nothing unusual about the fact that the position of Bishop Donal Murray of Limerick had yet to be resolved.
While much media speculation suggests that Bishop Murray has travelled to Rome to offer his resignation, Vatican insiders point out that such a resignation could not have been accepted before today at the very earliest.
Given that Pope Benedict XVI had scheduled a meeting with Cardinal Seán Brady and Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin last Friday to discuss the Murphy report, no decision linked to the fallout of that report could have been taken before Friday’s meeting.
Speaking after the meeting, Cardinal Brady confirmed that Bishop Murray had met the Congregation of Bishops last week, adding that “we await developments”. Those “developments” probably involve a meeting between the pope and the cardinal prefect of the congregation of bishops, Giovanni Battista Re.
Given that the pope held Saturday audiences with the prime minister of Albania, Sali Berisha, with Bosnian cardinal Vinko Puljic, with Archbishop Reinhard Marx of Munich, and with the Papal Nuncio to Belgium, Gacinto Berloco, he was unlikely to have also organised a meeting with Cardinal Re.
Vatican commentators also suggest that Cardinal Re may have asked Bishop Murray to prepare a formal, written document in which he could respond to the Murphy report’s criticism of his handling of complaints against priests later found to have been involved in the sexual abuse of children.
After almost completely ignoring the Murphy report since its publication two weeks ago, Italian and Vatican media sources gave much attention to the pope’s Friday meeting with Cardinal Brady and Archbishop Martin.
Typical was the coverage of Milan daily Corriere Della Sera, which described the Murphy report as a document that not only furnished proof “of decades of abuse of children” by Irish priests but also that these abuses “met with silence from those very ecclesiastical authorities which should have been protecting children and denouncing the crimes”.
Vatican Radio carried an interview with Cardinal Brady in which he spoke of his sadness at finding himself in Rome for the second time this year to discuss an Irish clerical sex abuse problem.
He told the radio station he would return to Ireland “encouraged by the promise of a pastoral letter” from the pope – a letter, he said, which would provide both encouragement and “perhaps a rebuke”.