Response to clerical child abuse report

Madam, – Archbishop Diarmuid Martin has stressed the significance and rarity of the promised papal pastoral letter which will…

Madam, – Archbishop Diarmuid Martin has stressed the significance and rarity of the promised papal pastoral letter which will, we are assured, reorganise the Irish church for the better.

But is this rarity really a privilege for Ireland – or an attempt by the Vatican to say that what happened here is solely our Irish fault, when every informed Catholic knows that what happened in Dublin has been replicated in over two dozen countries globally?

As for the exchange of a system of 26 dioceses for a mooted 12 or less, this will be to appoint fewer more powerful monarchs who are likely to be even more distant from their people than the present episcopate.

How are these super-bishops to be made accountable, when the total absence of structures of accountability for Catholic bishops is a global problem also? Disgraced bishops in Ireland prove daily that they can still do as they please – and so does Bernard Cardinal Law, disgraced Archbishop of Boston, who sits on the Vatican body that will appoint any new Irish bishops.

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To propose an Irish solution for a problem caused mainly by the Vatican’s own dedication to unaccountable monarchy is not to award a privilege but to deliver an evasive insult. To be persuasive, any reorganisation of the church should be global in scope, and should make bishops accountable to their people on administrative matters. The Irish Catholic Church is far less to blame for this crisis than the institution that now tries to claim it can solve it without tackling the medieval systemic weakness that afflicts the papacy itself. – Yours, etc,

SEAN O’CONAILL,

Acting Co-ordinator,

Voice of the Faithful in Ireland,

Greenhill Road, Coleraine.

Madam, – Since The Irish Times has mentioned (Opinion, December 14th) that I am a Russian expert and Diarmuid Martin’s brother, I feel I should point to a major flaw in Theo Dorgan’s comparison of the Archbishop of Dublin in 2009 to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991.

Mr Gorbachev was president of the USSR and therefore the equivalent of the Pope and not the head of a small peripheral diocese.

In relentlessly persisting with this false analogy, Mr Dorgan seems to suggest that Dublin needs a Yeltsin. If so, it’s time to lock up the altar wine. – Yours, etc,

SEAMUS MARTIN,

Rue Mirabeau,

Puisserguier, France.