{"id":55,"date":"2010-08-12T11:50:54","date_gmt":"2010-08-12T11:50:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/08\/vatican-declines-irish-bishops-resignations.html"},"modified":"2010-08-12T11:50:54","modified_gmt":"2010-08-12T11:50:54","slug":"vatican-declines-irish-bishops-resignations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/08\/vatican-declines-irish-bishops-resignations.html","title":{"rendered":"Vatican declines Irish bishops’ resignations"},"content":{"rendered":"

It could be argued that the sins of Dublin auxiliary bishops Raymond Field<\/a> and Eamonn Walsh<\/a>,
\nas laid out in the Murphy Report, didn’t amount to much. Both, it
\nseemed, failed in their duty to pursue and\/or adequately report an
\nallegation of sexual abuse by a priest. But, under pressure from their
\nsuperior, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, the two tendered their
\nresignations last December–and appropriately so. In the midst of the
\ncomplete meltdown of the Irish church’s institutional credibility,
\nparticipation in the culture of cover-up had to be grounds for removal
\nfrom office–for the good of the church. Or so one would have thought.<\/p>\n

So why has the Vatican decided<\/a> not to accept the resignations? The bottom line, as the Irish Times<\/i>‘ Paddy Agnew points out<\/a>,
\nis that if all bishops who covered up clerical sexual abuse were
\npermitted to resign, the episcopal ranks would be decimated. And then
\nwhere would the church be? But of course, no one in the hierarchy can
\nsay that publicly. So the decision is announced in the quietest way
\npossible, with no explanation offered. For the good of the church. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It could be argued that the sins of Dublin auxiliary bishops Raymond Field and Eamonn Walsh, as laid out in the Murphy Report, didn’t amount to much. Both, it seemed, failed in their duty to pursue and\/or adequately report an allegation of sexual abuse by a priest. But, under pressure from their superior, Archbishop Diarmuid…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nVatican declines Irish bishops' resignations - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/08\/vatican-declines-irish-bishops-resignations.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Vatican declines Irish bishops' resignations - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"It could be argued that the sins of Dublin auxiliary bishops Raymond Field and Eamonn Walsh, as laid out in the Murphy Report, didn’t amount to much. Both, it seemed, failed in their duty to pursue and\/or adequately report an allegation of sexual abuse by a priest. But, under pressure from their superior, Archbishop Diarmuid…\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/08\/vatican-declines-irish-bishops-resignations.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2010-08-12T11:50:54+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Vatican declines Irish bishops' resignations - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/08\/vatican-declines-irish-bishops-resignations.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Vatican declines Irish bishops' resignations - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk","og_description":"It could be argued that the sins of Dublin auxiliary bishops Raymond Field and Eamonn Walsh, as laid out in the Murphy Report, didn’t amount to much. 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}