{"id":4961,"date":"2006-10-27T10:09:03","date_gmt":"2006-10-27T10:09:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/10\/moving-north.html"},"modified":"2006-10-27T10:09:03","modified_gmt":"2006-10-27T10:09:03","slug":"moving-north","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/10\/moving-north.html","title":{"rendered":"Moving north…"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Irish bishops have been meeting with the Pope for their ad limina <\/em>visits this week. <\/p>\n

The Irish church has, of course, been wrenched from its pedestal in Irish culture over the past 3 decades, not just because of the increasingly secularization of Irish society, but because of the impact of sexual abuse claims, as well as the accusations of physical and emotional abuse by religious men and women in their various institutions. <\/p>\n

Pope Benedict reportedly let his views be known:<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\n

Pope Benedict, in the strongest language he has ever used in relation to clerical child sex abuse, has expressed his own "personal anguish and horror" at what happened in the Ferns diocese over a 40-year period from the early 1960s onwards. <\/p>\n

He said the "incomprehensible behaviour" of some clergy in Ferns had "devastated human lives and profoundly betrayed the trust of children, young people, their families, parish communities and the entire diocesan family".<\/p>\n

Pope Benedict’s comments were made public last night by the director of the diocese of Ferns communications office, Fr John Carroll. The pope was speaking during a private audience at the Vatican for the new Bishop of Ferns, Most Rev Denis Brennan, who is accompanying the other Irish Catholic bishops on an ad limina visit to Rome.<\/p>\n

The 271-page report of the Ferns inquiry, chaired by retired Supreme Court judge Frank Murphy, was published a year ago. It identified more than 100 allegations of child sexual abuse made between 1962 and 2002 against 26 priests operating under the aegis of the diocese.<\/p>\n

It severely criticised the way complaints against priests had been handled by the church authorities, particularly by the former bishops of Ferns, Donal Herlihy and Brendan Comiskey.<\/p>\n

Yesterday was the first time Pope Benedict had commented on the Ferns inquiry report.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The diocesan statement<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Irish bishops have been meeting with the Pope for their ad limina visits this week. The Irish church has, of course, been wrenched from its pedestal in Irish culture over the past 3 decades, not just because of the increasingly secularization of Irish society, but because of the impact of sexual abuse claims, as…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4961","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nMoving north... - Via Media<\/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\/viamedia\/2006\/10\/moving-north.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Moving north... - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The Irish bishops have been meeting with the Pope for their ad limina visits this week. The Irish church has, of course, been wrenched from its pedestal in Irish culture over the past 3 decades, not just because of the increasingly secularization of Irish society, but because of the impact of sexual abuse claims, as…\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/10\/moving-north.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2006-10-27T10:09:03+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"awelborn\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Moving north... - Via Media","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\/viamedia\/2006\/10\/moving-north.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Moving north... - Via Media","og_description":"The Irish bishops have been meeting with the Pope for their ad limina visits this week. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4961","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4961"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4961\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4961"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4961"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4961"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}