European Catholic Clergy Faces Fallout From Sex Scandal

Posted on Apr 22, 2010

Flickr / rohan_chennai

Two more high-profile figures are paying the price for their parts, however direct or oblique, in the child abuse scandal still rippling through the ranks of the Catholic church. By Thursday, the Vatican had officially retired Irish Bishop James Moriarty and was fielding German Bishop Walter Mixa’s resignation offer as other European members of the clergy worked to contain the fallout in the face of more potential damage to clergymen’s careers, not to mention the church’s public image.  —KA

The New York Times:

Moriarty was the second of four Irish bishops retired by the Vatican after being named in an official report last year as Church leaders who hid predator priests. Two others have offered their resignations but Rome has not yet decided their cases.

Bishop John Magee, a former personal secretary to the past three popes, had his resignation letter accepted last month after he was accused in a separate Church report of mishandling sex abuse cases in his diocese of Cloyne.

There have been growing calls for the head of the Irish Church, Cardinal Sean Brady, to quit over his role in covering up a sexual abuse case in 1975. He has not offered to resign.

Mixa, an outspoken conservative bishop, was accused of slapping and hitting children while he was a parish priest in a small town in the pope’s native Bavaria the 1970s and 1980s.

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