Pope, Irish Bishops plan summit on child abuse

(January 21, 2010) Ireland's Roman Catholic bishops are being summoned next month to a Vatican summit with Pope Benedict XVI to shape the pontiff's response to child-abuse scandals, church officials said Wednesday. Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, director of the Vatican press office and Vatican Radio confirmed Wednesday that the Pope has called Irish prelates to the Vatican for a February 15-16 meeting. Cardinal Sean Brady, archbishop of Armagh and president of the Irish Episcopal conference and Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin already met with the Holy Father last December 11. They discussed the Murphy Commission Report, which details abuse cases in the Dublin Archdiocese from 1975 to 2004. Two Irish church officials said the pope planned to speak both as a group and individually to Ireland's 27 bishops, three archbishops and Cardinal Sean Brady. They said the dialogue would influence Pope Benedict's planned pastoral letter to Ireland's four million Catholics following revelations of widespread child abuse within the Irish church. Irish government-ordered investigations published last year documented decades of Catholic cover-ups of child abuse within the Dublin Archdiocese as well as the church's Dickensian network of residences for troubled Irish boys and girls. May's published report on Catholic-run orphanages, residential schools and workhouses nationwide found that orders of Catholic brothers and nuns engaged in systemic physical, mental and sexual abuse of tens of thousands of children from the 1930s to 1990s, when the last of the institutions closed.