Cardinal’s sin lives on

OF course there was enormous excitement at the arrival into Knock of the first charter flight packed with pilgrims from the US. The attachment of Irish-Americans to their ancestral home is well known but for practising Catholics, there is nowhere more redolent of faith and fatherland than the holy shrine of Knock.

The first transatlantic pilgrims to Knock were led off their flight by Cardinal Timothy Dolan. Tipped as a possible successor to the current Pope, the Archbishop of New York is a formidable Church figure but also a controversial one. When he took charge of the diocese of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 2002, he inherited a hotbed of paedophilia and child sex abuse. But according to records, much like our own ecclesiastical leaders, protecting the Church from further scandal was uppermost in his mind.

He professed sympathy for the young victims of the notorious Fr Lawrence Murphy who abused up to 200 deaf children in their school, but was later accused of denying them compensation. Just as damagingly, he authorised payments of up to $20,000 to predatory priests to hasten their departures from their ministry.

By any stretch Cardinal Dolan is not the man to lead the drive to put Knock on the map of major places of pilgrimage, on a par with Lourdes and Fatima. In fact given our own appalling history handling clerical sex abuse, he has the potential to tarnish the project irreparably.