Britain’s most senior Roman Catholic cleric, Cardinal Keith O’Brien,
acknowledged Sunday that he had been guilty of sexual misconduct, a week
after he announced
his resignation and said he would not attend the conclave to choose the
next pope. The moves followed revelations that three current and one former priest had accused him of inappropriate sexual contact dating back decades.
Cardinal O’Brien, the head of the church in Scotland, is the
highest-ranking figure in the church’s recent history to make such an
admission.
“I wish to take this opportunity to admit that there have been times
that my sexual conduct has fallen below the standards expected of me as a
priest, archbishop and cardinal,” Cardinal O’Brien, 74, said in a statement.
The statement stunned many in the Scottish church and beyond. Some said
the cardinal’s statement appeared to raise the possibility that the
undefined sexual activities he acknowledged may not be restricted to the
known allegations, the earliest of which relates to 1980. Ordained in
1965, he became an archbishop in 1985, but was not named cardinal until
2003.
Last weekend, The Observer newspaper reported the accusations of
impropriety with accounts from the four men. The first was a seminarian
when Cardinal O’Brien, then a priest, served as a powerful supervisory
figure in two Scottish seminaries. The others were young priests; it is
not clear exactly when in the 1980s they say they were subject to his
unwanted advances.
Initially, Cardinal O’Brien contested the allegations and said he was
seeking legal advice. But on Sunday, he offered a sweeping apology that
was, however, bereft of detail. “To those I have offended, I apologize
and ask forgiveness,” he said. “To the Catholic Church and the people of
Scotland, I also apologize. I will now spend the rest of my life in
retirement. I will play no further part in the public life of the
Catholic Church in Scotland.”
Many analysts saw the cardinal’s resignation and absence from the
conclave as a result of papal pressure, and British newspapers have
cited unidentified Vatican
officials as saying Pope Benedict — who stunned the world with his own
announcement on Feb. 11 that he would step down — had ordered the
cardinal to remove himself.
Benedict’s resignation, which he attributed to ill health and
exhaustion, took effect on Thursday, bringing an end to an eight-year
papacy overshadowed by scandals involving cover-ups of pedophilia and
other forms of sexual abuse by Catholic clerics.
The Vatican and more than a billion Catholics worldwide now await the
papal conclave this month, in which 115 cardinals will choose one among
their number as Benedict’s successor. He will inherit a crisis over
church governance that Vatican experts have described as one of the
legacies of the 85-year-old Benedict, a widely respected theologian
whose critics faulted him with failing to deal conclusively with the
sexual abuse scandals.
Analysts said that Cardinal O’Brien’s apology was bound to place a
shadow over the process. Even before his announcement on Sunday, it was
already seen as highly unusual that Cardinal O’Brien would not attend
the conclave, and several other cardinals accused of protecting abusive
priests have fought off pressure not to participate from advocates for
abuse victims.
The differing approaches across the Catholic world to handling the sex
abuse crisis are expected to be evident at the conclave. Bishops’
conferences in English-speaking countries have tended to adopt a more
aggressive, zero-tolerance policy in recent years, while more
traditionalist cardinals inside the Vatican and elsewhere in the
Catholic world have often closed ranks to defend fellow prelates.
Cardinal O’Brien was a powerful voice of the conservative orthodoxy on
homosexuality that characterized the papacies of John Paul II, who
elevated him, and Benedict. Abandoning the relatively tolerant approach
to the issue he had adopted in the years before he donned a cardinal’s
red hat, he condemned homosexuality as immoral, and as a “grotesque
subversion.”
His sudden downfall is a major crisis for the church in Scotland, where
most of the country’s 750,000 Catholics are of Irish ancestry and live
in the central belt between Glasgow and Edinburgh. As migrants or their
descendants, they suffered decades of discrimination.
“It’s possibly, in terms of the internal history of the Church, the
biggest crisis in the history of Scottish Catholicism since the
Reformation,” said Tom Devine, a prominent historian.
The four men who accused Cardinal O’Brien have not been identified
publicly, but the Observer reporter who broke the story, Catherine
Deveney, wrote Saturday that they had all identified themselves in the complaints forwarded to the papal nuncio.
She also addressed the mystery of why the accusations are only now
surfacing: until now, the men did not know of one another’s stories.
She said the former seminarian, whose story she had known “for years,”
had called her last month, and related that he had just had a
conversation with a priest who had divulged that the cardinal had
instigated an “inappropriate relationship.”
Ms. Deveney said that two
other priests who said they had been approached by the cardinal were
“drawn in,” without saying how.
“I’d never wanted to ‘out’ Keith just for being gay,” said the former
seminarian, Ms. Deveney wrote. “But this was confirming that his
behavior toward me was part of his modus operandi. He has hurt others,
probably worse, than he affected me. And that only became clear a few
weeks ago.”
She laid out this timeline: The four made statements to the nuncio,
Archbishop Antonio Mennini, a few days before Benedict announced that he
was stepping down. The four men were told that Cardinal O’Brien would
still go to Rome.
Then, on Feb. 22, the cardinal made headlines by saying that the church
rules on celibacy should be reviewed. Ms. Deveney said the men learned
informally that the church objected to the comments, and that “the
cardinal would not go to Rome.”
“So did the church act because it was shocked by the claims against the
cardinal, or were they angry he had broken ranks on celibacy?” she
asked, noting that her article breaking the news — for which she had the
men’s statements in hand — came two days later.
The former seminarian, now married with children, said he had acted
because he was “disappointed” by what he described as a “lack of
integrity” by the church in reacting to the men’s original complaint to
the Vatican, Ms. Deveney wrote.
He said the only response he had
received from church authorities had been in the form of a “cursory
e-mail” giving the numbers of counselors he could talk to who were based
“hundreds of miles” from where he lived.
Since the allegations became public, he said, the indifference of the
church had not changed.
“There have been two sensations for me this
week,” he said. “One is feeling the hot breath of the media on the back
of my neck, and the other is sensing the cold disapproval of the church
hierarchy for daring to break ranks. I feel like if they could crush me,
they would.”