Catholic World Report

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Did the Vatican side with two auxiliary bishops against the archbishop of Dublin?

By Michael Kelly

The decision by Pope Benedict not to accept the resignations of two Irish bishops who stepped down after a controversial report into child abuse mishandling surprised many when it was announced during the second week of August.

In a letter to his priests, leaked to the media August 11, Dublin’s Archbishop Diarmuid Martin revealed that neither Bishops Eamonn Walsh nor Raymond Field, both Dublin auxiliary bishops, would now be stepping aside.

Both men had tendered their resignation to Pope Benedict XVI on Christmas Eve 2009 after coming under severe pressure—not least from Archbishop Martin—to resign.

It has been heavily speculated that the Holy See was unwilling to accept the resignations given the circumstances. Neither man, for example, was criticized in the Murphy Report, which detailed mishandling of allegations of child sexual abuse in the sprawling Dublin archdiocese.

Both Bishops Walsh and Field initially resisted calls for their resignation when the report was published in late November 2009. On the other hand, Bishop Donal Murray of Limerick—whose failure to investigate an allegation of abuse was described as “inexcusable”—had his resignation quickly accepted by the Holy See.

Archbishop Martin’s words and actions have offered the faithful confusing signals regarding whether or not Bishops Walsh and Field ought to resign.

Art

This summer marks the 400th anniversary of the artist’s death, with an ambitious exhibition of his major works in Rome.

By Thomas S. Hibbs

In the 1986 film Caravaggio, the director Derek Jarman takes the turbulent life of a gifted artist as an occasion to reinvent him as a lascivious, romantic-existentialist anti-hero. An irascible man, whose public fortune waxed and waned, who spent much of his life on the run from legal and political authorities, and who died young and tragically just as luck seemed to smile upon him, Caravaggio is ready material for romantic and existentialist recreation.

But this is to miss what is most important about his art—a body of work that constitutes some of the finest religious art ever produced in the West. In fact, Caravaggio’s art demonstrates the falsity of the romantic assumption, exacerbated in post-modernism, of a necessary opposition between stylistic novelty and tradition, between the private aims of the artist and public use of art. Caravaggio blends a distinctive and readily identifiable personal style of painting with subject matters of universal and lasting import. His religious art is decidedly Catholic and counter-reformational in its sacramental realism.

This summer marks the 400th anniversary of the death of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (September 1571-July 1610). That the anniversary should prompt a series of new scholarly studies is predictable. What is not so expected is the spread of his popularity among non-academics. An ambitious exhibition of his major works in Rome at the Scuderie del Quirinale has been, for months now, the hottest ticket in the Eternal City. Elsewhere in Rome, where his works adorn the walls of many churches, tour groups crowd around his paintings, the way visitors to the Louvre jostle for a glimpse of Leonardo’s “Mona Lisa.”