Sir, - I must respond to Andy Pollak's reference to the "media's allegation of hypocrisy and cover up" by Catholic Church authorities in Scotland, specifically Cardinal Thomas Winning and Archbishop Keith O'Brien (September 25th). This is a very grave charge.
The issue is this when they held their news conference to announce the resignation of Bishop Roddy Wright on September 14th, should the two archbishops have informed the media of the bishop's former relationship with Mrs Whibley and the fact that they had a child? More pertinently, would it have been right for them to have done so? Mr Pollak does not even address this fundamental question, yet he can conclude by speculating ("the suspicion must remain") that the archbishops' failure to "tell the full story" was to "try to limit the damage caused by such a dramatic new revelation".
This conclusion is unjust. What right has Mr Pollak to impugn the integrity of named persons with casual references to "suspicions" which his article makes no attempt to substantiate? He demonstrates ignorance - surprising in a correspondent specialising in religious affairs - of the priority which ordained ministers of the Catholic Church have always placed on protecting confidential information about individuals.
In this particular case, the right of a child to privacy had to be a paramount consideration. This right is strongly underlined in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which has been ratified by both the British and Irish Governments. I therefore repeat what I told Andy Pollak: it would have been wrong for the archbishops to have made such information public, and certainly not without the knowledge or consent of the persons involved.
It is untrue, as Bishop Wright stated in the News of the World that he gave the two archbishops permission to release the information about Mrs Whibley and their son But, even had he done so, it would have been rash and imprudent for them to have acted on the consent of a person in deep emotional and moral turmoil, and who was in no position to weigh up the possible consequences of the publication of such information on the lives of the two other persons involved. The fact that Mrs Whibley herself chose to make the information public was her decision.
Libby Purves, a columnist who holds no particular brief for the Catholic Church, showed far greater insight than Mr Pollak when she wrote in the London Times (September 24th): "As for Cardinal Winning and the other senior Scottish clergy, they may have been slow in disclosing all they knew but there were good reasons for that, not least the delicacy of the son's position and the fear of, precipitating the bishop's own suicide. This is a church, not a political party; its prime duty is to individual souls. And, by and large, the note struck by church officials has been perfectly Christian." - Yours, etc.,
Catholic Media Office,
5 St Vincent Place,
Glasgow G1 2DH.
Andy Pollak writes: My main source for the comment Fr Connelly objects to was an article in the Scotsman on September 21st by Hugh Farmer, editor of the Scottish Catholic Observer. He wrote about "charges" that Cardinal Winning "purposely misled the media when he announced that he and Archbishop O'Brien had tried to, dissuade Fr Wright from resigning. These charges were made when the cardinal admitted that he was told on Sunday evening by Fr Wright that a love child did exist." Similarly, The Tablet's Scottish correspondent, Rennie McOwan, wrote that "the bishops' decision to be economical with the truth was exposed" and they "have inevitably been accused of a cover up."