BELFAST, Northern Ireland –– One of Ireland's most popular Roman Catholic bishops announced his resignation Monday over allegations he had protected a pedophile priest.
Bishop Brendan Comiskey made his announcement in Dublin the day before a documentary was to be shown in Ireland about the Rev. Sean Fortune, a priest who the church acknowledges sexually assaulted dozens of boys in the 1980s and 1990s and who committed suicide in 1999 before his trial.
"I found Father Fortune virtually impossible to deal with," Comiskey, who has been the bishop of Ferns in southeast Ireland since 1984, said in a statement.
"I confronted him regularly; for a time I removed him from ministry. I sought professional advice in several quarters, I listened to criticisms and praises, I tried compassion and I tried firmness. Treatment was sought and arranged."
But Comiskey said his efforts "were clearly not good enough," and added: "I should have adopted a more informed and more concerted effort in my dealings with him and for this I ask forgiveness."
Comiskey said he would present his resignation in person to the Vatican later this week.
One of Fortune's accusers, Colm O'Gorman, said he welcomed Comiskey's resignation but would keep pressing for the Irish government to mount a wider probe. O'Gorman and five others claiming abuse by Fortune have filed a lawsuit naming Comiskey and Pope John Paul II as defendants.
O'Gorman said the bishop wasn't the only church official who turned a blind eye to abuse. He noted that Ireland's Catholic boy scouts organization had asked Fortune to be barred from their functions by the early 1980s. Some of Fortune's victims were in Dublin and Belfast, outside Comiskey's area of responsibility.
"It is a little bit incongruous to hear that the holy Roman Catholic Church, in all of its power and position, was unable to control this one man," said O'Gorman, 35, a former scout who accused Fortune of raping him repeatedly when he was 14 to 16.
The church's two top-ranking leaders in Ireland, Cardinal Desmond Connell and Archbishop Sean Brady, said they accepted Comiskey's decision. And they issued a wider apology – the latest in a long line of such statements since the first child sex-abuse cases emerged in Ireland in 1994. Similar scandals have rocked the church in the United States, Australia, Britain, Canada and France.
"To all victims of such abuse, to their families and to their parish communities, we again offer our profound apologies," Connell and Brady said.
"The sexual abuse of children by priests is totally in conflict with the church's mission and with Christ's compassion and care for the young," they said, adding: "Not only has trust in the Catholic Church been damaged, but so too has the faith of the people and the morale of clergy."
Comiskey, avuncular and articulate, was frequently the Irish hierarchy's preferred choice for speaking to the media. But his career in recent years has been marred by debates about his personal life. He was treated in the United States for alcoholism in the mid-1990s and was also questioned about his solo trips to Thailand, where he stayed in a hotel used by prostitutes, including young males.
The documentary "Suing the Pope," which deals with Fortune and Comiskey's handling of his case, was originally broadcast by the British Broadcasting Corp. on March 19. It was to air on Irish state RTE television Tuesday.