The Irish Times – Monday, January 18, 2010
PATSY McGARRY Religious Affairs Correspondent
THE FIRST person in Ireland to have gone public – in 1995 – about his abuse by a Catholic priest has formally left the Catholic Church.
Andrew Madden, who was abused when an altar boy in Cabra parish in Dublin by Ivan Payne, wrote to the Dublin archdiocese before Christmas saying he wished to leave the Church. He received notice of his “cessation of church membership by formal act of defection. . .” from church authorities last week.
He also received a letter, dated January 11th, from Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin expressing sadness at the decision to leave and saying it made him wonder whether the church could learn from it.
In a response to Archbishop Martin at the weekend, Mr Madden said that following publication of the Murphy report, he was “appalled, as I believe you may have been, by the behaviour of your fellow bishops as they did everything to try and hold onto office, four of them failing”.
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