Under fire Bishop awaiting fate

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Bishop Donal Murray will remain in Rome to await developments regarding his future, his spokesman has said.

It is the first public comment on behalf of the bishop since he went to Rome on Sunday to discuss his future.

Bishop Murray was one of a number of bishops criticised in the Murphy Report into the handling of clerical sexual abuse in the Dublin archdiocese.

The spokesman said that Bishop Murray had an hour-long meeting with Vatican officials on Monday.

The Murphy Report said that while serving as auxiliary bishop of Dublin, Bishop Murray had badly mishandled allegations of clerical child abuse. It said his failure to deal properly with one priest suspected of being a paedophile was "inexcusable".

The spokesman for Bishop Murray said that he had been criticised in three cases but that in none of those cases did he have an allegation that a child was being sexually abused.

He added that in five other cases where Bishop Murray was the first to receive a complaint, the report did not criticise his responses and that his management of the remaining one of the nine cases was not criticised either.