Cardinal Keith O'Brien has admitted to
allegations he made advances to younger clergy in his diocese.
A week after announcing his resignation
as archbishop of Saint Andrews and Edinburgh, O'Brien has issued a
statement in which he admitted to allegations he had previously
denied.
O'Brien's decision to not attend the
conclave to elect the next pope left the United Kingdom without
representation this week in Rome.
“I wish to take this opportunity to
admit that there have been times that my sexual conduct has fallen
below the standards expected of me as a priest, archbishop and
cardinal,” the 74-year-old
O'Brien said.
The allegations made by three priests
and a former priest first surfaced last weekend in a report compiled
by The Observer. The paper wrote that the conduct could date
back to the 1980s and that the four men had complained to the Vatican
about “inappropriate acts.”
O'Brien apologized to “those I have
offended,” the Catholic Church and the people of Scotland.
“I will now spend the rest of my life
in retirement,” he wrote. “I will play no further part in the
public life of the Catholic Church in Scotland.”
O'Brien has been a vocal critic of gay
rights, denouncing the government's plans to legalize gay marriage as
“madness” and a “grotesque subversion of a universally accepted
human right.”
He also compared such unions to plural
relationships.
“If marriage can be redefined so that
it no longer means a man and a woman but two men or two woman, why
stop there? Why not allow three men or a woman and two men to
constitute a marriage, if they pledged their fidelity to one
another?”
His anti-gay rhetoric made him a
celebrity among conservatives opposed to marriage equality and a
target of marriage advocates. Last year, the group Stonewall named
him their “Bigot of the Year.”