Vatican's Irish envoy posted to Prague after abuse row

The Vatican's envoy to Ireland, Giuseppe Leanza, is being posted to Prague, officials in Dublin said Friday, just days after he was recalled to Rome amid a row over clerical sex abuse. "I can confirm that diplomatic consent for the archbishop's posting to Prague has been given," a spokesman for the Czech embassy in Dublin told AFP, without giving any further details. Leanza was recalled to Rome on Monday "for consultations" after the publication of a damning report into the Church's handling of abuse claims in the southern Irish diocese of Cloyne. The report prompted Prime Minister Enda Kenny to launch an unprecedented attack on the Church authorities, saying their response to the abuse showed a culture of "dysfunction, disconnection, elitism and narcissism" at the Vatican. An Irish foreign ministry spokesman said the plan for Leanza to move to Prague was unconnected with the controversy about the Cloyne report. "This was flagged some time ago. We knew he had been due to leave Ireland," the spokesman told AFP. Dublin is still awaiting an official Vatican response to the judicial report, which condemned the Church's handling of abuse claims against 19 clerics in Cloyne between 1996 and 2009 as "inadequate and inappropriate". Leanza was summoned by deputy prime minister and foreign minister Eamon Gilmore to discuss the findings earlier this month. The Cloyne case is only the latest in a series of abuse scandals for the Catholic Church in Ireland, which were first exposed in a 2009 report detailing hundreds of cases of sexual abuse of children by priests going back decades. Pope Benedict XVI last year wrote a letter to Irish Catholics expressing shame and remorse, and the church has strengthened rules against abuse, but campaigners say it has still not done enough.