years , he said in the statement . `` I fully accept the overall conclusion ... that the attempts by church authorities to ` protect the church ' and to ` avoid scandal ' had the most dreadful consequences for children and were deeply wrong , '' Moriarty said after the government report came out last month . Bishop Donal Murray , the bishop of Limerick , resigned on December 17 . Murray was named in the 720-page report that found the Archdiocese of Dublin and other Catholic Church authorities in Ireland covered up clerical child abuse from 1975 to 2004 . Child sexual abuse was `` widespread '' then , the report found . The report by the Dublin Archdiocese Commission of Investigation , which was set up in March 2006 to look into the abuse allegations , did not say Murray was guilty of abuse but that he failed to report it . Murray was `` aware for many years of complaints and/or suspicions of clerical child sexual abuse in the archdiocese , '' the report found . It said he dealt `` badly '' with a number of complaints and suspicions of abuse , and that his
-LRB- CNN -RRB- -- An Irish bishop resigned Wednesday following a government report into the sexual abuse of children by Catholic clergy -- the second to do so . Bishop Jim Moriarty was not directly criticized in the Murphy Report , but was a member of the Dublin archdiocese leadership for more than a decade before it put proper protections for children in place , he said . Moriarty said he `` should have challenged the prevailing culture '' of protecting the church rather than children when he was an auxiliary bishop in Dublin from 1991 to 2002 . `` I know that any action now on my part does not take away the suffering that people have endured , '' he said in a written statement . `` I again apologize to all the survivors and their families . I have today offered my resignation as bishop of Kildare & Leighlin to the Holy Father . I hope it honors the truth that the survivors have so bravely uncovered and opens the way to a better future for all concerned . '' The Vatican had no immediate comment on the resignation . Moriarty has been a priest for 48