Palmerston North Bishop Charles Drennan, 59, had offered to resign after an independent investigation into the woman’s complaint, according to a statement from Cardinal John Dew, head of the church in New Zealand.
The Vatican said on Friday that the Pope had accepted the resignation.
The removal is significant as the Catholic Church has long considered sexual relationships between clerics and adult women to be sinful and inappropriate, but not criminal or necessarily worthy of permanent sanction.
However, the MeToo movement and the scandal over ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, an American defrocked by Francis for sexual misconduct, have forced a reckoning about the imbalance of power in relationships between clerics and lay adults, nuns and seminarians, and whether such relationships can be consensual.
The bishop was a member of the New Zealand church team of priests and sisters selected to respond to the country’s royal commission inquiry into sexual abuse of children and vulnerable adults in state and faith-based care between 1950-1999.
At 59, Mr Drennan is well under the normal retirement age of 75 for bishops. Ordained as a priest in 1996, he worked for seven years in the Vatican’s secretariat of state before being made a bishop in 2011. He took over as the head of the Palmerston North diocese a year later.
More recently, he was elected secretary of the New…
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