LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - Brady was part of an internal church investigation in 1975 into the reported abuses of Father Brendan Smyth. Brady admitted that he did not report his findings to the police and asked two teenagers who gave him evidence to sign oaths of secrecy.
Brady apologized for his role in the Smyth investigation in March of this year.

"I want to say to anyone who has been hurt by any failure on my part that I apologize to you with all my heart," Brady said at his home church, St. Patrick's Cathedral in Armagh.

Smyth died in prison in 1997, having been convicted in both the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom of child abuse.

Ireland has come to grips with a series of government-backed reports that found Catholic clergy committed physical and sexual abuse of children across the country for as long as 70 years.

Child abuse by the Catholic clergy in Ireland has become such a widespread scandal that Pope Benedict XVI addressed it in a pastoral letter to Irish Catholics earlier this year. The pope is due to visit England and Scotland later this month, which will put him just across the Irish Sea from Ireland.

Brady says that he was not disappointed Benedict was not coming. "The pope has already reached out to us by sending us a pastoral letter," he said, adding he hoped Benedict would come to Ireland in the future.

There had been a criticism that a papal visit could have improved matters.

"The visit could have helped if the church had admitted that it had acted wrongly in the cover-up. But they are not admitting overall responsibility, just blaming individual priests," Maeve Lewis, of the charity One in Four, which counsels victims of sexual abuse said.

In a poll of the Irish Times newspaper three out of four Irish adults said Brady should resign. Brady told CNN he would not.

"I have re-evaluated my position and I have decided to continue as the archbishop of Armagh," he said.