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  Redemptorist 'Glad' Drennan Did Not Resign Due to Report

By Lorna Siggins
Irish Times
February 15, 2010

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2010/0215/1224264467056.html

IRELAND -- SUPPORT FOR BISHOP: A PROMINENT Redemptorist has said that he is "glad" Bishop of Galway Dr Martin Drennan has not resigned in the wake of the Murphy report as he believes the "campaign" against him was "wrong and unfair".

Fr Tony Flannery of the Redemptorists in Athenry, Co Galway, has also said that people who publicly leave the Catholic Church "can't have it both ways" in continuing to "dictate to the church how it runs its business".

Bishop Drennan, who is the only one of the five bishops mentioned in the Murphy report not to have resigned, has said he is satisfied with the way he handled abuse allegations, and has said that resigning is "not the answer".

Fr Flannery has described Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin as "domineering, possibly even bullying" towards other bishops on the Murphy report issues at their recent gathering in Maynooth, Co Kildare.

Writing in the Connacht Tribune , Fr Flannery said the bishops are "clearly floundering, and are doing a poor job at handling the crisis that it has been their fate to deal with".

"None of them could have had any inkling, the day they put that mitre on their head, that anything so monumentally difficult would present itself," he wrote.

"What has been the impact of the current Archbishop of Dublin on the gathering? From the outside he would appear to be domineering, possibly even bullying, and that they haven't been able to stand up to him," he added.

"That is of course with one quite remarkable and to me surprising exception, the Bishop of Galway. I am glad he has not resigned because I think the campaign against him by both church authorities and media was wrong and unfair," he said. He added that his real concern was if there was any possibility that the system of choosing bishops might change to give priests and people in a diocese "real say".

Fr Flannery said he had "no problem" with the 6,000 people who had decided to leave the church through the CountMeOut website, which had recorded over 6,500 declarations of "defection" by yesterday.

"We have long departed from the notion that you have to be a Catholic in order to be saved. I have sometimes thought about leaving myself," Fr Flannery said.

"But the public nature of these departures reminds me of a long dead Redemptorist Geoff O'Connell comparing the way an English and an Irish person makes their exit from the church," he said.

"The English person would slip out quietly by a side door and his absence might not even be noticed until someone went looking for him. The Irish person, on the other hand, would shout and roar, pull down the dresser, spilling its contents on the floor, and slam the door on his way out. And then, having got to a safe distance, he would proceed to pelt stones on to the galvanised roof.

"The church is made up of the community of believers and the decision, for instance, as to who is or is not bishop of a particular diocese should be made in consultation with the believers, and neither by an exclusive little cabal in the Vatican or by those who are no longer a part of the church, and who have made it very clear that they do not wish to have any part of it, either alive or dead," Fr Flannery said.

Fr Flannery is author of the recently published book, Responding to the Ryan Report , in which he argues that revelations about clerical involvement in abuse might provoke the church into reviewing its teaching on sexuality.

 
 

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