IRELAND
The Irish Times
JOHN WATERS
I HAVE followed the Fr Brian D’Arcy saga for days in a vain attempt to learn what precise heresies the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith objected to.
But no one seemed much interested in discovering what these were, and Fr Brian was being intriguingly vague. The sense was of a fearless and scholarly dissident whose robust and scorching critiques of Vatican thinking have been cruelly suppressed by forces living in fear of his outspokenness.
We understand from reports that the objections relate to his Sunday World column in 2010. We know from Fr D’Arcy’s account that the letter of “censure” from the CDF incorporated some cuttings of his columns, although he did not say which ones.
On radio last weekend, he said that, when his superior first told him of the CDF’s difficulties, in March 2011, he gathered that the issues were his “attitude about the Vatican’s way of dealing with child sexual abuse” and that the CDF didn’t like “what they called my liberal views on contraception”.
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