IRELAND
Eureka Street
Brian Lennon May 17, 2012
Organisers had initially expected 200 to turn up at the Association of Catholic Priests (ACP) meeting in Dublin this month. In fact over 1000 showed up.
The size of the crowd in part was a response to the recent silencing of Irish priests.
One of those silenced, Fr Tony Flannery, was part of the leadership team of the ACP. A second, Fr Brian D’Arcy, was a weekly columnist in tabloid newspaper, The Sunday World. It turned out that someone in the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith had been trawling through decades of the paper to check D’Arcy’s articles.
Two other stories provided a backdrop to the meeting. One was a TV program which revealed that in 1975 when he was a bishop’s secretary, Cardinal Sean Brady, now Primate of Ireland, was given the names of some boys abused by Fr Brendan Smyth during a canonical investigation, and failed to report this either to the parents or to the police. Smyth, the abuser being investigated, continued to prey on children for a further 18 years.
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