IRELAND
Irish Times
McGARRY, Religious Affairs Correspondent
IRELAND’S CATHOLIC bishops have declined to meet the Association of Catholic Priests’ leadership team, saying any such engagement “would best take place at local level by using established structures such as the Council of Priests”.
The ACP team said yesterday it was “both disappointed and saddened by this response”.
It found it “hard to understand why, in this time of great difficulty for the Irish church, neither the bishops as a body, or any individual bishop, is willing to meet with an association that has a membership of over 1,000 priests”.
It noted the Catholic primate “Cardinal Seán Brady, in a letter to the ACP on May 1st of this year, wrote: ‘The ACP has already met representatives of the bishops and also attended a meeting of a Commission of the Episcopal Conference and we expect that there will be ongoing meetings of this nature’.” No such ‘ongoing’ meetings have taken place.”
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