IRELAND
Association of Catholic Priests
Brendan Hoban challenges a Catholic newspaper to apologise for inaccurate reporting (Written for the Western People)
For years I’ve watched the career of Judge Paul Carney of the High Court. For some reason, he seems to have been there forever. Probably because he’s allocated many of the more complex, high-profile cases. I often wondered how he could sleep at night, his mind forever mulling over the raw details of broken lives and trying to balance the multiplicities of rights and entitlements into a fair judgement. I wouldn’t want to have his responsibility.
Most of the time Carney seems to get it exactly right but recently he got it very wrong. It was the case of Fiona Doyle who had been sexually abused by her father, Patrick O’Brien, for years. Carney sentenced him to 12 years in prison but then suspended 9 years of the sentence and granted bail for the remaining 3 years. This meant that O’Brien walked free from court.
The predictable outrage of the next few days was brought to an end when Carney apologised for getting it wrong, expressed profound regret for the distress he had caused Fiona Doyle, accepted that his judgement was inappropriate and withdrew the bail. O’Brien is now in jail.
What was refreshing about Carney’s apology was that there was no self-serving element to it. He got it wrong. He held up his hands. He apologised. And in doing so he enhanced his reputation. …
A recent case of this was a Catholic newspaper that quoted ‘senior Vatican sources’ to the effect that there was no question of Fr Tony Flannery facing excommunication, that he couldn’t be excommunicated because the law of the Church didn’t allow for it and that the case hinged on whether or not Flannery accepted the Church’s teaching on the nature of the priesthood.
The story was an effort to torpedo publicity from a Dublin press conference where Flannery said he was ‘threatened with excommunication from the Catholic Church for suggesting that, in the future, women might become priests and calling for this and other matters to be open for discussion’. However, in an effort to undo the effectiveness of Flannery’s position, the paper had lost the run of itself because it got things spectacularly wrong:
(i) an extract from the letter from the Congregation of the Doctrine indicating that the ‘threat’ was there in black and white was published on the website of the Association of Catholic Priests (ACP);
(ii) experts in church law made it clear that the Church can and does excommunicate; and
(iii) evidence was produced that indicated that Flannery’s faith in the origins of priesthood and the Church, far from being a problem, had been resolved to the satisfaction of Cardinal Levada of the CDF last June!
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