IRELAND
America

Rhona Tarrant | Aug 11 2016

In the tumultuous and often bewildering news cycle of 2016, the Archbishop of Dublin taking to the national airwaves to address “Grindr, which is a gay dating site,” still managed to jolt the listening public in Ireland.

Archbishop Diarmuid Martin was clarifying why he recently decided to withdraw three seminarians from St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth, because of “strange goings-on.” Archbishop Martin told listeners that Ireland’s national seminary had a “gay culture” and that “people are sexually active in the seminary. People are on an app or website called Grindr.”

Archbishop Martin expressed concern that investigations into sexual harassment and other misconduct were carried out by the college council rather than independent investigators. He added that a culture of “quarrelsome” anonymous accusations and “poisonous” anonymous letters was creating an unhealthy atmosphere for seminarians.

The archbishop’s intervention lent credibility to long-standing rumors surrounding…