IRELAND
Mayo News

Fr Kevin Hegarty

IMAGINE if the director of the Bank of Ireland declared that he had no confidence in the financial procedures of the company. There would be a mass withdrawal of funds. It might even lead to the closure of the bank.

As a less dramatic level, something like that happened in the Catholic Church in Ireland last week.

The Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Diarmuid Martin, is the second ranking cleric in the Irish Catholic establishment and a trustee of St Patrick’s College in Maynooth. He announced that he was unhappy with seminary formation in the college and was sending Dublin student priests to the Irish College in Rome. Has he sounded the death knell for an institution that was once the biggest Catholic seminary in the world and the place where the vast majority of Irish priests have been trained since 1795. What is…