President says that there is a ‘wholesome, healthy’ atmosphere at the college

IRELAND
Irish Independent

Sarah MacDonald
PUBLISHED
03/08/2016

The president of Maynooth has emphasised there is a “healthy, wholesome” atmosphere at the college despite the controversy currently engulfing the national seminary.

Monsignor Hugh Connolly was commenting following on from Archbishop Diarmuid Martin’s decision to pull ­trainee priests under his charge from St Patrick’s College due to a “an ­atmosphere of strange ­goings-on there”.

Msgr Connolly admitted that he was “worried” about the allegations that some seminarians had been listed on a gay dating app, but there was no “concrete detail” to back it up.

But he emphasised that there was a good atmosphere at the college.

“The broader atmosphere is, I think, actually quite a wholesome, healthy one because there are a lot of interplay between students of many, many disciplines, lay students and clerics, male and female, people who are engaged pastorally,” he told RTÉ’s ‘Drivetime’.

Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.