IRELAND
The Argus
Anne Campbell
PUBLISHED
13/08/2016
Recently retired Knockbridge Parish priest, Fr Gerard McGinnity, has revealed how he is thinking of writing a book about his life and his role in highlighting problems at St Patrick’s Seminary, Maynooth, days after Archbishop Diarmuid Martin revealed he is to send trainee priests from his diocese to the Irish College in Rome.
A series of senior bishops have backed the college amid allegations of a ‘gay culture’ in St Patrick’s College. Archbishop Martin has withdrawn his trainee priests from Maynooth due to what he described as allegations of a ‘homosexual, gay culture, that students are using an app called Grindr, a gay dating app’.
However, the leader of the Catholic Church in Ireland, and Dundalk’s parish priest, will continue to send trainee priests to Maynooth. A spokesman for Archbishop of Armagh Eamon Martin, the Primate of All Ireland, said the Archdiocese was ‘extremely grateful to St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, for the spiritual, human, pastoral and academic formation that he received there’.
Fr McGinnity is a former senior dean at Maynooth and in the 1980s was relieved of his post after he raised complaints seminarians then had brought to him. Speaking to RTE Radio 1’s News at One last week, Fr McGinnity he said the current controversy was ‘like deja vu in many respects’ and recalled what happened when he brought trainee priests’ complaints to the hierarchy.
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