IRELAND
The Guardian
Henry McDonald Ireland correspondent
Tuesday 2 August 2016
The archbishop of Dublin will no longer send his student priests to be trained at Ireland’s oldest seminary amid claims of sexual harassment, a culture of gay sex and the use of the gay dating app Grindr on the campus.
Dr Diarmuid Martin has condemned the atmosphere at St Patrick’s College in Maynooth and will instead advise his seminarians either to be trained at Irish College in Rome or to work in parishes in Dublin.
The leader of Ireland’s largest diocese said there had been “poisonous” claims contained in anonymous letters about sex scandals at the college, 16 miles (26 km) from the capital.
Responding to reports coming out of the college, the head of Dublin’s Roman Catholics told RTE Radio on Tuesday that he was “somewhat unhappy about an atmosphere that was growing” there. Martin said he felt it was not the healthiest place for his student priests to be.
“There are allegations on different sides,” Martin said. “One is that there is a homosexual, a gay culture, that students have been using an app called Grindr, which is a gay dating app, which would be inappropriate for seminarians, not just because they are trained to be celibate priests but because an app like that is something which would be fostering promiscuous sexuality, which is certainly not in any way the mature vision of sexuality one would expect a priest to understand.”
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