Tony Flannery

January can be a long, and fairly dreary, month. In my years of ministry it was a nice break from the travel and intensity of mission preaching. More often than not it was also a time when I was preparing for the Galway Novena, which usually takes place in the first half of February. A few days ago I was talking to one of my Redemptorist colleagues who was going off for a badly needed break for a week.  

In a recent article in The Tablet, the distinguished Augustinian theologian, Gabriel Daly, had the following paragraph:

“When the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith offends against justice and peace by identifying its own traditionalist opinions as ‘the immutable teaching of the Church’ and then accuses, and even punishes, fellow Catholics for not conforming to them, we have a situation that makes dissent and protest not only permissible, but a moral and theological duty.”