Tony Flannery

The attempts to clean up the Vatican bring home the extent of the corruption that has informed the Catholic Church’s administration.
The Italian bias in the way the church has been organised has led to its involvement in Italian politics and power, including connections with the Mafia.
Pope Benedict did not know what hit him when he was first confronted with the venal set-up in the administration of the church; it all seemed to be out of his reach, ending in his resignation.
Pope Francis has managed to keep afloat in a leaking vessel on a very stormy sea. Thankfully, he is more concerned with honesty than with orthodoxy, confronting head-on the dysfunctional system that he has inherited.
There has been far too much concern with keeping up appearances.
The church seems driven by the fear of appearing human, subject to the cut and thrust of human living and human loving – what Pope Francis has recently referred to as ‘narcissism’.
Historically, Christianity in Ireland was rooted in and sustained by the monastic orders. They were not subject to Rome in the way the Catholic Church now finds itself. They provided and continue to provide a distinctive perspective on Christian life that is somewhat detached from the influence of Rome.
The Catholic claim to be the one true church, clearly, is no longer sustainable. Some of the greatest evils in the world today arise from the claim to have God or Allah distinctively and exclusively on one’s side.
It is difficult to separate the Vatican shenanigans from some pure and perfect ‘real church’ that the Vatican purports to administer; the sheer simplicity of the Christian message has become entangled in a man-made political mess, becoming an unedifying side show in the lives of many Christians.
Many of our young people who say they have left the church claim to have found Christianity.
Philip O’Neill, Oxford, England