Tony Flannery

Sometime in Autumn last I was invited to give a talk at a venue in Galway. The date, time and place were arranged, and early in the new year the following notice was displayed in the website of the organisers. 

Fr. Tony Flannery.

Reconciling our Religious Upbringing with our current understandings of  Creation, Interpreting Scripture, and the Divine Presence. February 17th

I was looking forward to the event, Galway being my native county, and I had also been very involved in starting up the Galway Novena, and had worked on it for many years.

I published a book, Keeping the Faith, in 2005. It was my effort at the time to highlight the areas that needed reform in the Catholic Church. In that book I quoted from Hans Kung’s book Christianity, the Religious Situation of our Time.

He was writing from his experience of dealing with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF, now DDF). This is what he wrote:

The Roman Inquisition, founded in the Middle Ages, continues.

It is easy to distrust the outsider’s view of religious life since it is what it is, a way of life, which the outsider however well intentioned can only assess from the outside. All left brained assessments of religious life will demonstrate enormous certitude based on details drawn as honestly as possible from the external worlds of various ministries and badly attempted ‘good works’. 

No one will remember that we were once ordinary young girls growing up in Ireland who simply chose another way of life.