Tony Flannery

There’s an interesting article about a book review by Adrian Hardiman, in the Irish Times today on page 8.

It’s at http://www.irishtimes.com/news/crime-and-law/hardiman-questions-methods-of-uk-sex-claim-inquiries-1.2533054.

His review is in the Dublin Review of Books at http://www.drb.ie/essays/kafka-on-thames.

His review is of Love, Paul Gambaccini, by Paul Gambaccini, who recounts his experiences at the rough end of Operation Yewtree in UK, an investigation into allegations of child sexual abuse.

There are many things in Hardiman’s review which kept ringing bells in relation to the Murphy Report.

Bread and circuses during the Year of Mercy? No, grazie!
Robert Mickens

The man Pope Francis put in charge of coordinating events for the Extraordinary Holy Year of Mercy — Archbishop Rino Fisichella — has announced that the fledgling Jubilee of Mercy is already off to a roaring success.
The archbishop, whose day job is heading the Pontifical Council for the New Evangelization, told journalists at a press conference on Jan.

‘Pope Benedict was a teaching Pope, a theologian and intellectual’ a Vatican insider told BBC’s Mark Dowd. ‘His misfortune was to accede to the papacy at a time that there was a power vacuum, in which a number of middle-ranking members of the Roman Curia had turned into “little Borgias” as another clerical official put it’, reported Dowd. Pope Francis would himself refer to the Curia as the “leprosy of the papacy”, filled with clerics who were both narcissistic and self-referential.