On Wednesday evening last, March 12th I gave one of my talks on Church reform at Gullane’s Hotel, Ballinasloe. It was organised by John Molloy, and he did an excellent job. The crowd was far larger than I expected. There must have been well over one hundred people there. Two things that struck me about them in particular. Firstly, they seemed to me to be very well up in the affairs of Church.
I wish to briefly reflect on the experience of the past two weeks or so, since the question of my brother Frank going before the Public Accounts Committee first came to prominence.
I have listened to politicians of all shades, led by the Taoiseach, and followed closely by the Tanaiste, and then by number members of all parties, calling on him to attend. Meanwhile the members of the PAC were on every possible media outlet, demanding that he come before them, and increasingly threatening all kinds of retribution if he failed to appear.
When Pope Francis, in Evangelii Gaudium, which came out last November, talked about how “the Church has to accept the unruly freedom of the Word” I knew that in all probability we were in a new era for the Catholic Church. In the founding story of Christianity that we find in the New Testament we are told that the close followers of Jesus were timid and frightened after he had left them.
