Tony Flannery

‘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.

A delegation from the Association of Catholics in Ireland (ACI) on 26 November 2015 met with Archbishop Eamon Martin in Armagh. They asked him if he could give some support to the Irish priests who have been silenced. Archbishop Eamon Martin replied it was a matter for the Heads of the relevant Religious Orders and the Vatican CDF. The ACI delegation also asked if the bishops were meeting with the ACP and Archbishop Eamon replied that he meets with ACP members very regularly.

http://cdn.rasset.ie/manifest/audio/2016/0110/20160110_rteradio1-sundaywithmiriam-sundaywith_cl10512573_10514826_261_/manifest.m3u8
This is the link to the interview my brother Frank and myself did on RTE radio on Sunday, January 10th with Miriam O’Callaghan. It was a new experience for both of us to be on a programme together. Our lives have gone in different directions, and the issues we were talking about were very different, but I think it still made a good programme.

As a follow up to the programme I got this email this morning; as you can see it is a copy of an email he has sent to the bishops, and indeed to Church authorities all over the place.