Tony Flannery

I am writing this a few days before the General Election. I grew up in a very politically aware household, and all through my life I have taken a great interest in matters political. I believe that as a democracy we have been blessed with a fair degree of stability for the past one hundred years since the foundation of the state.

This current election campaign is probably the strangest, most unexpected, and at the same time enormously interesting, of all the elections I have lived through in my seventy plus years.

An American religious sister, Lavinia Byrne, published a book in 1994 entitled ‘Women at the Altar: the ordination of women in the Roman Catholic Church’. In the book she stated the following:

The ordination of  women to the priesthood is the logical conclusion of all the recent work  of Catholic theology about women and in particular about the holiness  of all the baptised.  It is not an aberration from what the Church  teaches, but rather a fulfillment of it so that not to ordain women would now be to compromise the Catholicity of the church.

It is quite a while since I have written anything in my blog. But now we have turned a new year, and even though I will be seventy three in two weeks time, there is still a sense, even if only a small one, of a new beginning.

The last few months of twenty nineteen contained two potentially significant happenings in my life.

First, the house I have been living in for the past eight years, since my “withdrawal from ministry” (to use the official Redemptorist phrase for what took place in my life in 2012) was sold, and now I am based back in my monastery.