Fr Tony Flannery has paid a high price for his membership of the Association of Catholic Priests (ACP). A founder member, over five years ago, in the dog-days of the Pope Benedict era, Tony and others (including myself) spelled out as our platform the need for an agenda of reform for the Church we had served for decades – and which everyone (or almost everyone) could see was dying by the day.
Yesterday in Dublin: the theatre and the march.
Yesterday, Saturday, two friends and myself decided we would go to Dublin to the Gate production of “A Month in the Country”. It was not our brightest idea, considering we were clashing with the rugby match and the ‘right to water” march.
The train from Limerick Junction to Dublin was packed, and I had to make do with standing on the corridor between carriages. There were about half a dozen Cork men around where I stood, and I could clearly hear their conversation all the way to Dublin.
John Cooney on the papal nuncio, Bishop Crean and myself
Irish Journalist John Cooney from Dublin writes:
Ireland’s Papal Nuncio Charles Brown scored a spectacular own goal by highlighting the ineffectuality of the Vatican’s ‘silencing’ of dissident Redemptorist priest Tony Flannery, whose continued marginalisation from public ministry at home is more than matched by his celebrity emergence as a top speaker at an international conference next month in Philadelphia in support of the ordination of women priests just days before Pope Francis’s first visit to the Land of the Free.
