The Irish Association of Catholic Priests said it is “disturbed” that the group’s founder, the Redemptorist priest Tony Flannery, is under investigation by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. In a statement on April 9 , the priests’ association—which represents about 20 percent of Ireland’s 4,000 priests—affirmed “in the strongest possible terms our confidence in and solidarity with Father Flannery.” The group said that the Vatican’s “individual focus on Father Flannery and inevitably, by implication, on the members of the association, is an extremely ill-advised intervention in the present pastoral context in Ireland.” In the past, Father Flannery has called for reconsideration of the church’s teachings on a variety of issues, including the ordination of women, the ban on artificial birth control and mandatory priestly celibacy.
Vatican Investigates Irish Redemptorist
Show Comments (
)
Comments are automatically closed two weeks after an article's initial publication. See our comments policy for more.
The latest from america
“Pope Francis is the pope of the people,” Rosa de los Ríos told America in Spanish before the funeral Mass. “He is very close to the people.... That’s why he was so loved. People felt he was very close to them.”
Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy met inside St. Peter’s Basilica ahead of the funeral for Pope Francis on the morning of April 26.
Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re’s homily for the funeral of Pope Francis.
The day before he died, Pope Francis made one final circuit through St. Peter’s Square in his popemobile. “That’s my last image of him alive,” Gerry O’Connell remembered. “He drove among the people.”