Search Results for 'Diarmuid Martin'

Colaiste Iognaid is 150 years at its Sea Road site this year, and as part of the celebrations, an international education conference is being held at the Connemara Coast Hotel, Furbo this weekend.

An Athenry cleric who was placed under investigation and silenced by the Vatican earlier this year for his outspoken views is now being put under further pressure to sign retraction documents.

The Association of Catholic Priests (ACP) has expressed its support of Fr Tony Flannery, branding the intervention of the Vatican to effectively silence the Athenry-based Redemptorist cleric as “ill-advised” and “unfair”.

The revelations this week that Cardinal Sean Brady sat in on and conducted interviews with traumatised victims of child rape, believed their story to be true and failed in his moral, Christian and legal duty to inform the gardai, is a true indicator of the extent of the level of denial that exists in the Catholic Church regarding the culture of secrecy.

Abuse victims are hurting again this week at the apparent disregard of the Vatican for their suffering at the hands of paedophile priests and religious over decades in Ireland. While they may have been naive in thinking that the Church would change the habits of a lifetime and stage some sort of public lynching, the lack of any obvious compassion or regret by the world’s senior churchman has struck a sour note, not only in the minds of victims, but among all those who were viewing this meeting as a turning point for the Church.

We’ve had a week now to come to terms with The Ryan Report. Archbishop Diarmuid Martin warned us to expect the worst, but even so, the scale of the cruelty, neglect, and abuse - physical, emotional, and sexual - documented in the pages of this report will change forever the way the Church is viewed in this country. That those in a position of care to the most vulnerable members of society - those whom the Irish Constitution singled out for particular concern - could have inflicted the immediate pain and suffering, not to mention the long-term emotional consequences that those abused have carried with them into maturity, is terrible enough. That they acted as they did in the name of the Christian faith, whose founder took the child’s trust as a metaphor for humanity’s trust in God, can only be described as blasphemy.

DEFIANT Bishop of Galway Dr Martin Drennan, who has refused to bow to calls for his resignation after his name was mentioned in The Murphy report into the handling of child abuse in the Dublin archdiocese, is to speak face to face with Pope Benedict in the Vatican next month as the pontiff draws up a response to the Irish abuse scandal.