Association of Catholic Priests discuss Church's future

BBC News, 7 May 2012

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The Association of Catholic Priests
 represents more than 850 of the 4,500
priests on the island of Ireland.

An organisation which represents more than 850 priests in Ireland will hold a meeting on Monday to discuss the future direction of the Catholic Church.

The Vatican has recently criticised leading members of the Association of Catholic Priests (ACP) for expressing views which contradict Church teaching.

The ACP meeting comes at a turbulant time for the Church in Ireland.

Its leader, Cardinal Sean Brady, is facing calls to resign over his handling of a clerical sex abuse case.

Change

The ACP meeting, entitled "Towards an Assembly of the Irish Catholic Church", will take place at hotel in Dublin.

It has been described as a first effort to bring people together to discuss the current state of Catholic Church in Ireland which has been rocked in recent years by a series of high profile child abuse scandals.

During that period, a number of priests have openly expressed their desire for change in Church rules on matters such as clerical celibacy, the ordination of women and the ban on contraception.

However, in recent months, some of Ireland's most vocal, liberal priests have been disciplined by the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF).

They include leading ACP member, Father Tony Flannery, and the broadcaster and newspaper columnist Fr Brian D'Arcy.

Fr Flannery, who is based in County Galway, was ordered to stop writing articles for a Redemptorist Order magazine to which he had contrbuted for 14 years.

Fr D'Arcy was told he must get prior approval to write or broadcast on topics dealing with church doctrine.

Revelations

In the run-up to Easter, Pope Benedict warned that the Church would not tolerate priests speaking out against Catholic teaching. 

The leader of the Catholic Church in
 Ireland, Cardinal Sean Brady, has
faced calls to resign

Last week, a BBC documentary uncovered new revelations about an internal Church investigation into clerical child sex abuse in 1975.

It said a teenage boy who had been sexually abused by Fr Brendan Smyth gave the names and addresses of other children who were at risk from the paedophile priest to Cardinal Brady, who at that time was a 36-year-old priest.

He passed the allegations to his superiors but did not inform the police or the children's parents.

Fr Smyth continued to sexually assault one of the boys for a year after that.

He also abused the boy's sister for seven years, and four of his cousins, up until 1988.

The ACP recently commissioned a survey of Irish Catholics which found that 90% would support the introduction of married priests.

The survey also found that 77% of Irish Catholics want women to be ordained, while more than 60% disagreed with Church teaching that gay relationships were immoral.

At the time, Fr Brendan Hoban from the ACP said the results were proof that the perception of Irish Catholics as traditionalist, conservative and resistant to change was wrong.    

The Pope said the Church had no authority from God
to admit women priests.

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