Bishop’s diktat closes down public debate

SOME things never change, at least in the institution of the Catholic Church. 

Despite all of the warm, touchy-feely rhetoric about being a listening, inclusive Church, one that values the input of its laity, it remains an autocratic, anti-democratic organisation happy to stifle free speech if its authority or teachings are challenged in even the most gentle way.

Today we report that a priest has been prevented from speaking at a parish event in east Cork by the local bishop William Crean. Killeagh Parish Pastoral Council had invited Redemptorist Tony Flannery to speak in September but, according to Fr Flannery, that invitation was withdrawn after Bishop Crean became aware of the invitation. The crozier was used to good effect to stifle debate, close down a necessary discourse, and bully a community group into accepting an unwelcome diktat from a blinkered hierarchy.

The Killeagh group might, in time, explain why they felt obliged to bend to such pressure, one absolutely unacceptable in civic life, but it is unlikely that Bishop Crean will feel the need to be any more expansive than he has been already.

This is another example of the deeply conservative nature of the Irish Catholic Church, a conservatism at the root of the — again — anti-democratic stonewalling of Government policy on school patronage. The Catholic Church’s influence is at an all-time low in Ireland and this top-down whip-cracking is one of the many reasons for that inevitable loss of respect.