Truth lost in controversy

As a 29-year-old lay Catholic I thought I might offer my own opinion on the Fr Flannery debacle.

The current wave of sympathy for Fr Tony Flannery and Reality magazine editor Gerard Moloney has brought to the forefront a certain misunderstanding about the essence and role of the Church.

Whatever one’s opinions may be on issues such as contraception, mandatory celibacy and the non-ordination of women, there is one pre-conceived notion of the Church that in my opinion forms the basis of all subsequent misunderstandings.

The underlying assumption on the part of the aforementioned priests is that the Church is analogous to a political party, and just as a political party must change its policies to win votes and thus survive, so too must the church change many of its ‘backward teachings’ in order to win back numbers to Sunday masses and thereby continue to exist.

If we look at the Church in this light we may, and many do, accuse the Church or “the Vatican” of a lack of genuine humility, or worse still, of a fanatical chauvinism which sometimes leads “the Vatican” to silence people who are at variance with its ethos.

In the fog and obscurity created by all these misconceptions a rather simple entity has been lost; the truth.

The truth is that Tony Flannery swore in front of God almighty before his ordination to promulgate the teaching of the Church and has spent a large part of his ministry contradicting and negating that oath, leaving the Holy See with little choice other than to ask him to stop.

He has not been suspended. He has not been ex-communicated and he has certainly not been mistreated in the same way Christ was, because he was given a fair hearing and left with his ministry intact.

The Church has the mandate to preach the truth as revealed to her by Christ and his Holy Spirit.

We do not have the luxury that politicians have of changing our “policies” to suit current trends.

We are not called to promote our own opinion, but we are called to be seekers and teachers of the truth even when that truth is unpopular and out of fashion.

John O’Riordan

Cloghroe

Co. Cork