Pope Benedict XVI is not even dead a week and already prominent voices in the Irish Synod are sticking the knife in.
(Father) Tony Flannery, who is no longer allowed to practise public ministry, took part in the Synodal Meeting in Athlone last year and is one of the most prominent voices in the Association of Catholic Priests. The ACP is heavily linked to the ruling Fine Gael party who shut the Vatican Embassy in the early 2010s and pursued a policy of attacking the church regularly in order to distract from their own austerity policies. Flannery’s brother was prominent in the party and in 2018, Flannery even admitted to voting against the rights of unborn children in Fine Gael’s abortion referendum.
Flannery attended the National Synod Session in June, which saw many more traditional groups excluded. He said that the Primate of All Ireland had warmly greeted him at the event, writing: When I walked in to the room in the morning after arriving the first person who came over to greet me, hand out in welcome, was Eamon Martin. He wrote:
When I walked in to the room in the morning after arriving the first person who came over to greet me, hand out in welcome, was Eamon Martin.
Flannery has responded to the death of Pope Benedict XVI with his usual classiness, saying:
Do I regret his death? I can’t really say that I do.
Flannery whines about Ratzinger’s apparent persecution of him before admitting:
Not that I had any direct dealings with Joseph Ratzinger.
Another group, We Are Church, were also invited to the Athlone Synod meeting. They too did not miss the opportunity to go after Benedict XVI following his death.
We Are Church International sees the late Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, former Pope Benedict XVI, as a highly contradictory theologian who shaped the Roman Catholic Church for decades in a backward-looking way like no other post-conciliar church leader. He left his successor Pope Francis and the entire Church a difficult legacy to overcome, leaving a climate of fear and a theological standstill.
Another (Father) Ignatius (Iggy) O’Donovan wrote that Benedict XVI led a:
McCarthy-type purge of fellow scholars
It was on his watch at the CDF that Hans Kung, his one-time colleague, was stripped of his right to teach Catholic theology.
The Irish Independent quotes O’Donovan as saying that he found it ‘very hard to mourn’ Benedict XVI’s passing.
One of Benedict XVI’s first acts as pope was to meet with Hans Kung in 2005. These sorts of facts generally escape the parochial inwardness of the Irish Catholic liberal scene, which rarely looks beyond the pages of the Irish Times for context. Clearly, Benedict XVI was a more open man than they give him credit for.
Another prominent voice involved with the Synod and the ACP went viral recently for shocking comments about young priests, which were echoed in the Synod Synthesis Report.
