A man who brings us back to the basic tenets of faith

Country Living with Francis Farragher

My ageing Massey Ferguson is not exactly the envy of my neighbourhood but it does have an old radio that works, keeping me in touch with all things local and national.

In the midst of my chores on Saturday, I tuned into Radio 1, where the excellent Áine Lawlor was doing an interview with one Fr Tony Flannery, the Redemptorist priest from Attymon, whose Masses I have chanced to attend, and enjoyed, over the years, but alas not any more.

For the past three years, Fr Tony has been ‘suspended from duties’ by a powerful body in the Catholic Church, known as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), something akin to a disciplinary committee of the GAA, except that they are a lot more secretive and judgmental.

His so-called crime was that, at the height of the clerical sex abuse scandal in Ireland, he wrote that the “priesthood as we have it now in Ireland, is not as Jesus intended”, if anything, an understatement in terms the awfulness of what happened for decades across every corner of Ireland.  Years back the term ‘silenced’ was used in the context of disciplinary action against priests, but Tony Flannery certainly has not been silenced since the ruling by the CDF: in fact, he has travelled internationally to set up a reform movement in the Church.

Now 68 years of age, he remarked rather jaundicedly that his best chance of having the sanctions against him lifted would be a scenario, maybe a decade or so from now, if he was terminally ill, and the authorities decided that enough was enough.

He was there at the very start of the Galway Novena over 30 years ago and it was rather poignant to hear him speak of his official Church isolation towards the end of another successful nine day celebration of faith by the banks of the Corrib and also on the year’s great date of love, Valentine’s Day.

The poor man is obviously hurting very deeply on a personal level by being prevented from ‘putting on the vestments’ and celebrating the Eucharist, his great mission and purpose in life. But despite the unpleasantness of it all, he has also been stimulated by the many, many people in the Church, who want to see reform brought in and who want to see an end to the cloak-and-dagger attitude that has dragged the institution to its knees over recent years.

One of his tales about attending a recent funeral of a person that he knew well paints its own picture of a side of the Church that’s more reminiscent of the CIA than a Christian organisation. The priest in charge of the ceremony asked Tony Flannery to put on the vestment and to ‘come up on the altar’ with him. It was an offer he declined on the basis, that if he did go onto the altar, word of his action would have reached the Vatican by that same evening, and (in my words) ‘all hell would break loose’.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.