The Vatican has moved to suppress dissent in the Irish Catholic Church by clamping down on two well-known liberal Redemptorist priests as well as the congregation’s monthly magazine, Reality.
Restrictions have been placed on Fr Tony Flannery, a founder of the Association of Catholic Priests, whose monthly column in the magazine has been discontinued.
A clampdown has also been imposed on the magazine itself and its editor, Fr Gerard Moloney, who, it is believed, is no longer allowed to write on certain issues.
Neither priest would comment when contacted by The Irish Times yesterday.
Fr Flannery, a brother of senior Fine Gael adviser Frank Flannery, is well known around Ireland through retreats he has conducted in Galway, Limerick, Belfast and elsewhere.
Yesterday Pope Benedict delivered an unusually direct denunciation of dissenting priests and laity in a sermon at a Holy Thursday Mass in St Peter’s Basilica.
Responding specifically to a call to disobedience by Austrian priests and laity on celibacy and women priests, he said they had challenged “definitive decisions of the church’s magisterium”.