Courtney McGrailAt least one magazine is happy to follow Papal advice
Would-be cutting edge stuff in the latest issue of The Phoenix, with the ‘Clerical Errors’ column taking a rusty scalpel to the timing of papal nuncio Archbishop Charles Brown’s August 22 Irish Times interview, risibly billed at the time as the nuncio’s “first Irish interview”.
Claiming “the garrulous Brown had spent much of his IT interview congratulating himself on masterminding the appointment of ten new bishops, including his Munster mole, Crean of Cloyne”, The Phoenix asserts says this was wholly undermined by the Cloyne bishop’s “blundering” ban on Vatican-silenced [sic]Fr Tony Flannery from addressing a parish council.
Of course, far from congratulating himself, Dr Brown, pressed for the first 11 of the interview’s 53 minutes on the appointment of bishops, consistently stressed how Ireland’s newest bishops have been appointed in line with exactly the same criteria that have been used in Ireland and elsewhere over the past 10-15 years.
The true hero of the story, for The Phoenix, is the silenced Fr Flannery, the man Rome cannot stop. Despite being barred from addressing parishioners in Cloyne, Fr Flannery will demonstrate his continued relevance by visiting Philadelphia on September 24 to speak to an excommunicated fringe group calling itself the Association of Roman Catholic Women Priests, led by Irish-born Bridget Mary Meehan, who has called herself a Catholic bishop since 2009.
Still, it’s nice to see The Phoenix seems to be heeding Pope Francis’ Laudato Si’ calls for reusing and recycling, with the bulk of the column having already appeared in August on the silenced Fr Flannery’s own website under the byline of the ‘fiery Pict’ John Cooney.
Waste not, want not, as the Holy Father might say!
Claiming the mantle of choice
Over at the self-proclaimed ‘Newspaper of Reference’, Una Mullally and Fintan O’Toole are predictably delighted that comedian Tara Flynn and journalist Róisín Ingle have told tales of their own abortions to challenge what Fintan calls Irish law’s supposed assumption that they are heartless murderers.
That 2013’s Protection of Life during Pregnancy Act struck down the old offence of procuring an abortion, something that remains a crime in Britain, and one carrying a life sentence, is somehow forgotten.
It’s a shame that Ms Ingle, in lamenting what she sees as the “very abstract” nature of Ireland’s abortion debate, and stressing our need for “a mature real conversation”, resorted on RTÉ’s the Marian Finucane Show to calling those who disagree with her as “anti-choice”.
If our mature national conversation will entail calling people ‘anti-choice’ because they insist no human being should be deprived of ever making any choices for themselves, we could be in for a strange few years.