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Post by loughcrew on Jul 17, 2010 13:10:28 GMT
There is a disturbing report on our national seminary college of St. Patrick's, Maynooth, published in today's edition of the Irish Daily Mail and written by Philip Nolan which seems to confirm earlier reports filed by Mark Dooley in the same newspaper. I have no personal knowledge of the regime which exists in the college but if anyone could enlighten me as to the veracity or falsity of these reports I would be most grateful.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Jul 21, 2010 10:18:58 GMT
I have not read the Nolan article. My sources say there may be some exaggeration in the Dooley articles (probably due to the author taking reports at face value a bit too much) but they are substantially true.
But Dooley only repeated what already appeared in relation to Maynooth and Milltown in The Brandsma Review, what Father Joseph Briody said in The Irish Catholic in 2001 (?) not long after RTÉ's 'True Lives' featured a few Maynooth clerical students; a piece in the Sunday Business Post by LMSI president Peadar Laighléis in January 2001 which refered to Maynooth, Milltown and formation with in clerical religious orders; and going way back to the 1970s, a series of articles in the Irish Independent by Mgr P Francis Cremin entitled 'What's wrong with Maynooth?'.
More softly, but equally critically, Mgr Pádraig Ó Fiannachta published an article in Irisleabhar Má Nuad which was later translated into English and published in Intercom (a magazine every priest and religious in Ireland, apart from the SSPX, receives) entitled 'Maynooth as I would like to see it'. That was early 1990s.
All point to grave deficiencies in priestly and religious formation over a long time and there is more than the Daily Mail saying it.
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Post by Beinidict Ó Niaidh on Jul 21, 2010 11:31:56 GMT
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Post by guillaume on Jul 21, 2010 13:33:18 GMT
Could not read the article in the daily mail, as this paper is not online. However, thanks for the links. If the situation described in the different articles is truth, then the situation is serious indeed. Seem that Ireland's only seminary is in bad shape. It is not surprisingly that the Irish Church is so shy to encourage vocations. The Church does it from time to time, but actually do not encourage vocations as such, in a firm manner. Seminarians having girlfriends, drunken parties, boyfriends, condom... Now that is the world I live in.... This is not a behaviour expected from young people called by God to serve Him and save the souls ! For me, the only solution rest in traditional seminaries abroad. FSSP or ICRSP or SPPX. In those place, they will receive a proper and holy formation, not this kind of circus described there and really disturbing. I think a proper investigation shall be done. The apostolic visitation might do something. The purification of the Church which had slightly started shall start in the seminary. Shame to the director of this place, if those rumors are truth.
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Post by Beinidict Ó Niaidh on Jul 21, 2010 14:23:38 GMT
Though I don't share Guillaume's enthusiasm for the SSPX, I think his point stands: if the articles quoted are a reflection on the way Maynooth is now, then Irish candidates for the priesthood are best to go elsewhere.
The Irish Daily Mail is not online, but there is a lot more stuff on this topic out there. I'll look and if I can I will post more.
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Post by loughcrew on Jul 21, 2010 16:03:30 GMT
And in today's Irish Daily Mail (still no on line copy to link to) Doctor Mark Dooley claims that he got the boot from his lecturer's postion in Maynooth college for exposing the goings on in the seminary.
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Post by guillaume on Jul 22, 2010 10:01:38 GMT
Thanks. I found this on Father Z's blog. I copied and paste the whole thing, including Father Z comments. It makes me seriously SICK !!!!! wdtprs.com/blog/2010/05/problems-in-the-seminary-at-maynooth-ireland/ The Article by Mark Dooley is entitled Sin within the Church is born in Seminaries and my friend in Ireland who sent me the article tells me there is a follow up this week which he is sending me.
Mark has visited and lectured in Seminaries and reports that Irish Seminaries are hotbeds of serious moral decay which is devastating the Church in this country. Their culture is one which rejects piety and holiness in favour of religious laxity and moral confusion. This is resulting in priests who barely believe in the doctrine they were ordained to promote. Mark speaks then of courageous young men who have told him about what is going on, and even have to conceal their true piety at the risk of being thrown out of the seminary. [I’m having a flashback.] One seminarian complained to Mark he was not allowed to knell during Mass. He has learnt that some professors have told him there is no such thing as transubtstantiation [Exactly what my waterloo was at my seminary… a prof, priest, who explicitly denied transsubtantiation.] and that he should not look to Rome as "they dont know anything". Often the Rosary is frowned upon. Seminarians have been taught that the Mass is just a memorial of a past event and is only a "gathering of the Community" to remember the event. [The same doctrine denying priest told us that when an "ordained minister says the words of institution over bread and wine, no real change takes place. It becomes a symbol of the unity of the community gathered there in that moment." How many things are wrong with that?] Meanwhile in the Seminaries he claims, excessive drinking and dubious sexual practices are overlooked. [Yes… this is like a nasty flashback.] He claims that the seminaries are still refusing to accept that there is anything wrong with their training methods and refusing in effect to teach that the priest should be formed in the image of Christ . Later on the current erroneous teaching leads in part at least to the abuse scandals of today.
My own comment is that I have found small examples of this in the past in the training of priests over here….but many years ago. Students who were told to leave because of their piety and even homsexuality cases. A recent case concerns a priest who was ordained 20 years ago who was teaching that one could not accept that the words used by Our Lord in the Gospel were ever uttered, and that what mattered at Mass was the Community. He has now been "retired".
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Post by monkeyman on Jul 23, 2010 4:01:29 GMT
Well to contrast all this muck with something more hopeful, I was informed recently that as many as 3 young Irish men are preparing to enter "Traditional" seminaries abroad- afraid thats about the thick of it that I have at the moment.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Jul 26, 2010 11:20:26 GMT
Monkeyman, that's good to hear, but Irishmen do not have the best of records when it comes to staying in the trad seminaries.
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Post by Askel McThurkill on Aug 16, 2010 14:14:28 GMT
I have one observation - I have heard a lot of 'shock, horror' in regard to articles about Maynooth for a long time. The stir caused by Mark Dooley now is similar to the reaction to the Fr Briody piece in 2002, coming shortly after the infamous 'True Lives' programme Melancholicus describes on his blog. Peadar Laighléis did not directly attack Maynooth in the Sunday Business Post, but people knew where he meant (though he also knows a bit about the climate in religious orders - I think this experience pushed him towards the LMSI - or maybe one of our other posters knows better), but at the time the incident occured where a Galway diocesan priest, Rev Olan Rynne (yes, he was at Maynooth) posed nude in a charity calendar. The picture was pulled but not before a series controversy ensued, raising a lot of money for cancer research in the process. The piece mentioned by Father O Fiannachta made the national newspapers in the early '90s, when the biggest scandal was about Éamonn Casey.
We're talking about a pattern here. I remember being at a funeral around the time of the O Fiannachta piece where a young solicitor who had been at Maynooth as a lay student told people what the late Pope John Paul II was alleged to have said to the late Cardinal O Fiaich when he was greeted in the College Chapel in Maynooth in October 1979. The then 550-strong body of clerical students were out on in the aisles of the Gun Chapel in soutanes and surplices singing 'JP2, We love you' and clapping. JP2 was seen on the TV footage to look horrified and apparently, he turned to Tom Fee and is said to have said 'I thought this was a seminary'. Well, this was two years after Mgr Cremin's 'What's wrong with Maynooth' appeared in the Irish Independent.
My point here is we seem to have very short memories when it comes to the National Seminary and what is out of place there. Since 1977, it has had a lot of presidents: O Fiaich, Olden, Ledwith, O'Donnell, Farrell and Connolly. Its numbers have gone from 550 in 1979 to 350 in 1987 to 230 in 1992 to about 55 in 2000, climbing back to 65 today. Draw your own conclusions.
BTW, can anyone remember a straw in the wind in Easter 2009 when a number of students in Maynooth and the Irish College in Rome suddenly upped and left to join a new religious order in some French diocese?
Criticism of Maynooth has been pretty consistent over the past generation and doesn't appear to have ever been properly addressed.
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 16, 2010 19:31:23 GMT
the recent claim about three Maynooth contemporaries from the 80s abusing the same man also suggests a nasty subculture. I must say Bishop Willie Walsh comes very well out of that report, whatever his other issues.
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Post by Beinidict Ó Niaidh on Aug 16, 2010 20:10:54 GMT
the recent claim about three Maynooth contemporaries from the 80s abusing the same man also suggests a nasty subculture. I must say Bishop Willie Walsh comes very well out of that report, whatever his other issues. If I remember Fr Briody's piece correctly, he refers to this subculture.
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Post by Beinidict Ó Niaidh on Aug 16, 2010 20:13:22 GMT
Askel only gives part of the story with his stats. Until the mid-1990s, Holy Cross College, Clonliffe; St Patrick's College, Thurles; St Patrick's College, Carlow; St Peter's College, Wexford; St John's College, Waterford; and St Kieran's College, Kilkenny were all open.
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Post by Askel McThurkill on Aug 16, 2010 20:28:25 GMT
Askel only gives part of the story with his stats. Until the mid-1990s, Holy Cross College, Clonliffe; St Patrick's College, Thurles; St Patrick's College, Carlow; St Peter's College, Wexford; St John's College, Waterford; and St Kieran's College, Kilkenny were all open. Absolutely correct. There were even a couple of students in the Irish College in Paris at the earlier stages.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Aug 19, 2010 11:44:39 GMT
the recent claim about three Maynooth contemporaries from the 80s abusing the same man also suggests a nasty subculture. I must say Bishop Willie Walsh comes very well out of that report, whatever his other issues. If I remember Fr Briody's piece correctly, he refers to this subculture. Both Hibernicus and Beinidict are correct on these points. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, rumours were in circulation in regard to Maynooth, Thurles, Clonliffe and some of the other seminaries about the expulsion of groups of clerical students who preyed on younger clerical student in the manner which Hibernicus suggests above. A very nasty subculture indeed and one would hope it had no support from anyone in authority in any of the places listed above. I can not comment in relation to the smaller seminaries, but the reports about Maynooth seem very well corroborated. BTW, did anyone read Nick Lowry's Brandsma Review piece 'Maynooth: Seminary or Sewer?' which had much information from fomer students on the place - it appeared not long after Fr Briody's Irish Catholic article.
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