Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Falsely accused priest pays tribute to ACP at AGM

The parish priest of Ahascragh Co Galway, who was falsely accused by RTÉ’s Prime Time Investigates of raping a teenage Kenyan girl in 1982 and fathering a child by her, has paid tribute to the Association of Catholic Priests’ role in helping him prove his innocence through two paternity tests.

Last Sunday (11th Oct. 2011), 65-year-old Fr Kevin Reynolds returned to ministry in his parish in Co Galway.

RTÉ has now accepted that the allegations were completely untrue and negotiations are in train with the broadcaster regarding appropriate apologies and compensation.

Addressing over 300 members of the ACP and the public who attended the first session of the Association’s AGM on last Tuesday evening, the Mill Hill missionary said he was “very happy to go back to ministry in Ahascragh.”

“I want to take the opportunity to thank this Association,” he said.  “When I was very unexpectedly asked to withdraw from my ministry, I came to Dublin on May 20 in a daze.  It is something you cannot talk about unless you experience it; there was an avalanche of advice coming from so many sides.  I just couldn’t cope."

He recalled that Columban, Fr Sean McDonagh had invited him to come and talk about the allegations and having heard his side of the story, said the ACP would take his case on. 

“RTÉ and others would have loved if I had just sat back and took it on the chin and said nothing,” Fr Reynolds commented.  However, he said he and the ACP and their legal team had “hounded RTÉ.”

One of the main issues discussed by the members of the Association of Catholic Priests at their first AGM, the theme of which was The Challenges of Priestly Ministry in Ireland Today, was the issue of the handling of allegations of abuse against priests and the matter of false allegations.

ACP spokesman, Fr Tony Flannery told ciNews, “This case highlights the need for people to be more careful about what they say about priests in the context of allegations and the principle of people being innocent until proven guilty.”

According to ACP co-founder, Fr Brendan Hoban, representatives of the Association met with three Senior Counsel last December to discuss the issues surrounding the treatment of clerics accused of abuse.

“An arrangement was entered into in terms of resourcing the legal efforts of individual priests” and Fr Hoban said, “Significant progress has been made on this front.” 

He added, “Our legal advisers are contributing their services completely free of charge and they have already, at our request, taken on the cases of six priests.”

Meanwhile, in his keynote address to the AGM, Fr Kevin Hegarty castigated the Church’s leadership for relying on “the weapon of rigid authority” and failing to grasp the level of breakdown in trust engendered by the findings of the Ryan, Ferns, Murphy and Cloyne reports.  

In his address, Fr Hegarty tore into the “acute level of dysfunction” in the Irish Church and outlined the disillusion among priests.

Fr Hegarty, who was ordained in 1981, warned that there is “a torpidity about the Catholic Church in Ireland today” and cited plummeting Church attendances.  That so few men and almost no women are prepared to offer a lifetime of vocational service through priesthood or religious life is a sign of a Church in crisis he suggested.

Fr Hegarty told the assembled priests and laity that the Church’s official theology on sexuality “fails to resonate with the actual experience of human intimacy.”  

He said most Catholic couples ignore the humane vitae prohibition on contraception and he also criticised the insistence on compulsory celibacy for clerics.

The priest of Killala diocese said that the Church had been “a cold house for the last thirty years” for those whose lives were influenced by free speech, democracy, accountability and respect for academic dialogue.  

He claimed the present structure of Church is “suspicious of lay involvement” and “only those who are seen to conform" to the hierarchy's "narrow views are admitted to the temple.”

He criticised the manner in which bishops are chosen, saying it was on the basis of being in favour of compulsory celibacy, adherence to clerical dress, docility to papal teaching and above all against contraception and the ordination of women while “misogyny is dressed up in theological abstractions.” 

He called for the creation of spaces in the Church where real conversations could take place unhindered so that a way forward could be plotted. 

Wednesday’s session was closed to the public.  

Over 100 ACP priests heard Dr Marie Keenan question many of assumptions about child protection, specifically the role of the National Board for Safeguarding Children, and the fact that bishops and religious superiors have now taken on the role of policing criminal activity, which Dr Keenan said should be reserved for the organs of the State.