Tony Flannery

For the past week the media have been full of the altercation between the judge and the Christian Brothers. I have been saddened by the whole affair. Sad, of course, for the many people whose lives were damaged by various forms of abuse at the hands of certain brothers.

But also sad for the brothers themselves, the majority of whom did not abuse anybody, but gave great service in their schools, and opened up possibilities for generations of young men, especially in the second half of the last century.

In the almost fifteen years now since I was suspended from ministry as a priest, I have regularly complained about the lack of due process in the dealings with my case, and also the fact that there was no appeals process. Now I discover that I was wrong. There is an appeals body in the Curia. It is known as the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura, and it is an established body within the Vatican, and one of its functions is to deal with cases of the removal of a priest’s ministerial faculties.

I was born into a rural, small-farming household in the West of Ireland just after the Second World War. From a religious point of view, my upbringing was about as traditional as you could imagine.

Mass, confession, benediction, and novena to Our Lady in a nearby monastery every Saturday.

My parents were religious, but I think towards the end of their lives, they began to have questions of their own. Maybe not so much my father, who died in his early sixties, but more obviously my mother, who lived almost to ninety.