Tony Flannery

Roy Donovan’s review of Eamon Maher’s ‘The Prophetic Voice: Jean Sulivan’s Ongoing Relevance in France and Ireland’

June 8 2026

In his book ‘The Prophetic Voice’, Eamon Maher has done us a great service in transporting Jean Sulivan, the French priest, from anonymity into mainstream. He does this by putting forward from within his fiction writings that Sulivan is prophet and is a role model for our times. I was left feeling that it is remarkable that such an unheard of ‘rebel’ priest existed in the 60s and 70s.

! https://www.newstalk.com/podcasts/highlights-from-moncrieff/will-we-ever-see-women-in-power-in-the-catholic-church

This is my article currently published in The Journal.ie

Major Challenges facing the Catholic Church

After a long period of stagnation, even retrenchment, in the Catholic Church, Pope Francis was a reformer. Through a movement which he called Synodality, he attempted to change the structure of the Church, in particular in its decision making processes.  The idea reflects the need to shift from a system where traditionally all the power and authority was in the hands of the clergy to a system where all the believers had a voice and accepted that at a basic fundamental level all the baptised were equal.