IRELAND’S CATHOLIC bishops have declined to meet the Association of Catholic Priests’ leadership team, saying any such engagement “would best take place at local level by using established structures such as the Council of Priests”.
The ACP team said yesterday it was “both disappointed and saddened by this response”.
It found it “hard to understand why, in this time of great difficulty for the Irish church, neither the bishops as a body, or any individual bishop, is willing to meet with an association that has a membership of over 1,000 priests”.
It noted the Catholic primate “Cardinal Seán Brady, in a letter to the ACP on May 1st of this year, wrote: ‘The ACP has already met representatives of the bishops and also attended a meeting of a Commission of the Episcopal Conference and we expect that there will be ongoing meetings of this nature’.” No such ‘ongoing’ meetings have taken place.”
Yesterday the ACP leadership team released details of its two meetings with bishops.
One, in March 2011, related to the new missal and no changes sought by the ACP were agreed. A second “private meeting, very pleasant and affable” with two bishops took place last spring. Following it the ACP felt “more meetings like this would not serve any useful purpose”.
Last June, the ACP wrote to the cardinal requesting a meeting with the episcopal conference. Among the things they wished to discuss was “what will we do now to save the Irish Catholic Church. . .from effective collapse?”
The ACP agm takes place at Dublin’s Regency Hotel on November 9th and 10th.
