The Association of Catholic Priests (ACP) has lashed out at members of the Irish hierarchy whom they accuse of denigrating priests and contributing to the current negative climate towards the ordinary clergy.
In a statement issued on Monday in response to remarks made by Archbishop Diarmuid Martin on the defamation of Fr Kevin Reynolds by RTÉ, the ACP said questions needed to be asked as to whether some bishops, including Archbishop Martin himself, had been “complicit in the denigration of priests.”
The ACP statement continued, “It is one thing to lament the present negative and unjust attitude towards priests in general (as the Amarach/Iona survey has shown), but it is another to preside over, as some bishops have done, a situation where there is a serious lack of care for priests, innocent and guilty, and to effectively demonise them in Church and society.”
The Association, which now has over 600 members in Ireland, said the, “collateral damage done to priests and religious in general, and to innocent priests in particular, has been significant.”
The ACP called on Archbishop Martin and other bishops to demonstrate by their actions, rather than their words, that priests have rights like every other citizen.
“While we rightly value the systems and structures put in place to safeguard children, bishops need to be aware that their duty of care extends beyond simply implementing guidelines,” the Association leadership said. They criticised some bishops’ lack of concern for priests and their extended families and parish communities.
On RTÉ’s Morning Ireland programme on Monday, Archbishop Martin said the defamation and handling of the Fr Reynolds’ case by RTÉ raised questions about the need for independent regulation of the media.
“Press freedom is a vital element of our society and investigative journalism has done much good for our society but we need to have forms of regulation which are independent and we need, above all, a broad discussion in Ireland about how we manage these,” Dr Martin said.
He added it wasn’t about curbing journalists but was a question of democracy and added,
“These are fundamental questions that all of us in our systems have to ask: how can this happen and can we prevent it happening again.”
Asked about his reference to the fact that bishops had resigned or retired in the wake of recent clerical abuse scandals and whether there was a parallel for RTÉ resignations, Archbishop Martin told Morning Ireland, “I just wanted to point out that in some cases there was pressure put on Church people to resign at the beginning of the investigation rather than take the time to investigate more seriously.”
In his interview with the Irish Independent, Dr Martin told the reporter, "If this were in the Church, the bishops would be told to voluntarily resign rather than stand aside. The level of accountability has to be questioned here, it took a long time before people came and held their hands up and said 'look we made a serious mistake here’.”
In relation to Dr Martin’s criticism of RTÉ’s slow response to acknowledge the fact that they had got the story wrong on Fr Reynolds, the Morning Ireland presenter referred to the Church’s dragging of its feet in relation to the abuse scandals.
However, the Archbishop underlined that he was not “going to defend much of what happened in the Church in the past.”
“I think that we are now coming around to a situation in which that is changing and changing considerably,” he said and added, “The one thing I think you can say is the Church has learnt from its mistakes by putting into practice child protection norms which are now transparent and credible and by opening itself to consistent monitoring of how it performs.”
He reiterated that his comments in relation to the media were not an attempt to “muzzle anybody but to ensure that people’s rights are protected.”
Rejecting the claim that there is an anti-Catholic bias in the media, the Archbishop said there might be an anti-Catholic bias among some journalists. Of his own experience with the media, he said, “I have in general been extremely well quoted and correctly quoted, criticised or praised."
In their statement, the ACP said that while they agreed with Archbishop Martin’s conclusion that not all media should be, “tarred with the same brush in the way that priests have been,” they still believe that the case of Fr Kevin Reynolds shows, "what seems to us very much like bias in at least two instances.”
These they cited as RTÉ’s reluctance to wait until Fr Reynolds had a chance to prove his innocence, which the ACP said suggested they were confident that anything could safely be said about a priest in the present climate without fear of repercussions.
They added, “The Church authorities would not back him, and that people generally would believe the story.”
The ACP also criticised the manner in which the RTÉ journalist had door-stepped Fr Reynolds, “in both a time and place that is sacred to the Catholic faith.”
The ACP said, “There is, we believe, no doubt that RTÉ, or indeed any journalist, would not do the same to an Imam in the precepts of his mosque, or to a Jewish rabbi at his synagogue.”