Trainee Catholic priests have been meeting up using the gay dating app Grindr at Ireland’s top seminary, it has been claimed.
Dublin’s archbishop Dr Diarmuid Martin said he was ‘somewhat unhappy’ about rumours that students at St Patrick’s College in Maynooth were using the app, which he claimed ‘fostered promiscuous sexuality’.
The church leader will boycott the centuries-old college – which is just 16 miles from the Irish capital – and send students to a school in Rome instead.
The Archbishop said a ‘whole series of anonymous allegations’ were being circulated about goings-on at the Maynooth seminary.
While ‘some material has resulted to be true’, he added that it was impossible to fairly investigate and carry out due process while those making claims remained anonymous.
Efforts by him to recruit an independent person who could deal with whistleblower complaints were met with ‘simply more anonymous letters’ he said.
‘A culture of anonymous letters is poisonous and until that is cleared up I would be happier sending my students elsewhere,’ he added.
• Full story at the Daily Mail.
Irish Times Rome correspondent Paddy Agnew says this issue is likely to be viewed as an internal Irish problem.
“I can tell you that the Holy See official reaction when it comes will be that this is a matter for the Irish bishops, for the bishops conference, for the Archbishop of Dublin, for the fellow bishops to deal with – it’s not a matter Rome would be involved in,” he told Newstalk Breakfast.
“It’s not that they don’t have their own problems of that nature in Rome,” he said – referring to the previous case of a Polish monsignor who came out as gay last year.
“As somebody who went to a boys boarding school, as somebody who has two gay brothers, I’m not unaware of a gay sub-culture – and I can tell you The Holy See’s probably got more gays per square inch than anywhere else in the entire world.”
• Full story at Newstalk.