Irish Priests Gagged by the Vatican
Brian D’Arcy is a well-known Roman Catholic priest and journalist in Ireland who had his wings severely clipped by the Vatican 14 months ago. He is forbidden to write or broadcast on such issues as the abuse scandal and he must submit his writings on other moral matters to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) for censoring. The CDF has imposed this restriction on him because of articles he has written criticising priestly abuse (he himself was abused when a youth), the Vatican’s handling of the scandal, and Rome’s ban on priests marrying.
D’Arcy is resolved to continue speaking out. “I speak strongly about this,” he said in an interview, “and I will make no apologies. I don’t mean it to be an offence to anybody when I say this, but if people expect me, who
was abused twice in my life, to be silent about issues and about the protection of children, I can’t do that.”
Five other named Irish priests, and four others who wish to remain anonymous, have also been censured and silenced by the Vatican. The anger of many Irish Roman Catholics has been aroused, and about 200 people, mostly priests and nuns (many of them wearing gags), demonstrated outside the residence of the apostolic nuncio in Dublin to protest against the silencing of the priests.
Some of the severest criticism of the Vatican has come from Roman Catholics. One blogger, in a blog entitled, “Silencing our way out of trouble”, says, “It’s deja vu all over again. About 150 years ago, the Vatican’s first response to the ‘modern world’ of democratic reform and theological renewal was to silence and shame any Catholic who spoke positively about either. So we got the Syllabus of Errors. . . . Now here we are at the beginning of the twenty-first [century], and once again the Vatican (and presumably the Pope) is choosing the former path: condemnation and silencing. . . . To be honest, this smells of a bit of desperation on the part of the Vatican.”
Desperation or not, the Vatican still shows that there is an iron fist in the velvet glove. A Roman Catholic columnist writing in The Independent says, “Quite obviously Fr D’Arcy spoke out too honestly and too often. It shows the enormous power of the Vatican and the fear it can engender, that someone such as he has kept silent on that censure for the past 14 months.”
D’Arcy is certainly no reformer in the Protestant sense of the term – he does not question the unscriptural doctrines of Rome. But we pray that God, by His Word and Spirit, will yet raise up Luther-like figures from Popery, as He raised up Knox, Calvin and others from the very midst of that foul system and as He called Saul of Tarsus from his fanatical Pharisaism. “Is any thing too hard for the Lord?” (Gen 18:14). NMR