Today in Dublin the Association of Catholic Priests will meet, with a membership claiming to represent a quarter of priests in Ireland, according to Radio 4’s “Today” programme this morning.  They include among  their objectives: allowing the divorced to remarry; the election of bishops; change in liturgical language and practice to be “inclusive and accessible to all”; married clergy and the ordination of women; and a general liberalisation of the Church’s teaching on a variety of matters to fall into line with norms and mores of secular society.  You can read their “Objectives” here couched in seemingly innocuous and polite terms but in fact calling for a revolution.  

Some might think that a large group of priests calling for such a revolt has come out of nowhere quite suddenly but I think you would find many similar views long held by many priests in the UK as well. My own experience is that they are not uncommon views among many priests.  Those of us who try to hold to the Church’s official teaching have long been branded as “traditional”, “conservative” and “reactionary” precisely because the centre “opinion” has long ago shifted to a stance far from what you will find actually written in the Code, the Catechism, the rubrics, or orthodox teaching.

These revolutionary views have been propagated at the seminaries and disseminated in parishes to the laity, quietly and unobtrusively for years without being challenged by the hierarchy – and in fact, often encouraged.  Now in Ireland they are organising and banding together to formally lobby for these now entrenched revolutionary views.  So prevalent that they now feel strong enough to come out fully into the open and make an outright challenge to Orthodoxy.