BishopAccountability.org
	Priest Labels Eucharistic Congress "a Ridiculous Jamboree" Total Catholic November 11, 2011 http://www.totalcatholic.com/tc/index.php/uk-and-ireland-news/1912-priest-labels-eucharistic-congress-a-ridiculous-jamboree- A member of the Association of Catholic Priests who is also a priest of the diocese of Cloyne has hit out at the process by which bishops are appointed. Writing in an opinion piece for the membership of the ACP, Fr Joe McGuane claimed that the Irish Church has "far too many dioceses" and he cited the structure of the Austrian church which has just nine dioceses while Germany has 27 dioceses for 25 million Catholics. Fr McGuane described that recent calls for all bishops appointed prior to Archbishop Diarmuid Martin to resign as "quite useless while the present system of appointments is in place". He claimed that under the current system, "clones" would replace those ousted and their characteristic would be "blind knee-jerk unconditional obedience, no matter how stupid the instructor or instruction, and a total absence of initiative and leadership". Blaming a "dearth of leadership" for the current crisis in the Irish Church, the Cloyne priest said "Seventeen years after the late Brendan Smyth was convicted of child sexual abuse, not alone are we still at square one but we have actually gone backwards." He also hit out at next year's International Eucharistic Congress in Dublin saying it had been "designed as a distraction" and claimed that the level of interest in the Congress ranked minus three on a scale of one to 100. "Priests will have to drag themselves along ... for a ridiculous jamboree, and dragoon as many parishioners as possible along with them," he said.
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