

Two founder members of the Association of Catholic Priests (ACP) have condemned as “scurrilous” what it described as a “sustained media attack on religious orders”.

Fr Brendan Hoban asked “how has it has come about that the actions of a minority of religious has effectively led to the demonisation of all religious, even though the vast majority lived admirable and sometimes heroic lives?”

He continued: “How has it come about that religious who gave up their salaries so that schools could offer a wider curriculum to their students (or religious who stood at a sink for 50 years working for nothing in an effort to augment the measly contribution of the State to the care of the young or religious who were for decades the only social contact with the desperately poor) are now, in their old age, ritually and comprehensively condemned in a media frenzy that seems intent on not providing the kind of balance that equity and justice require.”

Concerning the recent controversy following a refusal by the four religious congregations which ran Magdalene laundries to contribute to a redress fund for women who had been in them, he wondered at “how reluctant the public . . . seemed to be in defending the nuns. Where were all the past-pupils of Loreto, Our Lady’s Bower and the Ursulines? Why indeed, at a wider level, the silence from alumni of Clongowes, Blackrock, Rockwell, St Jarlath’s and St Muredach’s?”

He continued: “What’s instructive now is how that silence and condemnatory attitude that underpins it have become the media template for coverage of matters religious.”

Quoting from articles in The Irish Times, the Sunday Independent and the Sunday Times he said “the reason for this sustained assault” was a refusal of the four congregations concerned “to bend to additional pressure from the State to make further contributions to save the taxpayers paying their share.”

He said “the Minister for Justice even suggested that they had ‘a moral and ethical duty’ to pay more. The media coverage, unfair and sometimes scurrilous, upped the pressure yet another notch. But the nuns were not for turning.”

They had “already contributed generously. They had apologised for the activities of some of their members. They regretted ‘the distress, isolation, pain, confusion and much more’ that the Magdalene women had to endure . . . But there would be no further financial contribution,” he said.

The nuns, he said, “are right. It’s time that the nuns drew that line in the sand. It’s time that they refused to be bullied into line by politicians and a predictable retinue of well-known anti-Catholic voices in the media. It’s time that they rediscovered their self-respect and stopped apologising for the failures of individual members . . . and protested at the manner in which so many of their members have been unfairly and irresponsibly demonised.”

In support of Fr Hoban, another ACP co-founder Fr Tony Flannery said he was “sickened by the abuse and vitriol heaped on the nuns during the last few weeks; as if shovelling abuse on a group of old women was an admirable thing to do.”

He said “some of the spokespeople for the Magdalenes were utterly extreme and showed a complete lack of understanding of the lives of nuns, and of the contribution they have made to Irish life and people for the last few centuries. A combination of hypocrisy and moral righteousness is a very unpleasant sight.”