There’s “strange goings-on” at St. Patrick’s College, said Diarmuid Martin, the archbishop of Dublin, after declaring Ireland’s national school for the next generation of Catholic priests was not “a good place for students.” According to Irish Central, chief among those goings-on is a scandal involving Grindr.
And the scandal has grown so concerning, Martin stunned Ireland’s Catholic Church by revealing he was pulling his diocese’s prospective priests from the national seminary.
Martin made his surprising announcement following a series of anonymous letters that circulated, claiming there was “inappropriate behavior” according to Irish Central, among some of the seminarians in the college’s Maynooth Seminary. Those letters included claims that some of the priests in training had used the hookup app.
Instead, the seminarians are being “transferred” to Rome, according toMonsignor Ciaran O’Carroll, rector of the Irish college.
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“I wasn’t happy with Maynooth,” he told Irish Central, adding, “I have my own reasons for doing this.”
“There seems to an atmosphere of strange goings-on there, it seems like a quarrelsome place with anonymous letters being sent around. I don’t think this is a good place for students.”
Although he refused to comment on those sensational reports to the Irish Times, he instead focused on what he called a “certain bonding” with Rome — where he had worked for the Holy See for 25 years.
The Maynooth scandal first broke in May, and the reports then suggested that both seminarians and staff members had been using Grindr for hook-ups. At the time, Monsignor Hugh Connolly pledged he would deal with those reports, but now that the head of the archdiocese of Ireland’s capital city is on record saying he believes the national school is an unsuitable place to train priests, repercussions are expected.
