Madam, - May I be allowed to comment on Mgr Dermot Farrell's sincere and moving account of the difficulties of rebuilding shattered morale at Maynooth? ("Maynooth determined to emerge from shadows", November 17th).
I do not wish to be thought hostile. As a member of staff of the Recognised College over the years in question, I was one of the few laymen who believed the umbrella of the bishops as trustees offered a sounder vision of what a university should be than the business-oriented and commercial and performance-related emphasis that has taken over since the Recognised College became NUI Maynooth under lay control with the passage of the Universities Act in 1997.
True rebuilding on a new and sound base involves true contrition and a "purpose of amendment". The Book of Common Prayer puts the matter well: "amendment of life" will be followed by "the grace and comfort of the Holy Spirit".
The trouble is that the church authorities are seeking the "grace and comfort" part without having passed through the essential prior stage of satisfactory "amendment of life". Mgr Farrell does not need me to tell him that absolution cannot be given, or be effective even if given, when the "essential prior stage" has been slurred or glossed over.
The shabby treatment of Fr Gerard McGinnity - whom we were led to believe in the late 1970s had himself suffered some sort of delusional collapse which rendered him unfit to continue - has recently been well highlighted in your newspaper. How do the authorities begin to recompense such a man - not to mention his now deceased mother - for the blight that has been done to his career for telling the truth? I do not know the answer, and in any case the matter is not for me to adjudicate on. But short of some massive - even symbolic - act of contrition by the authorities in this case, the "grace and comfort" of absolution will be withheld.
All Maynooth staff knew full well that instant dismissal and forfeiture of pension were possible results of "an act of moral turpitude". Yet the individual about whom (as we now know) Fr McGinnity justly and correctly complained did not suffer these penalties. Instead he enjoyed a huge "golden handshake" and pension for life, and was allowed to retire with his reputation outwardly and ostensibly intact.
Until the church authorities have the courage to dismiss such people and stop their pensions, and to set in motion, and see through, the necessary ecclesiastical procedures for defrocking for "conduct unbecoming a clerk in holy orders", then the terms for the rebuilding which Mgr Farrell so eloquently articulates have no chance whatsoever of success; they are like the seeds that fell on rocky ground.
So all depends on the church authorities to make a move and set in train, for all to see, the necessary act(s) of contrition. - Yours, etc,
Dr MARTIN PULBROOK, (Lecturer in Ancient Classics, St Patrick's College, NUI, Maynooth, 1976-2000) Port Erin, Isle of Man.