In an interview for Irish TV, Fr Brian D'Arcy, CP, said it took him years to get over the sexual abuse inflicted upon him.

"One never ever gets over the fact that they were abused and the older one gets, the worse it gets," he said.

"I can live with it but just barely at this stage because abuse destroys your inner soul," he said.

In 2012, The Tablet revealed that Fr D'Arcy had been formally censured by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Fr D'Arcy, who was well known for his media work, had spoken out against mandatory celibacy for priests, Church teaching on contraception and had criticised the handling of clerical sexual abuse.

In the wake of the Murphy Report into clerical abuse in the Archdiocese of Dublin, Fr D'Arcy called for reformation of Church structures and accused the Holy See of using legal procedures to shield itself from criticism over its handling of abuse.

Speaking on Irish TV this week, Fr D'Arcy recalled his pain over the Vatican censure, saying it was like being abused all over again.

"It was a big burden - in many ways it kind of destroyed me," Fr D'Arcy said.

"It took a long time and counselling to find out why I took it so badly.

"The reason I took it so badly is because it was being re-abused by clerics. It brought it to the top again, the abuse I had been dealt by clerics," he said.

"I knew I was right to say what I was saying - to protect children and that people who have abused children should not be practising or that clerics should [not] be investigating each other."

Fr D'Arcy was also critical of how the Church has handled child sex abuse scandals.

"We, as a group of clerics, are not able to handle child abuse because we're old, we're celibate, we're away from families, we're living in an unreal world."

Sources

• Irish Times
• Irish Independent
• Catholic Ireland
• BBC
• Image: Catholic Ireland

The size of the crowd in part was a response to the recent silencing of Irish priests.

One of those silenced, Fr Tony Flannery, was part of the leadership team of the ACP.

A second, Fr Brian D'Arcy, was a weekly columnist in tabloid newspaper,The Sunday World. It turned out that someone in the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith had been trawling through decades of the paper to check D'Arcy's articles.

Two other stories provided a backdrop to the meeting.

One was a TV program which revealed that in 1975 when he was a bishop's secretary, Cardinal Sean Brady, now Primate of Ireland, was given the names of some boys abused by Fr Brendan Smyth during a canonical investigation, and failed to report this either to the parents or to the police.

Smyth, the abuser being investigated, continued to prey on children for a further 18 years.

In fact the Cardinal had passed all the information up to his bishop and was devastated when he learnt that Smyth had not been stopped.

He rejected calls for his resignation. Several commentators pointed out that had he called for a discussion on women priests the Vatican would have promptly given him his marching orders, as Bishop Morris in Australia found to his cost.

A second story concerned Fr Kevin Reynolds.

RTE, the national broadcaster, had accused him in a program of fathering a child by an underage woman in Africa.

Reynolds denied the charge and offered to take a paternity test in advance of the program.

This was refused.

Eventually, RTE was forced to publish an abject apology, pay an undisclosed sum for libel, and was subjected to a withering public report. Several staff resigned. Continue reading

Sources

• Brian Lennon S.J. in Eureka Street
• Image: Enlighthened Catholicism