Staff Reporter
The Association of Catholic Priests (ACP) has been forced to amend a media statement after inaccurately describing members of the permanent diaconate as laypeople rather than clerics.
In a press release issued last week, headed ‘Association of Catholic Priests Statement on the Permanent Lay Diaconate’, the ACP leadership committed themselves to backing Fr Roy Donovan, parish priest of Caherconlish and Caherline, in his opposition to “the decision by the Archbishop of Cashel & Emly to set up a group to investigate initiating the permanent lay diaconate in his diocese”.
Fr Donovan’s objection, the ACP said, “is based on the fact that currently the Church confines the lay diaconate to men, even though Pope Francis has a commission working on the history of women deacons in the early church, with a view to possibly opening the diaconate to women also”.
The claim that Archbishop Kieran O’Reilly has decided to look into introducing the ‘permanent lay diaconate’ into the Archdiocese of Cashel & Emily has been published in turn by The Irish Times and on the website of ACP founder Fr Tony Flannery.
Like priests and bishops, however, deacons are clergy and as such there is no such thing as a ‘lay diaconate’ in the Church; the ACP has corrected its statement on its website which now refers simply to the ‘permanent diaconate’.