[caption id="attachment_70846" align="alignright" width="600" caption="Fr. Tony Flannery."]
Division between the Irish Republic and the Vatican have widened after a group representing clerics hit out at the Holy See's "silencing" of a priest who has offered outspoken views on the future of the Catholic Church.
Father Tony Flannery caused a stir when he expressed his views on controversial church issues while writing a column for a religious magazine.
The Athenry-based Redemptorist is a founding member of the Association of Catholic Priests, and the group has backed him in the row, which erupted after the Vatican stepped in to force the discontinuation of Fr. Flannery's column in his order's "Reality" magazine.
Officials in Rome had taken issue with the Irish priest's view on the ending of celibacy for clerics and the idea of female priests, and ordered the magazine to cease printing the opinions. Following the ongoing scandal of the church's handling of sexual abuse by clerics, the new row has caused a further rift between Ireland and the Vatican.
In recent weeks, a Vatican report also criticized Irish priests for holding beliefs on church doctrine at odds with official Catholic orthodoxy.
Speaking this week, the ACP, speaking for as many as 800 priests, said Fr. Flannery's opinions were not designed to be an attack on the wider church.
"We affirm in the strongest possible terms our solidarity with Fr. Flannery and wish to make clear our view that this intervention is unfair, unwarranted and unwise," an ACP spokesman said.
"While some reactionary fringe groups have contrived to portray our association as a small coterie of radical priests with a radical agenda, we are at the very heart of the church, committed to putting into place the reforms of the Second Vatican Council," the spokesman added.
Fr Flannery, who has written on religious matters in the Redemptorist magazine for 14 years has expressed opposition to the church's ban on contraception and women priests and publicly backed Taoiseach Enda Kenny's unprecedented attack on the Catholic hierarchy in the aftermath of the Cloyne Report into sexual abuse.
