Rumours have spread that there is a gay hookup culture at Ireland’s top seminary, St Patrick’s College in Maynooth, which is just west of Dublin.
And the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, Dr. Diarmuid Martin, has now said he will not be sending trainee priests to the seminary after hearing about the allegations.
Archbishop Martin said: “There are allegations on different sides. One is that there is a homosexual, a gay culture, that students have been using an app called Grindr, which is a gay dating app, which would be inappropriate for seminarians, not just because they are trained to be celibate priests, but because an app like that is something which would be fostering promiscuous sexuality, which is certainly not in any way the mature vision of sexuality one would expect a priest to understand.”
Because of this “growing atmosphere” around the college, Dr. Martin, the most senior Catholic in the Irish Republic, announced he would now be sending students to the Irish College in Rome instead.
The decision comes after allegations and rumours circulated about the college in online blogs and letters, where around 50 student priests are training.
The archbishop also spoke about claims that students who had spoken out had been dismissed from the seminary, and accused the college of “not treating allegations correctly”.
Martin told RTE: “I thought a quarrelsome attitude of that kind was not the healthiest place for my students to be and I decided to send them to the Irish Pontifical College in Rome.”
St Patrick’s College in Maynooth was founded in 1795, and was once the largest seminary in the world, training 500 priests every year – a number that has now fallen to around 50.