Madonnina

The rebel priest standing up to the Catholic Church

Peter Murnane Clerical Errors

Title
: The rebel priest standing up to the Catholic Church
Author: Steve Kilgallon
Publisher: Stuff NZ
Date:  30OCT2022

For 62 years, Peter Murnane has been a Dominican priest.

He remained so through the storm after he poured blood on the floor of the US Consul’s office. When he provided a safe house for the asylum seeker Ahmed Zaoui. When he broke into the Waihopai spy base, was prosecuted and acquitted. Even when he gave a sermon explaining why he thought Australia’s top Catholic, Cardinal George Pell, was not a good bloke.

Only now, at 82 years old, have the Dominicans seemingly had enough of their rebel priest after Murnane refused instructions to pulp his new book, Clerical Errors, which clinically examines the Catholic Church’s dismal sexual abuse record, lays out a long treatise on Pell and argues the entire church should be dismantled.

Ironically, the Dominicans have labelled him a ‘priest not in good standing’, a tag normally attached to paedophiles and other deviants.

It has left Murnane entirely unworried.

No longer willing to support a system he thinks is rotten, he has declined to take masses, has moved out of Dominican property and is living as a “semi-suburban hermit” on a state pension, “peeling my potatoes carefully” and as always, saying what he thinks.

“I know I am doing the right thing and saying the right thing,” he says, in his gentle, mumbling voice.

“I may be doing it a bit undiplomatically, but I am not a good negotiator.”

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