Dean's remarks on Catholic Church's position on asylum-seekers `a travesty'

The director of the Catholic Press Office, Mr Jim Cantwell, has described as "cavalier" and "a travesty of the truth" comments made recently about the Catholic Church by the Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, the Very Rev Robert McCarthy.

In an Irish Times interview last month, Dean McCarthy said: "The sad thing is that the Catholic Church is saying nothing. There is nothing more pressing for moral comment than the situation regarding refugees and the bishops are saying nothing.

"Apparently there's a pastoral by the Archbishop [Desmond Connell] that says something about it. But he specialises in not publishing his views."

Mr Cantwell said he knew of no body more conscious of the responsibility to give leadership on the refugee issue than the Catholic bishops. And they would also be the first to recognise that whatever the church has done for refugees, much more still needed to be done, he said.

Writing in the current issue of the Church of Ireland Gazette, Mr Cantwell said he presumed the pastoral Dean McCarthy referred to was Prosperity With a Purpose: Christian Faith and Values in a Time of Rapid Economic Economic Growth.

It had been launched on November 2nd last "(very publicly) by Archbishops Brady and Connell". It was well publicised in the media.

It had also been sent to 1,300 Catholic parishes in Ireland and would be used as a study document in schools, Mr Cantwell said.

In it, "the bishops state emphatically that `harbouring racist thoughts and attitudes is a sign against the specific message of Christ"' he said, and that the bishops had praised those who had shown "a practical Christian response to the plight of asylum-seekers in their midst".

The bishops had also urged full implementation of the 1996 Refugee Act and stressed that a system of admittance to Ireland must be fair, he said.

The Irish Commission for Justice and Peace, an agency of the Irish bishops, had prepared and presented to the Government proposals for the development of a humane, transparent and sustainable Irish immigration policy.

Last March, the bishops had established and were funding the Refugee Project, which was involved in lobbying on the refugee issue at both EU and national level, he said.