These new rules being dished out to trainee priests in Maynooth show the severity of the Grindr scandal on the church

The last two weeks has been a tumultuous period for the Catholic Church in Ireland as each passing day there seems to be fresh information being leaked from St Patrick's College in Maynooth where priests are being trained.

The initial allegations that stemmed from the seminary were that many of the trainee priests had profiles on the gay dating app Grindr, while there was also a culture of drinking and sexual activity being ignored by many of the lecturers at the college.

It led to Dublin Archbishop Diarmuid Martin withdrawing trainee priests from his diocese from attending the seminary and he is instead sending them to Rome to complete their training, while there will now be stricter rules enforced at the college according to reports.

The Irish Independent today report that priests will now be forced to eat their evening meal in the college rather instead of being allowed to eat wherever they choose around the town. They will also be required to attend an evening rosary at 9pm each night, something that wasn't compulsory up until now.

Senior staff will now dine with the trainee priests for both breakfast and dinner, rather than in the Professors' refectory, while the students' use of social media and the internet will also be monitored more strictly.

Former Irish President Mary McAleese has stated that she feels that the seminaries in Ireland should welcome gay priests, rather than castigating them for their sexual orientation.

"We have the phenomenon of men in the priesthood who are both heterosexual and homosexual but the church hasn’t been able to come to terms with the fact that there are going to be homosexuals in the priesthood, homosexuals who are fine priests,” Mary McAleese said.

“They haven’t been able to come to terms with that because the teaching of my church, the Catholic Church, tells them that homosexuality is, of its nature, intrinsically disordered – those are the words of Pope Benedict and that homosexual acts are, in his words, evil,” she added.

“I am just worried that the Maynooth controversy seems to be concentrating on the wrong things. A seminary should be a place where people feel welcomed, not somewhere where they feel welcomed, not somewhere where they feel policed – after all, there are young people who haven’t yet taken a vow of celibacy.”