Friday, July 29, 2011

Ireland "most anti-Catholic country in West"

"Erin Go Bonkers" (NRO, July 29, 2011):
While America’s attention has been absorbed in recent weeks by domestic affairs, something quite remarkable has become unmistakably clear across the Atlantic: Ireland — where the constitution begins, “In the name of the Most Holy Trinity” — has become the most stridently anti-Catholic country in the Western world."
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4 comments:

Ralph Roister-Doister said...

Clearly, decades of neglectful governance has allowed a pestilence of homosexuality and sexual abuse to flourish within the clergy. Just as clearly, the enemies of the Church have gleefully seized upon this fact, as all Catholics reap the whirlwind.

To this day, the overwhelming majority of our leaders offer us nothing but love love love, like "fun size" candy bars on Halloween, when what we and our Church truly need is another St Peter Damian and Liber Gomorrhianus.

Charity without justice is merely pusillanimity.

Anonymous said...

Clearly, decades of neglectful governance has allowed a pestilence of homosexuality and sexual abuse to flourish within the clergy.

And moreover, those abetting this are trying to have it both ways. For years dissidents has fed us a narrative of hordes of gay priests which I guess to their thinking was that if everyone finally admits to it, the Church can change the teaching and everyone can sodomize at will.

Then the abuse scandal hit and guess what? Suddenly there is not a single homosexual priest to be found anywhere in connection with it.

Ed said...

Thanks for pointing us all to George Weigel’s take on this latest inning in the long-running abuse scandal in the Catholic Church in Ireland.

Just as the John Jay report addressed the organizational/structural issues that rendered the US Catholic Church so tragically sclerotic in addressing the demonic and criminal behavior that infected thousands of its priests, Weigel addresses with insight and concision the fundamental aspects of organization and practices of the Irish church that, if reformed, could help it slow down its rapidly progressing destruction of the credibility of the church in Ireland.

But Weigel would have given his critique of the harsh comments of Irish Prime Minister Kenny (a lifelong Catholic from the conservative west of Ireland) desperately needed context if only Weigel had elected to throw in one or two of any number of relevant factoids (pick up any reputable Irish/UK periodical and you’ll quickly find ten or twenty - here are just a sample):

- The Irish government, in producing the Ferns, Dublin, Ryan, and Murphy reports on sex abuse by priests/brothers/sisters, had to spend almost $200 million of Irish taxpayers' (almost all devout Catholics) money on documenting the dimensions of “clerical sexual abuse” (Weigel apparently thinks “rape and torture of children” is an “hysterical” description – however, you won’t find many victims of “clerical sexual abuse” that believe that Weigel’s emotionally-de-contented terminology captures the degree of trauma and degradation of a child's unanticipated and forced sexual encounter at the hands of a trusted spiritual leader of his community) that the Irish Church and the Vatican consistently refused to provide.

- In contrast to the US, where the Bishops’ framework for dealing with abusive priests was finally (regrettably $2.5+ billion in legal settlements later) backed by the Vatican earlier in this millennium, neither the 1996 Framework Document nor its 2005 successor, Our Children Our Church, produced by the Irish bishops to address child sex abuse ever received any Vatican backing and they remain unenforceable in the Irish church.

- Early in 2010 the Holy Father told the Irish bishops that “some of you and your predecessors failed, at times grievously” when it came to protection of children.
But, not only was Benedict inexplicably unable at that time after much deliberation and soul-searching to express any view with respect to whether any action or inaction of the Vatican (including its multi-year guidance that even “non-sealed” information about child sex abuse need not be reported to secular authorities in Ireland) had in any way contributed to the problem, but also the Vatican has now concluded that, even with the benefit of all the work that has already been done by others, the Vatican won’t be able to produce its promised report on the Irish child abuse problem until sometime in 2012 or later.

- Archbishop Michael Neary of Tuam said, “Many are angered and appalled by what they have learnt. Indeed, these feelings are shared by priests and, yes, bishops too.” And then later last week the Association of Catholic Priests endorsed the call by Fine Gael Senator Caite Keane that the meeting of the 50th International Eucharistic Congress scheduled to take place in Ireland next year be postponed until a time when the Church may have taken substantive actions to begin to repair the damage caused by the release of the report on the Bishop of Coyne, the Vatican's ongoing refusal to cooperate on the matter with the Irish government (even refusing to disclose to which country the offending Bishop, and former personal secretary to three Popes, has fled), and the predictable ensuing outrage at the Church’s performance.

Weigel’s note provides a constructive, but terribly unbalanced, entry point into learning about how the Church has in just a matter of decades taken what Pope Pius once called the “most Catholic of countries” to what Weigel now calls “the most stridently anti-Catholic country in the Western world”.

Peter said...

That's something that really worries me. It's not really actual to be religious nowadays and people start to lose their faith in God not because they don't believe. They just forget about it because of the hard life. Everything is happening so fast, everybody is in hurry. People have no time to go to church. Call Ireland.