Who cares
Too bad for you if you’re Irish and you want to leave the Catholic church – the church is so dominant in public life that you can’t leave without making life difficult for yourself. Sor-reeeeee.
[T]he church is so deeply woven into the fabric of Irish life, it is difficult for many ordinary Irish people to distance themselves from it. The church is involved in education and health care, and its imprint on the Irish national identity is deep…Ninety-two percent of primary schools are still run by the Catholic Church and most of the best schools are Catholic.
So parents who want to leave are screwed. But hey, the remaining fans of the church are having a hard time too.
“It’s a very difficult time to be a committed Roman Catholic in Ireland,” says Breda O’Brien, who teaches religious education at a Roman Catholic school in central Dublin, and also writes a column for The Irish Times on religion. “There has been scandal after scandal, compounded by mismanagement within the church,” O’Brien says. “The church has not covered itself in glory…No one can deny the problems the church has had, but that does not make everything the church does wrong,” she says.
No, it doesn’t (though that certainly doesn’t rule out the possibility that everything the church does is wrong), but what it does do is drive a hole the size of a tank through the church’s claim to moral superiority and insight and scrupulosity. What it does do is make a laughing stock of the idea that Catholic clergy have some sort of extra-highly-developed moral awareness. What it does do is make a mockery of the church’s ostentatious concern for foetuses and for suffering people who want to escape their suffering in the only way left to them, given that the church has made it so blindingly obvious that it does not care in the slightest about the minimal well-being and safety of actual living conscious feeling children in their care who have been raped or enslaved or savagely punished or systematically deprived or all those, for year after year, decade after decade. What it does do is show up the Catholic clergy as a benighted self-protecting insular pack of men with all the moral sensitivity of a rock. Given what the church claims to be, that showing up is fatal to its pretensions. This isn’t Wal-Mart, or a bank, or an accounting firm, or a hamburger chain. This is a different kind of enterprise altogether, and now that it has become abundantly, lavishly clear that its first concern is always for itself and never for helpless victims in its power, how can it possibly continue to pretend to be better than everyone else?
I don’t think there’s a good answer to that, but I also expect that it will nevertheless go on pretending. Fewer people will buy the pretense, but some still will.
“The church is so deeply woven into the fabric of Irish life, it is difficult for many ordinary Irish people to distance themselves from it. The church is involved in education and health care, and its imprint on the Irish national identity is deep.”
Exactly, the only people who are seemingly making noises, are those who have either undergone third level education — where they have learned about the world at large. They can see the bigger picture, as too can the atheists who have recently set up a website in the wake of the blasphemy law. The latter would also be from the upper echelons of society.
Ireland will come to a standstill tomorrow to celebrate St Patrick’s Day. It would find it terribly difficult to divorce itself from religion and the countless other celebrations, such as communion and confirmation – – it would be like a helpless child. Religion is everywhere you look – – the people in general would be clueless as to know how to exist minus religion.
The remit of the Murphy Report should be extended to take on board matters such as what we are presently experiencing in the media of late.
There is tremendous pressure on Cardinal Sean Brady to resign.
One of Father Brendan Smyth’s victim’s, Helen McGonigle, who is an attorney, is talking directly to presenter, Miriam O’ Callaghan on Irish “Prime Time” from New York. She is pointing out the fact that she was only a child when she was sworn to secrecy by Sean Brady. She cleverly held up a photo of herself as a child at the time and one of Father Brendan Smyth, Thus bringing the message across loud and clear.
Cardinal Sean Brady is quick to point out that he was a young cleric and was only acting on orders. He was indeed at the time in question a highly qualified priest in his mid-thirties. The child who was sworn to secrecy was only eight years old or thereabouts. Did Sean Brady and his superiors consider her delicate age when she was gagged by the church? No!
We were asked to take into consideration the age of the religious in our dealings with institutional abuse — but as one Goldenbridge survivor pointed out – – who took us into consideration when we were mere children in that abominable institution when we were being daily flogged to bits by the religious. Nobody!
Mo – the victims were made to swear secrecy, right? The BBC has been reporting that they were ‘asked’ to. I find this infuriating. They weren’t bloody asked, they were forced!