There is need for reflection
Poor Ireland, it must be so disconcerting.
The phenomenal economic boom over the past two decades, and the secularization that came along with it, allowed Ireland to think it was no longer what it once was: a backward land dominated and shaped by the Roman Catholic Church. But as the economy has crashed, the Irish have come face to face with their earlier selves, and with a church-state relationship that was and in many ways still is, as quite a few people in the country see it, perversely antimodern.
It’s perhaps similar to being suddenly transported from a cosmopolitan liberal coastal city to a parochial conservative religious town in the hinterland.
Only worse.
As secularism advanced in other parts of the world, successive popes relied on Ireland as a bulwark and pushed Irish leaders to keep the church in the country’s structure. In 1977, Prime Minister Garret FitzGerald noted that in a private meeting, Pope Paul VI stressed to him “that Ireland was a Catholic country — perhaps the only one left — and that it should stay that way” and that he should not “change any of the laws that kept the republic a Catholic state.” That continues to this day, according to Ivana Bacik, a senator for the opposition Labor Party who has been a leader in the effort to extricate the church from the state. As she put it, “In no other European nation — with the obvious exception of Vatican City — does the church have this depth of doctrinal involvement in the affairs of state.”
By what right? In other European nations, laws are generally changed or not changed by the legislators or people of those nations, not by different ones. It’s odd that the nation of “Vatican City” thinks it gets to tell the Irish PM what laws to change or not change. Odd but not surprising.
Last summer, there was talk of a plan to divest the church of its control of state-financed schools, but when I asked a Department of Education and Skills spokeswoman last month what the department was doing, she gave me only the Catholic Church’s current position — that there is need for “reflection” on the issue — and actually referred me to the church for further information.
Or reflection.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Ophelia Benson, Rational Humanist. Rational Humanist said: There is need for reflection #humanism #atheist http://tiny.ly/eR8d […]
The only reflection that pope Ratzi is interested in is his own, smiling serenely back at him. One day the mirror will crumble.
This really is bizarre — not only that the pope should have said that, but that the PM should have then revealed what he said! I mean, really! Here is a church leader, whatever his international status — and it seems to me that for all our good this is something that should be given more serious attention by the international community — who presumes to tell the PM of an independent nation what he should do. No wonder Henry VIII objected to the pope’s interference in Englisn affairs. That’s what the break with Rome was all about, and here it is still going on. Absolutely medieval!
I thought the break with Rome was because old Enrique couldn’t wench his way through the female population and get a legitimate son. The nasty church wouldn’t let him marry, then divorce or something. Then again, I’m not an expert.
The Rev. Sean McDonagh, a leader of the Association of Irish Priests, which formed last year after the reports were published, suggested that to get at the root of the problem, the team of investigators “should begin by scrutinizing Rome’s own handling of sex-abuse allegations.”
Father Sean McDonagh, Society of St. Columban Fathers (SSC) should also look to some of the priests within the newly formed Irish priests association to get to the nub of the grossly biased thinking on child abuse that they hold, specifically regarding child institutional child abuse.
For example – I read in the Irish Times, Monday, September 6, 2010 that Father Flannery was part of the association. I once had a very grave reason for writing to the Irish Times. The opening lines of letter went…
Dear Editor,
Following on from Father Tony Flannery’s article of Monday 7th August 2006. Part of the headline stated
My answer quite emphatically to this is no, no no, it isn’t strange in the least as to why so much energy is being presently concentrated on children who were after-all incarcerated in institutions at the pleasure of – The Irish State. The last three words being the operative words, Children who were incarcerated into these institutions, namely, notorious Goldenbridge, Artane, and Letterfrack were systematically psychologically, emotionally, mentally, physically and sexually abused on a daily basis. Father Tony Flannery – you are missing the point here, the State and the religious were utterly 100/% responsible for the children in their care. To reiterate, so as to spell it out succinctly, the State acted in loco – parentis.
You also referred to Newtownforbes as being an orphanage. I beg to differ – Goldenbridge, Newtownforbes and the above mentioned child prisons were indeed Industrial Schools not orphanages. So stop using this euphemism.
The letter was never published in the paper, so i wrote personally to Father Tony Flannery. i never got a reply.
These are the priests who want to get to the root of the child abuse and they haven’t even got the decency to deal with someone who was habitually on the receiving end of institutional child abuse. I certainly hope he learned his lesson from reading what the author Russel lShorto of the article called the so-called report.
It’s not clear to me it’s surprising that the PM would have revealed it—I suspect it’s something the Pope says in public, on the record, so it’d be surprising if he didn’t also say it in private. (Then it would be like a Wikileak showing that the Saudis say one thing in public and the opposite through diplomatic channels.)
It is, of course, ridiculous that heads of state would even put up with being talked to like that, much less comply.
There is a general pattern isn’t there? It’s force, or the more subtle forms coercion. Follow the rules or else and don’t think about fighting back. But this corrupt and hierarchical form of control contradicts the reality of progress and therefore wealth. It’s even visible in the corrupt banking system and its hierarchy and lack of reality.
Garret Fitzgerald ex Fine Gael Taoiseach and his late wife Joan and many of their friends were keenly interested in theology and in the development of the Catholic Church in Ireland.
@4: During medieval times, even late medieval times, RCC Inc was rarely averse to accommodating the need of the rich and famous to be free of marital encumbrance in order to beget legal heirs on some more fecund and attractive candidate. The reason why the pope at the time (Clement Vii as I believe) did not co-operate with Henry’s minister and grant an annulment of the marriage to Katherine of Aragon was very likely that the Holy Roman Emperor and King of the Romans at the time was Charles V (Carlos I of Spain) who was Katherine’s nephew and very opposed to an annulment. Much easier to piss off a second rank king in an offshore island far from Rome than to piss off the HRE who has an army within shouting distance of your palace. After all it was not unknown for popes to be held prisoner and was an ever present danger under such circumstances.
OTOH it didn’t leave Henry much of a choice either. Had his syphilis been further advanced he might well have had Katherine murdered and England would still be “a catholic country” – like Ireland.
It’s even visible in the corrupt banking system and its hierarchy and lack of reality.
Egbert – Allied Irish Bank (AIB) and Ansbacher banks wrote off debts of almost IR£200,000 owed by Jesuit educated Dr. G. FitzGerald following the collapse of the aircraft leasing company. He also was given a ministerial car in 2008. They are all appeasing each other and singing from the same hymn sheet. The last Taoiseach of the country, Bertie Ahern, let it be known that he was a daily communicant. Conference of Religious of Ireland CORI is the religious/political conscience of Ireland. It has untold political clout. Politicians won’t dare to mention the abortion issue during the course of the election, which is now almost underway in Ireland.
The idea of ” Catholic Ireland” as a bulwark against modernization has been prevalent in church thinking for a long time. I was 12 when pope JP2 visited Ireland in 1979 and was too young to understand the meaning of his pronouncements at that time but reading some of the things he said then shows the continuity ‘moral’ enforcement with that of the current pope.
http://www.irishtimes.com/focus/papaldeath/article_p4a.htm
@sailor1031,
“..and England would still be a ‘catholic country’-like Ireland”.
Yes, if Henry hadn’t quarrelled with the Pope there probably would have been no Protestant England, no Enlightenment and no Industrial Revolution. We should be grateful to that desperate, nearly bankrupt, syphillitic, psychopath-we have him to thank for the modern age.
It isn’t. It really isn’t. It’s similar to being not worrying about health care when you’re rich and well and then finding you can’t afford it when you’re sick and lose your job.
There was a push for political reform in the early 1990s – and then the boom started and it was put on the back burner. Government became less transparent, not more.
This allows business as usual to go on – hence dodgy deals over recompense for people abused in state institutions run by orders.
That said, it would be a mistake to think the Ireland of now is all that similar to that of 1977 (the Taoisigh that year were Crosgrave and Lynch, by the way, Fitzgerald didn’t get to that post until 1981).
In 1977 contraception and divorce were illegal. “Homosexual acts” were illegal. Having a baby outside marriage was seriously disapproved of. Legislation to outlaw discrimination in pay between men and women only came into force that year – this also was when it was made generally illegal to force women to leave work when they married. The first multidenominational school had only opened in 1975.
Now all this has changed. Contraception and divorce are legal, you can even buy condoms in the supermarket (amazing if you remember the troubles Virgin had trying to sell them in the 1980s). Gay and lesbian couples are not only not breaking the law but can have their partnership recognised in a civil partnership. A third of babies are born to unmarried parents. So let’s not get hysterical about this. A lot has been done (though a lot more to do, as Bertie once said).
(By the way, Bertie? Daily communicant? The Bertie who had a public romantic relationship with a woman not his wife? Times have changed)
Regarding education, there are now 58 interdenominational schools in Ireland. Most of the rest are religious schools. In fact they are privately run schools. The churches involved own the land the school is on, in some cases they paid for the buildings. This is the problem – to take these schools over the state would need to rebuild most schools in the country, buy the schools or annex private property. They show no appetite for any of these options. That is not surprising since the State hasn’t been very interested in setting up its own schools – it took the voluntary group Educate Together (and other voluntary groups) to set up any inter or multidenominational schools at all. So that leaves the question to the owners of the school – do they want to hand over their property for free?
The solution – fight for political reform, transparency and the State to take on its obligations for education (and health, and regulation and…)
There were grumbles that Bishop Casey had kept the Pope too long in Galway.
Re: Sigmund’s Irish Times link @ 11. Bishop Casey who had kept the Pope waiting was also the same bishop, who, behind closed doors, kept a woman lover waiting. He was openly bearing gifts on the Papal alter while secretly bearing a child on another alter of life. Father Michael Cleary too who was to the forefront during the Papal Visit to Ireland in 1979, was thus preaching one set of holy Roman Church ethics to the laity whilst living behind church doors with an ex Goldenbridge inmate on Church funding. He preached to young people in schools about adultery matters whilst fathering children with a vulnerable young ex-institutionalised survivor. He then had the audacity to suggest to her that she have an abortion. The hypocrisy. Alas! The two ‘holy’ men who were centre-stage with Pope John Paul II in Galway have now made a different kind of history. Both turned out to be fathers in far more than the clerical sense – and both went on to provide scandals that rocked the Catholic church in Ireland more than any visit by a Pope.
“It isn’t. It really isn’t. It’s similar to being not worrying about health care when you’re rich and well and then finding you can’t afford it when you’re sick and lose your job.”
@ CathyBy
Aye, the low income earners are the ones who presently suffer the most in the health care system as they’re not privileged enough, for want of a better word, to come under the remit of the medical card.
FINE GAEL’S SPOKESPERSON for health, Dr James Reilly, says the party is committed to abolishing the HSE by 2016, if it gets into government. Reilly said Fine Gael would base Irish healthcare on the Dutch system of universal health insurance. The Fine Gael party if it gets elected (at the end of February) which doubtless it will – will then begin the long-term project of introducing universal health insurance in 2016 to “end the two tier system of health”, according to Reilly. He said this would mean everyone would have health insurance and the state would cover children, students, and people with medical cards and GP visit cards, while subsidising treatment for low income earners. There was also a lot of very positive radio talk regarding the Canadian system, which, I think, is akin to the Dutch one.
And I have little doubt that the Vatican would love to return to that everywhere. I don’t think people are right when they talk about Catholicism being “tamed” in that this implies not only external constraints but some kind of fundamental transformation of the RCC itself. I have little doubt that Spain under Franco remains the ideal for the Vatican, and they continue to push for this as much as possible. I don’t believe they have any respect for secular political institutions at all, and I don’t think they accept or will ever accept a situation in which they don’t dominate people’s lives. They haven’t made their peace with nontheocracy – they just bide their time and make their moves when opportunities present themselves.
Coincidentally – I’ve just spotted Father Tony Flannery towards the end of article having a chin-wag with the author, Russell Shorto, regarding a meeting he had with older congregation members in a rural area.
“…[T]hey want to take their church back from Rome. The child-abuse business has shaken the Catholic Church structure here in a way I would never have felt possible in my lifetime. So for the likes of me, that’s an upside to all that has happened. There’s an openness now, among priests and laity.”
Yes, it should have dawned on the likes of him a long time ago what survivors of institutional child abuse were trying desperately to say, instead of trying to bring them further down by abruptly dismissing their claims and seeing the latter as being less significant than what was currently going on in Ireland. Crikey the poor bugger must have finally woken up the sheer reality of what was going on in his midst. What a turn around for the books.
Oops, I take that back, as he goes on to say to RS
I asked him if he thought the openness extended in any way into the hierarchy, and he laughed. “Oh, no,” he said, “no indication of that at all.”
Right, so we ‘re back right where we started.
“In 1977 contraception and divorce were illegal”
That date almost sounds like the distant past (and makes me feel rather dated!) but it is not that long ago that extreme catholic rules were the law of the land.
Divorce was still illegal in 1996. The constitutional ban that forbid divorce in every circumstance was placed again before the electorate in a referendum in that year and the catholic church did its utmost to enforce its laws on the land. A dying Mother Teresa was even flown over by the Vatican to implore the Irish population to keep divorce illegal for everyone (catholic and non-catholic alike). In the end the vote was something like 50.2% to end the ban and 49.8% to keep it. There was a large disparity between the church-ridden rural areas with large majorities in favor of keeping the ban and urban areas that voted to end it.
As for CathyBy’s point about the church run schools, one shouldn’t get the impression that schools were built largely on the charity of the catholic church. The church (or more accurately the religious orders – christian brothers and nuns) may have donated land for building schools but the money for the building itself would have either come from the government or from fundraising in the local communities. These same religious communities are the groups at the centre of numerous abuse allegations that resulted in hundreds of millions of euro compensation costs, most of which were avoided by the religious orders in a rather shady government deal by the extremely pro-catholic minister Michael Woods.
According to Wikipedia
“While serving as Minister for Education, Woods signed a controversial agreement with 18 Irish religious orders involved in child sex-abuse scandals which limited their compensation liability to the victims of abuse to only €128 million. This compensation scheme is project to eventually cost the Irish government, and therefore the Irish tax payers, €1.35 billion. The agreement was signed just before the 2002 general election, and consequently was not laid before the cabinet for its approval. It then remained unpublished for several months. In 2003 after brokering the deal, Woods claimed his strong Catholic faith made him the most suitable person to negotiate the deal”
A good illustration of the current reality of Irish theocracy is an article in todays Irish Independent.
http://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/david-quinn-any-vote-for-the-labour-party-is-a-vote-for-abortion-2535719.html
This is about the most liberal of the Irish daily newspapers and yet it publishes articles that essentially say “If you vote for a left wing party you go against catholic teaching and will go to hell”
Quinn is a particularly obnoxious character, a sort of Irish Donahue, funded by the catholic church to push its message by whatever means necessary.
I’m not Irish but my faith in the Labour party or any other political parties went out the window the day the Irish Parliament voted almost unanimously for the Blasphemy Law that went into effect in 2009. That I think was an indication of the mindset engulfing Ireland. It makes you wonder how come the poorest countries in Europe, (i.e. Greece, Ireland, Spain, Portugal) are all places where christian religion has it’s biggest sway.
Not that this has anything to do with Ireland’s present plight, just to enlighten the comment’s of #4 and #9, do you really think Henry 8th founded his own church because he couldn’t get a divorce? The dissolution of the monasteries was about money and power. It’s like saying W.W.I happened because of the assination of Arch-Duke Ferdinand or that the reason Edward 8th left the throne of England was because he wanted to marry a devorcee.
Cheers to a future without superstition!
“the day the Irish Parliament voted almost unanimously for the Blasphemy Law”
It was far from unanimous. The law was very narrowly passed with only the two parties of the ruling coalition, ‘Fianna Fail’ and ‘The Green Party’ voting in favor of the law. The opposition parties voted against the law.
I wouldn’t even blame the catholics for this one. Even the odious David Quinn was mystified by the law and came to the same conclusion that I did over why it was proposed – namely that it is designed to control the media such that they do not publish cartoons making fun of Mohammed. There is little or no muslim presence in Ireland but the food industry is very powerful and they were anxious to try to prevent a repeat of the Islamic world boycott suffered by Denmark’s food industry.
Slightly off-topic, but it involves the RCC so…
What do I see on the front page of my city’s edition of today’s Metro? “Sex abuse charges for 4 at city parish”, plus another charged with “child endangerment” for turning a blind eye. 3 priests, 1 non-clergy teacher, and the monsignor of the parish.
Nice to see the police finally arresting these a-holes!
As Sigmund says, most of the political parties in Ireland were not in favour of the Blasphemy law, and it was by no means supported by parties such as Labour.
The blasphemy clause is contained in the Defamation Act 2009. It was introduced by the government when that legislation was being considered by the Dail’s Justice Select Committee. That debate can be found at: http://debates.oireachtas.ie/JUS/2009/07/01/00004.asp Fianna Fail voted for it. Fianna Gael (opposition), Labour Party and Sinn Fein all opposed it. Greens didn’t take part at that stage. Then the whole Dail approved the legislation without an actual vote. It went to the Seanad and was debated there: http://debates.oireachtas.ie/seanad/2009/07/09/00005.asp This time, FF and GP voted in favour, while FG, LAP and Independents voted against.
Atheist Ireland has made a point of canvassing all candidates standing for election this year, and many are in favour of abolishing the law, although within what time-frame is anyone’s guess tight now.
You can see the party responses we collected here:
http://www.atheist.ie/information/2011-general-election/
@#21 Thanks for clearing that up, looks like I got some bad Canadian reoprting here because the article I read at the time stated that it was almost a complete majority.
Just wondering if any knows whether the Blamsphemy Law has been used on anyone yet? A contingent of us angry athietist Canuks was planning on going to Dublin and yelling out “Jesus sucks” until we got busted but then summer came, we had a beers a forgot about it.
Cheers!
Don
@Donald.
If you want to come over, please do! We could do with the visitors. Blasphemy tourism – might be the next big thing…
To answer your question, I haven’t heard of any. Blasphemy.ie attempted to get prosecuted by publishing what it felt would be considered blasphemous material with no result. This blog analysing the legislation considers it would be very difficult to bring a successful prosecution http://www.humanrights.ie/index.php/2010/01/03/the-offence-of-blasphemy-and-constitutional-change/
On the other hand, Nick Cohen in the Guardian says
“When Ireland published a law that said it was a crime to “outrage a substantial number of the adherents of [a] religion”, the Organisation of Islamic Countries took up Dublin’s dangerously vague definition to help in the oppression of their own people’s freedom of thought.”
http://m.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jan/09/nick-cohen-blasphemy-laws-inhuman?cat=commentisfree&type=article
@sigmund
The point re schools is that most are on church land and some built with church money. The State can’t just seize them.
Agree completely about the Woods deal (and that would have been the time to do a deal on the schools – but again a deal was done behind closed doors)
Just to clarify a point that Cathyby made; blasphemy.ie which is a site put together by Atheist Ireland (who actually published the 25 blasphemous statements article) was not trying to get prosecuted. The law as it is written is unenforceable in practice and the statement was as much to point out the ludicrousness of this law as well as to draw attention to it.
Apart from a few futile attempts by cranks to have certain entertainers brought to book, nothing has come of it; and the law’s author Dermot Ahern promised a hitherto undelivered referendum on the question of whether the law should be removed.
The real damage of the law has been outside of Ireland, where Islamic countries and political lobby groups have used this modern-day occurrence of a Blasphemy law in a Western nation as justification for their own rather more dangerous versions.
In New Caledonia, the French and Kanak (native Melanesian) communities live in a state of de facto apartheid, as do Whites and Aborigines in Australia. Catholicism was set up in New Caledonia by the French, but in the 19th Century Baptist missionaries arrived and began converting Kanaks in droves. Presumably, it gave them a security that they could not find in either Catholicism or their traditional Kanak animism, and a way of demarkating themselves from the French (whom they detested) at the same time.
Henry VIII started the Royal Navy, and thus laid the foundations of the British Empire, the first overseas conquest for which was Ireland. I suspect that the Irish held onto their Catholicism in the face of their detested British Protestant conquerors for much the same reasons that the Kanaks adopted the Baptist variant of Christianity. So the Reformation never reached Ireland, which is a great pity, because Irish monasteries were the only place where learning was kept alive as the Dark Age descended across Europe, beginning around the 5th Century.
Instead of remaining as the lighthouse of Western Europe, Ireland became a Catholic backwater.
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