Rupture With Vatican Reveals a Changed Ireland

[SecularMotion]

DUBLIN — Even as it remains preoccupied with its struggling economy, Ireland is in the midst of a profound transformation, as rapid as it is revolutionary: it is recalibrating its relationship to the Roman Catholic Church, an institution that has permeated almost every aspect of life here for generations.

This is still a country where abortion is against the law, where divorce became legal only in 1995, where the church runs more than 90 percent of the primary schools and where 87 percent of the population identifies itself as Catholic. But the awe, respect and fear the Vatican once commanded have given way to something new — rage, disgust and defiance — after a long series of horrific revelations about decades of abuse of children entrusted to the church’s care by a reverential populace.

While similar disclosures have tarnished the Vatican’s image in other countries, perhaps nowhere have they shaken a whole society so thoroughly or so intensely as in Ireland. And so when the normally mild-mannered prime minister, Enda Kenny, unexpectedly took the floor in Parliament this summer to criticize the church, he was giving voice not just to his own pent-up feelings, but to those of a nation.

His remarks were a ringing declaration of the supremacy of state over church, in words of outrage and indignation that had never before been used publicly by an Irish leade

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/18/world/europe/ireland-recalibrates-ties-to-roman-catholic-church.html?_r=1&hp

[xchrom]

1. recommend

[randr]

2. The Irish need to take up the cause for

native populations that have been abused by the RCC and lead a world wide legal attack on what is no more than an organized pedophile cult.

[Silent3]

4. "no more than"?

There's a lot wrong with the Catholic church, but calling it "no more than an organized pedophile cult" is going a bit over the top. Anger, even justified anger, is no excuse for egregious distortion.

There's a big difference between pointing out the real and more-than-damning-enough organized cover-up of pedophile activity, and speaking of the Catholic church as if it existed for no other reason than to give priests sexual access to children. Not only is that crazy Big Conspiracy talk (everything else the Catholic Church does is just a huge cover operation?), but if it were true, it would be a vastly failed conspiracy considering that pedophilia occurs among Catholic clergy at no higher rate than the general population.

[starroute]

3. Strange world where the state is the moral voice that criticizes the church

But Christianity, Islam, and Judaism have all been showing a tendency to abandon morality in favor of power politics, especially among those who claim to represent them most fanatically. The Catholic Church doesn't share the specific flaws of the fundamentalists, but in its own way it has put power and self-protection above truth and justice.

I'm not a believer in the supernatural aspects of religion, but I do think there is a kind of energy flow that operates through both individuals and institutions, pushing all of us to operate at a higher level. And the great world-religions in general have been ignoring what their own teachings tell them about how to maintain that flow (humility, tolerance, simplicity, openness) in a way that can only prove self-destructive.

[roguevalley]

5. Eamon DeValara and his tura-lura-loo vision of Ireland made

all this possible. Honest to God, why did O'Connell get shot and he didn't ... (mom was american)

[rizlaplus]

6. Archbishop Giuseppe Lazzarotto posted to Australia after awkward questions went unanswered

In September 2007 the Murphy commission, then investigating the handling of clerical child sex abuse allegations by Catholic Church and State authorities, had written to the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith seeking reports of clerical child sex abuse sent to it by the Dublin archdiocese. It also sought details on the document Crimen sollicitationis , which dealt with the sexual abuse of children. The Vatican did not reply but contacted the Department of Foreign Affairs to say the commission had not gone through proper diplomatic channels. The commission, being independent of Government and also investigating the State, did not feel it appropriate to use State diplomatic channels. In February 2007 it wrote to then papal nuncio to Ireland Archbishop Giuseppe Lazzarotto and requested he forward relevant documentation. He did not reply and was posted to Australia in December 2007. In January 2009 the Murphy commission wrote to papal nuncio Archbishop Leanza enclosing extracts from drafts of its report, as required. He did not reply.

On publication of the Murphy report in November 2009 Archbishop Leanza said he was not in a position to comment on the extracts as he had only arrived in April 2008 when “the report was already done”. He was called in by then minister for foreign affairs Micheál Martin, who emphasised public anger at the “appalling abuse of children” in the Murphy report and explained the need “for the Holy See to provide the fullest possible co-operation with any ongoing or further State investigations into clerical child abuse”. In February 2010 Archbishop Leanza declined an invitation to appear before the Oireachtas Committee on Foreign Affairs to discuss the Murphy report. On July 13th last the Cloyne report was published and, the following day, Archbishop Leanza was called in to meet Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs Eamon Gilmore, who told him Vatican intervention in Irish affairs was “absolutely unacceptable” and “inappropriate”.

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If any Vatican official had been examined by Judge Murphy we may have found out how many time the oath of secrecy was administered to children who had been raped by clergy. We may have also found out how many cases of child abuse by clergy in Ireland passed through the hands of one Josef Ratzinger! Apparently in Josef's time as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, 3,000 individual cases of child abuse landed on his desk - it's not known how many of these he referred to the civil authorities in the relevant countries or how many of them he recommended, to the relevant bishop, be referred to civil authorities.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3v_DI8_yPQM