In the wake of the sex abuse scandals, an anti-Vatican mood is sweeping the land.
Our Irish parents and grandparents would find astonishing the acidly anti-clerical views expressed in the Republic of Ireland today. The land that once called itself a foremost Catholic nation and most loyal ally of the Holy Father is awash with sentiments that seem to veer between Ulster Paisleyism and the Spanish republicanism of the 1930s.
One newspaper published a photograph of the Pope in full regalia, with “Persona Non Grata” superimposed on his image.
The airwaves are full of bitter remarks supporting Taoiseach Enda Kenny’s attack on the “disgraceful” Vatican, and recommending every anti-church measure from the dissolution of the monasteries to the expulsion of the Papal Nuncio and the severing of all links with the Holy See. (The recall of the Papal Nuncio this week marks the lowest point of relations between Ireland and Rome.)
One correspondent wrote that it was his ardent hope that the Catholic Church would follow the example of the News of the World, and hold a “last Mass” before shutting down.
The Taoiseach, meanwhile, has been met with standing ovations for his salvo against the Vatican for failing to respond with sufficient concern to the clerical sex abuse scandals as described in the Cloyne report.
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Related story: Vatican Recalls Irish Ambassador over Abuse Report
2 comments:
My reading of history has been that Ireland's cleaving to the papacy was more due to it rejection of the English rule over Ireland than to any real love for the pope. We will never know how things would have turned out in Ireland had it been a free country in the 16th and 17th centuries, but we do know that many Irishmen left Ireland and settled in America, got as far away from the Englishmen in America as they could, and joining the local churches, usually not the Church of England.
One of the reasons that I post articles on developments in the Roman Catholic Church is that they affect Anglicans and other Christians as well as Roman Catholics. I particularly want to draw to attention of those who see the Church of Rome as a safe haven and refuge from the problems of the Anglican Church, that the Roman Catholic Church has problems of its own. This problems are not new. They have been around for a very long time and the Church of Rome has swept them under the carpet rather than deal effectively with them.
The Roman Catholic Church is a corrupt church. It was a corrupt church in the sixteenth century at the time of the Reformation. It is a corrupt church 400 years later. It is corrupt morally and spiritually as well as in its doctrines and practices. The Roman Catholic Church needed reforming in the sixteenth century. It needs reforming in this century.
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