Fearful for the church in Ireland?

[Vouthon]

The Church in Ireland is in a desperate crisis. (I am Irish though I currently live and work in London) and the majority of people are so appalled by the actions of nuns and priests in the past that they now want nothing to do with the catholic church.

We are mocked and ridiculed for supporting a church where the sexual abuse of children was endemic and covered up by priests and bishops and now the latest unbelievable scandal of hundreds and perhaps thousands of babies and small children who were being ‘cared’ for by nuns having been buried in unmarked graves and even in sewer pits. There is a general consensus that even more of these graves will be discovered at other Mother and Baby homes around the country.

Add to that the selling of children to Americans without the knowledge or permission of their mothers, and the appalling treatment of unmarried mothers right up to the 1990s, the testing of vaccines on helpless children, and the cruelty of nuns towards these children, and you do have to wonder what sort of church was at large in Ireland.

For myself, I have really had enough. I think the downfall of the catholic church in Ireland is being allowed by Almighty God because it has been corrupt and unchristian. I am studying the Orthodox church and it’s teachings with a view to converting. After all, the Orthodox hold St Patrick and St Brigid as Orthodox saints. Ireland was a country that was Orthodox in its beliefs, rituals and practices until the 12th century, and we were known as a land of saints and scholars. It wasn’t until Pope Urban 1V (the only English pope; oh the irony!) ordered the invasion of Ireland by England to bring us into line with Rome in the 12th century, that we became ‘Roman’ catholics. And a pretty fine mess that has left us in.

Orthodoxy has its own problems, particularly with nationalism and caesaropapism. In Russia, the ROC has become a de facto arm of the KGB/FSB state, as a result of this weakness in its institutional structure which tends to become subservient to national-confessional cultures and autocephalous churches, lacking the universalism of the RCC. In addition, their tradition, while more beautiful than the Latin West in many respects, for instance in terms of the emphasis placed upon mystical theology in its liturgy, lacks the social doctrine one finds in the RCC and the developed body of social justice teachings, among other factors. For some people that’s no biggie but it was for me when I contemplated converting to Greek Orthodoxy in my late teens. I even spoke with a local priest and undertook a course but decided, for theological reasons, that Catholicism was the right choice for me.

I continue to stand by those theological convictions.

No religious institution is untainted, sadly, as spiritual or ecclesiastical office provides twisted people with avenues for exploitative power over other people. I’ve researched almost all of them and terrible evils have been committed in the name of practically all. I was shocked, for example, to find Buddhists murdering Rohingya Muslims in Burma with the support of monasteries and Japanese Buddhist monks defending the war crimes of Imperial Japan by justifying them based upon a warped misreading of anatta. Buddhism is a famously pacifist, non-violent faith - yet it’s teachings have been abused to justify such unspeakable crimes in Burma and Japan. The only one I’ve found where this isn’t the case is Jainism. It’s governing structure are a shining example of a religious institution which seems to have found a morally superior way of governing itself.

But I sympathise entirely with what you are saying.

The Catholic Church as an institution has effectively destroyed herself in Ireland and has only herself to blame for having far too close association with the state in the aftermath of independence from Great Britain, which contaminated the culture among the hierarchy and the training of those with religious vocations - by attracting power-hungry and sexually deviant people who saw an opening and a means of attaining authority over vulnerable people, under the guise of religion in a society where the Church wielded unhealthy dominance over all spheres of life. Add to that a fundamentalism in religion to sexuality that led to the callous mistreatment of vulnerable young, unmarried mothers and their kids.

Terrible abuses ensued, buttressed by obscene cover-ups of the indefensible and made worse by the collusion of the state, which also ran mental hospitals independent of the Church where similar abuse took place.

Nonetheless, while the sexual abuse scandals have been a worldwide plague driven by corruption among the clergy, the Church in Ireland seems to have been particularly morally polluted as an institution - when you compare it even with the Church in other European countries.

Something was badly wrong from the top down, so it seems - globally but especially in Ireland.