Is This the Death of the Catholic Church in Ireland?

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And here’s part II

What we’re seeing now is Ireland catching up with all of that with predictable results. The sad thing is that in doing it Ireland is looking absolutely pathetic. It has the feeling to it of the new kid in school who feels that she has to hang out with the cool kids, dress like they do, affect their speech, and avoid being seen with her square parents. Deep down, however, the kid is probably the same kid she’s always been.

That has the impact of making Ireland just another western European small nation. And that’s the irony of it. Now, Ireland isn’t any more interesting or special than any other western European nation. That will be plain soon enough. People won’t be proud to have had Irish ancestry any more than than they are to have had relatives who came from any other more or less generic place.

Sooner or later, however, people will start asking “what makes us Irish” and the answer is only going to be the Church. The same will be true of Quebec, which right now is a social disaster (pray that Ireland doesn’t get as messed up as Quebec). Then people will turn back.

If evidence is needed of that, Eastern Europe provides it. Former Warsaw Pact nations and Russia itself are still struggling with having been one big boring mass during Communist domination and are rediscovering who they are. In the process of doing that, they’re rediscovering the Church.

The Irish will too. But in the meantime, things will get a lot worse. One of the things that’s going to have to be sorted out is whether the Church’s institutional control of some things, such as the schools, is a good idea. Close association with the government hasn’t saved the dying Lutheran churches of Scandinavia nor is it doing the German churches very much good in Germany. In contrast the churches in U.S. are doing much better with no government association and the churches in Africa that likewise have none are going well. Additionally, the religious (i.e., the clerics) in Ireland seem to have gotten a little mushy in their message and are lacking the vigor they ought to have (and there were signs back for decades that this was not going well). There may be a need for some younger, vigorous, Priests, even if few in number, who make people mad and uncomfortable.
 
An excellent article.

What he notes, fwiw, about being Catholic in the UK has also been true about being Catholic in any of the Scandinavian countries. At one time, not all that long ago, to be a Catholic Scandinavian meant that you were either an intellectual or a scientist by default. And a suspect one at that, but secretly admired.
 
You make some germane points.

It’s true that a lot of arguments from Catholics in Ireland seem to be along the lines of, “this isn’t about legality of abortion, abortion already happens with women flocking at great personal cost and risk to England if they have the money. Rather it’s about poor women not having the same treatment,” or the argument in respect of, “I am personally opposed but we cannot impose our views on others”.

A poll from March of this year discovered that Irish youth are still highly religious by the standards of the rest of Western Europe:

www.irishtimes.com

Young Irish people among the most religious in Europe

Ireland among top four of 22 countries surveyed for regular attendance of religious services
www.irishtimes.com www.irishtimes.com
Irish people between the ages of 16 and 29 rank among the most religious in Europe, alongside Poles and Lithuanians, a new study has found.

Some 54 per cent of Irish people in this age bracket identify as Catholic, 5 per cent as belonging to other Christian denominations, 2 per cent as being part of a non-Christian religion, and 39 per cent saying they had no religion…

The report’s author, Prof Stephen Bullivant, director of the Benedict XVI Centre for Religion and Society at St Mary’s University, notes: “In only four countries do more than one-in-ten 16-29 year-olds claim to attend religious services on at least a weekly basis: Poland, Israel, Portugal, and Ireland.
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So, while the church has done wrong in Ireland and not exactly helped retain its position of moral gravitas with various scandals, we do need to balance this out with the fact that Catholicism isn’t exactly dead in Ireland either - even if the parishioners in question largely reject her teaching authority due to a loss in moral standing.

It’s complicated, I guess.
 
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Vouthon said:
“ I am personally opposed but we cannot impose our views on others ”.
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Which was exactly the argument that my very Catholic father made in the 1970s every time my mother brought this exact same topic up.

It was only later in the 80s that he changed his views on this.

By that time, we would hear that “well, it’s accepted and we have to live with it”, out in the general population. Now, however, abortion is not favored in large demographics and its become safe in a lot of places to openly oppose it. Things are never inevitable.

Which is also the same arguments we’ve seen here in the U.S. about same gender marriage, fwiw. And the “it’s decided, you can’t talk about it” argument is already being uncomfortably made by its supporters.

But at least at the pew level young Catholics get their religion more than ever. I’m constantly amazed by how much more they appreciate and understand it in a really orthodox fashion. I tend to think what is less understood is the long term impact of legal choices of such as this, as they haven’t lived any. In 1973 when I was ten I wouldn’t have ever guessed that years later I’d see a society that is as confused about sexuality as we are now, for example.

On a side note, statistics such as “x% identify as this or that” are always suspect. Even something as being Catholic can be like that if it’s cool not to be one. As I noted above, I live in an area where Catholics are a minority and over the years I’ve been surprised by how many people make a pretty dedicated effort to keep their Catholicism under the radar. It usually comes out if they realize that it’s safe to be one in any one group.
 
I noticed you made the parallell between Ireland and Scandinavia. Do you have a background in either, bc the parallells are uncanny, but I get decidedly short with outsiders stomping in full of recent online opinions?
 
hvizsgyak said:
And until we Pro-lifers can show beyond a shadow of a doubt that the child inside the mother’s womb really deserves his/her right to life and practically all people of the world agree with this, we will never overcome the woman’s so called right to choose. We need to come at this disaster from a better and new angle because what we are doing is not working to help people see the child’s point of view. Unfortunately, I got nothing to offer.
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It’s not that most pro abortion people don’t know they are killing an innocent human life. It is that they don’t care. Free sex is what they want. Even the ancient Greeks knew what abortion was and shunned it as per the Hippocratic Oath.

The problem is ultimately, as with all problems, selfishness. The particular manifestations are free sex (thus contraception, abortion, divorce), feminism (you have men who will say they have no right to tell a woman not to have an abortion - that is no man), euthanasia (people are only good for what they can do for others). The problem is deep and wide. In a sense abortion is just a symptom. You won’t get rid of abortion without going deeper. Not that we shouldn’t strive against abortion.
 
SnowRose said:
I noticed you made the parallell between Ireland and Scandinavia. Do you have a background in either, bc the parallells are uncanny, but I get decidedly short with outsiders stomping in full of recent online opinions?
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I know something on the topic, there are parallels but there are differences as well.

I notice you are registered as a Lutheran, in which case you are no doubt suffering a lot more in observation of the world than we are. In my view, the Lutheran church is dying. While its a bold prediction, and I won’t likely live to see it, I suspect that it’ll be replaced by what it replaced. I.e., Catholicism will come back in where the Reformation faiths drove it out, and it’s already starting. I note that the Norwegian and Swedish conservatives who severed their relationship with the larger Lutheran churches are already using the term “Catholic” in their name, just as some of the dissident Anglican Communion churches do. Indeed, in a larger sense, I suspect what we’re seeing to some degree is a great shaking out of things which were brought about by the Reformation and which will result in its end.

Anyhow, I’m not really sure how to answer your question but if we look at it the Lutheran Church (which was not of course called that) was forced on the population by Swedish and Danish monarchies (including in Norway, where the Danes at that time controlled). There was a long struggle as things went back and forth for a long time, but in the end the monarchies succeeded in imposing the Lutheran church on the region. The change was more subtle in some areas than others and it resembled the change in England in some ways in that at the parish level there wasn’t all that great of a change at first and an average person wouldn’t have really been able to grasp that there was a change.

Having said that, there remained groups of Catholics for a long time. In some areas the new Church remained very Catholic in its practices. In Norway there remained actual Catholic populations into the 1700s, which is not really all that long ago. In the 19th Century the Lutheran Church in Scandinavia went through a reform in which it became fairly austere. That gave us the version of Scandinavian Lutheranism that we are generally familiar with, but it’s only about half of the Lutheran history there.

Most of Scandinavia was dirt poor until after World War Two. Finland (not really a Scandinavian country) forceably modernized out of fear of the Soviet Union. Sweden’s economy rose in the post war world. Norway’s rose due to North Sea oil. The entire region became much wealthier than it ever had been as a result.
 
Part II

The Lutheran churches had always been associated with the crown or at least the government throughout their entire history and indeed they would not have even existed but for that. As with Ireland, that came to mean that they were unduly close to their governments in some ways. Scandinavian social programs really have their root in the Lutheran Church, which is understandable but it means that the government began to pick up a role that was that of the churches, making the church irrelevant in a traditional role of religion. This i a bit of the reverse, but still instructive, as to Ireland as the church in Ireland picked up some roles that the government normally filled, such as education. This is, I’d note, also the case with Quebec, where education, along with other normally governmental roles, were fulfilled by the church. The problem with that is two fold, even if the origin of it is understandable, as on one hand if the government occupies the role of religion, people confuse the two and the need for religion is accordingly reduced, as well as secularized. If, on the other hand, a church occupies the role of a government, it is acting in a partially secular fashion with all the attendant messiness that creates, and people will enter the Church with, in some cases, confused vocations. It’s notable that in Quebec after this role was terminated virtually overnight, quite a few clerics who had roles in education, etc., left their vocations. Chances are that their vocations were confused in the first place.

After Scandinavia became wealthy post war there was a struggle in the Lutheran churches in some locations between conservatives and liberals. In others ,there was no struggle as the leaders of the churches were already liberal. This should be really instructive to Catholics as the direction that the German church would like to go in now has already been been paved by the Lutheran churches in Scandinavia and we know exactly where it goes. Most Scandinavians remain Lutheran in some loose fashion in Scandinavia but their participation in their church is low. At least up until recently to be born in a Scandinavian country meant that you were going to be registered as a Lutheran by default. Now that the economy is so much better in Scandinavia than its ever been, and the government has occupied the social roles that the church did in former times, most people don’t really figure they need the church there that much. And after all the Lutheran churches everywhere have to argue for their validity anyhow, as they came about due to a self declaration of Luther’s.

Oops, there will have to be a Part III
 
Part IIII
Catholicism never really disappeared in Scandinavia even though it was severely repressed, but it’s been undergoing a revival. This is normally (and properly) tied to immigrants from Catholic regions, but it seems to be more than that. There’s a peculiar regional history in the region of conversion to Catholicism by intelligentsia and with the Lutheran churches dying, and it now being easy to research their origin, a small but increasing conversion makes sense. That makes sense to me and is happening elsewhere in Europe as well. More Catholics, for example, attend services in the UK every Sunday than Anglicans do.

By the way, for anyone who is a student of Scandinavia and religion, I’d highly recommend the novel Kristin Lavinsdattir. It’s an novel, but it’s an intensely researched one (Noble prize winner too) and gives a fantastic depiction of Medieval Norway including its intense religious nature.
 
exnihilo said:
t’s not that most pro abortion people don’t know they are killing an innocent human life. It is that they don’t care. Free sex is what they want. Even the ancient Greeks knew what abortion was and shunned it as per the Hippocratic Oath.

The problem is ultimately, as with all problems, selfishness. The particular manifestations are free sex (thus contraception, abortion, divorce), feminism (you have men who will say they have no right to tell a woman not to have an abortion - that is no man), euthanasia (people are only good for what they can do for others). The problem is deep and wide. In a sense abortion is just a symptom. You won’t get rid of abortion without going deeper. Not that we shouldn’t strive against abortion.
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To add to that, free sex isn’t free.

If you look at the situation in the US, now into the third generation, the problems that attitude created are all over, with the generation coming of age now struggling to figure out how to repair things.
 
Kristin Lavransdotter sucks as a novel, I read it in my teens.
You never answered my initial question, which was essentielly Who are you to make these parallells?
That’s a nice summary, I’ll give you that, but Catholicism on a Lutheran-turned-atheist country? Really?
Present Fatima and you’d get an in-your-face-laugh. Try the immaculate conception and you’ll be laughed out of the house.
When the leader of the local evangelical congregation converted to the RCC it just meant ”Omg if NN is Catholic now, no freaking way I could ever be. Like ever never”.
 
Actually the moral code against abortion goes all the way back to Cicero.
 
You may wish to discuss this with Gov Rauner (R-Ill) who recently signed a bill to fund abortions. He was under fire but nevertheless won his primary.
 
Yeoman said:
If you look at the situation in the US, now into the third generation, the problems that attitude created are all over, with the generation coming of age now struggling to figure out how to repair things.
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Unfortunately I don’t see the new generations struggling to repair things. I see them not knowing what the problems are or what harm they have suffered. That is why I see a further descent into chaos and gross immorality.
 
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