61 Scandals In The Church

The Church still has an extremely strong relationship with the government. Many Catholic voters insist that the government enforce their idea of what a family is. Ireland’s leaders have therefore long kept very conservative views on issues such as contraception, abortion, divorce, and homosexuality.

Although the Catholic Church still plays a very important role for the Irish people, its power has been on the decline for decades. Fewer and fewer people now attend Mass. More significantly, the priesthood and the monastic vocations have lost much of their stature, thereby leading to a sharp drop in the number of people entering the religious orders.

The Irish Church has been plagued by some of the same sex-abuse problems that have shocked North American Catholics; the term “pedophile priest” has become disturbingly common. Irish Catholics have accused the upper levels of the Church hierarchy of attempting to cover up the scandals of accused clergy. The Christian Brothers organization, which runs several Irish schools, has publicly apologized for the many cases of abuse that occurred in its schools.

Birth control and abortion have generated some of the biggest debates in Ireland. For decades, the use of birth control was considered a criminal act. In 1950, a government health minister proposed a “Mother and Child” plan that would have put the state into the Church’s traditional role of providing health care for pregnant women and mothers. Church leaders were afraid that the state might provide family-planning information, so they blocked the plan. The Church leaders got their way, but the resulting national controversy demonstrated that many Irish people were willing to challenge Catholic positions on social issues.

Between 1968 and 1993 the Irish Parliament passed a series of laws that made contraceptives legal and available. They did this in part with the support of the Irish people, partly because of pressure from the European Union to protect people’s right to privacy, and partly to protect the population against sexually transmitted diseases. Church and conservative leaders opposed the new laws at every step, but the will of the people on this issue was clear. Abortion is still illegal, but thousands of Irish women travel overseas every year to terminate pregnancies.

Many young people in Ireland today feel alienated from the Church. They complain that the pope is too conservative and doesn’t understand the needs of Catholic laypeople. They find that old-style Catholicism, with all its emphasis on shrines and the Virgin Mary, is irrelevant to modern people.

Ironically, though, one of the problems many modern Catholics have with the Church is that it has become too modern. The Second Vatican Council, convened by Pope John XXIII from 1962 to 1965, introduced a number of reforms into Church practice, including saying Mass in the vernacular and allowing laypeople to participate in Mass. Many Catholics had loved the old Latin Mass and the Gregorian chants in which it was sung and lamented its passing, as they did other forms of ritual that had been common and now are gone from Church practice. For some Catholics, that created a void that has not yet been filled.