BishopAccountability.org
	Sex Scandal Has Shattered Faithful By David McKittrick Herald November 27, 2009 http://www.herald.ie/national-news/sex-scandal-has-shattered-faithful-1956239.html A seemingly unending wave of sex scandals, many of them involving children, has decimated the once-proud standing of the Catholic Church in Ireland. This has rendered its power a pale shadow of what it was. The church was almost bound to lose influence over the last half-century, in common with a Western world where the secular is generally prevailing against the religious. But in Ireland, its fall from grace has been dramatic. Church attendance is on the wane, with only a handful of people now coming forward each year to train as priests or nuns -- this in a country which for decades sent thousands of religious ambassadors abroad. In the archdiocese of Dublin, there will soon be barely enough priests to have one for each of its 199 parishes. Clerical presence is not only contracting but ageing: in Dublin, there are now 10 times more priests older than 70 than under 40. The heart of the trouble lies in the mind of the flock, for even the most faithful have been shocked to the core by the relentless revelations. That shock has been all the greater because of the reverence which the Church once commanded. When what is now the Irish Republic came into being in the early 1920s, after Britain withdrew from the 26 southern counties, the new State was more than 90pc Catholic. From the start, it depended heavily on the Catholic Church to provide much of its basic infrastructure. It ran most of the schools, and many of the hospitals and other services. It set the tone for the entire State, since Catholic doctrine was built into many laws. As late as 1969, Ireland was described as "the most Christian country in the world," but in the Sixties, education, television and travel eroded much of the old deference. But the sex scandals, with the revelation that the Bishop of Galway had secretly fathered a child, have done more than anything to sap the authority of a once authoritarian Church. Contact: hnews@herald.ie
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