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	"Religious World Turned Upside down" By Eibhir Mulqueen Irish Times August 21, 2010 http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2010/0821/1224277318898.html AFTERMATH OF SCANDAL: THE CLERICAL sex abuse scandals has shaken the Catholic Church to its foundations but the world of the wider religious community has also been turned upside down, retired judge Catherine McGuinness said at the Merriman Summer School yesterday. A member of the Church of Ireland General Synod, she said she was struck by the speech given by the Catholic delegate at this year’s general synod conveying thanks to the bishops and clergy for their support and understanding for the Catholic clergy in their hour of need. “I found his speech both moving and sincere, and I was very glad indeed that such support, on a human level, was given.” She said that in the wake of the scandals, “regardless of religious affiliation, we now live in a wholly different world”. Despite the fact that this change had been brought about by what was essentially evil, she believed it was much better for Ireland that it should be so. “God moves in mysterious way, even if a certain former archbishop of Dublin is turning in his grave,” she said. The apparent split within the Catholic hierarchy, the amalgamation of parishes due to lack of priests, and the continuing public challenge both to the celibacy rule and to the failure to accept women priests had changed the world for Irish Protestants just as much as for Irish Catholics, she said. She believed relations had considerably changed between Protestants and Catholics in the Republic since the early 1980s when she had commented that “on the surface we are totally integrated, yet underneath the distrust grumbles on”. But in a formal sense, the post-Vatican Two improvement of inter-church relations had moved backwards. Devotion to the ecumenical cause was confined to niche groups, often composed mainly of ageing persons. “At the parish level, efforts between Catholics and Protestants to come together on a regular basis have dwindled away.”
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