Opinion Irish Church Needs to Import New Leadership Blood, The CathNews, August 5, 2011

Opinion- Irish Church Needs to Import New Leadership Blood

The CathNews
August 5, 2011

http://www.cathnews.com/article.aspx?aeid=27524

Ireland has become the most stridently anti-Catholic country in the Western world, writes George Weigel in Ethics and Public Policy Centre.

Its Taoiseach (prime minister), Enda Kenny, recently took to the floor of the Dail to denounce the Vatican as a house of "dysfunction, disconnection, elitism . . . [and] narcissism" and to commit an act of calumny against Pope Benedict XVI, accusing him of being a party to the coverup of the "rape and torture of children."

Ireland's attorney general plans to introduce a new law that threatens priests with five-year jail sentences if they do not violate the seal of confession when pedophilia is confessed. Polls indicate considerable support among Irish voters for such an unprecedented violation of religious freedom, and the Irish press has indulged its anti-Church phobias with virtually no restraint.

There can be no doubt that the crisis of clerical sexual abuse - and the parallel crisis of local Catholic leadership that failed to address the problem - has been especially acute in Ireland.

Benedict XVI condemned both the abuse and the coverup of abuse in a stinging letter to the entire Church in Ireland 16 months ago, a letter that condemned abusers and their enablers while offering a heartfelt apology to victims.

Apostolic visitations of the principal Irish dioceses and seminaries have been undertaken, on Vatican orders, by bishops from the United States, Canada, and Great Britain; their reports, one understands, have been blunt and unsparing.

What has not happened, and what ought to happen sooner rather than later, is a wholesale replacement of the Irish hierarchy, coupled with a dramatic reduction in the number of Irish dioceses.

Ireland is in desperate need of new and credible Catholic leadership, and some of it may have to be imported: If a native of Ireland could be archbishop of New York in 1850, why couldn't a native of, say, California be archbishop of Dublin in 2012? The United States and Canada, in particular, have Anglophone bishops who have demonstrated their capacity to clean house and reenergize dioceses evangelically.