The point is, of course, that the current crisis in Irish Church affairs, involving certainly an unprecedented fury against Ireland's bishops and also against Vatican bureaucratic procedures – of which Enda Kenny's late performance was the most striking example – is not about Catholicism at all.

[...]

The flaw in Weigel's article is very obvious: to be anti-clerical isn't necessarily to be anti-Catholic. Later in his piece, Weigel asks the question "How on earth did this most Catholic of countries become violently anti-Catholic?" Well, of course, it didn't. To be strongly disenchanted with your own bishops is hardly to be anti-Catholic (and it may indicate precisely the reverse).

[...]

Weigel has a quick tour d'horizon of the reasons for the secularisation of a few formerly overwhelmingly Catholic countries, which leads him to a bewildering conclusion: "Once breached, the fortifications of Counter-Reformation Catholicism in Spain, Portugal, Quebec [not European, not a country], and Ireland quickly crumbled. And absent the intellectual resources to resist the flood-tides of secularism, these four once-hyper-Catholic nations flipped, undergoing an accelerated course of radical secularization that has now, in each case, given birth to a serious problem of Christophobia…"

Christo WHAT? WHAT phobia? What is actually a crisis in the governance of the Catholic Church in Ireland has now become a general European hatred for the Saviour of the world.

And where are the bishops to sort this out to come from? The US, perhaps? Maybe the gruesome results over the last 20 years of self-confident American efforts to tell other people how to run their own affairs might be thought to rule this out? England perhaps? That's all the Irish need, a few English voices telling them what to do. I think we've been there before: it didn't work. The point is, Mr Weigel, that the Irish spent 800 years shaking off foreign tutelage: they're certainly not going to accept it now.