IRELAND
New Ross Standard
The way I see it
By FR BRIAN WHELAN
Tuesday March 27 2012
THE LONG awaited Vatican Report into the Irish Church was published last week. A couple of weeks ago, the Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin was quoted as saying that the Church in Ireland is at breaking point.
The statement was of course headline fodder for the newspapers, and reading the reports of the interview he gave in the US, one can easily see why such a statement would raise eyebrows. To think that the Church is at breaking point is quite disconcerting, and really I suppose it could be perceived as a very negative idea.
But I feel that while Archbishop Martin is right in some ways, the truer overall picture isn’t quite so bad. The institutional church, the hierarchy, and the perceived ‘all-powerful church’ is of course a shadow of its former self. But this needn’t necessarily be a bad thing. What had evolved, particularly over the last couple of centuries in Ireland, was an institution, which had strayed hugely from what the church should be all about.
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