IRELAND
Irish Central
November 12, 2017
By Cormac MacConnell
“We laity in the past placed ye on a pedestal that was far too high and uncomfortable for any mortal men.”
By the time ye are reading this I will possibly be roasting eternally already in the hottest corner of hell for having dreadfully broken the centuries-old sacred tradition of the Seal of Confession of the Catholic Church.
Mighty priests and saints were burned at the stake in the past for refusing to break that seal, so this is a heavy moment indeed for all of us. Maybe ye should stop reading here at this point to not become even laterally complicit in MacConnell’s. Those of you who are devoutly Catholic should take this suggestion seriously.
Anyway, for those of you still here, the context is that I also was devoutly Catholic and a regular Mass-goer until about 25 years ago when the frightening tide of scandals attached to my church began to surface in turgid waves.
It was a shock here in holy Ireland, for example, when it was revealed that both Bishop Eamon Casey and Father Michael Cleary, the hierarchy’s brightest stars of the time, were biological fathers as well as priests sworn to celibacy. They were both good and charming men and that was a minor enough matter on the scale of things.
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