IRELAND
Religion in the News (United States)
by Christine McCarthy McMorris
The afternoon was slowly winding down in Dublin last July 20 as the Dáil, Ireland’s lower House of Parliament, prepared to close for its summer break. Its last order of business was to debate a motion to “deplore” the Vatican’s role in the state’s fourth investigation of the sexual abuse of children in the Catholic church, this one involving 19 priests of the diocese of Cloyne in County Cork from 1996 to 2009.
Only a few lawmakers and members of the press were on hand when Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Enda Kenny opened the discussion not with the expected mild criticism but by declaring that the Cloyne Report “exposes an attempt by the Holy See to frustrate an inquiry in a sovereign, democratic republic as little as three years ago. And in doing so, the Cloyne Report excavates the dysfunction, disconnection, elitism, and the narcissism that dominate the culture of the Vatican to this day.”
In an unequivocal declaration of independence, Kenny drew a line between Ireland’s past relationship with the Catholic church and its present:
“[T]his is not Rome. Nor is it industrial-school or Magdalene Ireland, where the swish of a soutane
smothered conscience and humanity and the swing of a thurible ruled the Irish-Catholic world.
“This is the Republic of Ireland 2011. A republic of laws.”
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