IRELAND
The Association of Catholic Priests
Why exactly does the Catholic magisterium seek to prevent Catholic priests from questioning magisterial positions, even on merely disciplinary matters?
The only good reason surely must be to strengthen the authority of those positions, to persuade us that those positions are the only correct ones.
However, I have to say that for this particular Irish Catholic the action recently taken against six Irish priests has had precisely the opposite effect. I strongly believe that the authority of the magisterium itself, and of all clergy who expressly support its positions on controversial disciplinary issues, has never been more seriously undermined in Ireland than by this action.
The reason is that in Ireland we tend to give authority to teachers in proportion to their disinterestedness – the degree to which they obviously derive no personal benefit from what they teach. So, the few Catholic clergy who disregarded the Irish penal laws of the period 1691-1750 gained authority from the fact that they had nothing to gain and everything to lose by staying in Ireland and proclaiming what they taught.
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