IRELAND
Sky News (Australia)
An international conference celebrating Roman Catholicism has opened in Ireland against a backdrop of anger over child abuse cover-ups and evidence of declining faith in core church beliefs.
About 12,000 Catholics, many from overseas, gathered for an open-air mass in a half-full Dublin stadium on Sunday at the start of the Eucharistic Congress, a week-long event organised by the Vatican every four years in a different part of the world.
The global gathering, begun in the 19th century and last held in Quebec in 2008, highlights the Catholic Church’s belief in transubstantiation, the idea that bread and wine transforms during mass into the actual body and blood of Jesus Christ.
An opinion poll of Irish Catholics found that two-thirds of Irish Catholics don’t believe this, nor do they attend mass weekly.
The survey, published in The Irish Times with an error margin of three points, also found that just 38 per cent believe Ireland today would be in worse shape without its dominant church. And just three-fifths even knew the Eucharistic Congress was coming to Ireland.
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