IRELAND
The Irish Times
KATHY SHERIDAN
When did Irish Catholics finally stop fearing the belt of the crozier? Was it in 1992, when they were forced to confront the tragedy of the raped and pregnant 14-year-old girl in the X case? Or after the 2009 Murphy report, when Mary O’Rourke spoke scathingly of the nuncio “parading around Ireland in his wonderful glitzy clothes but not replying to letters”? Or was it the spectacle of a fearful, perspiring Cardinal Seán Brady being torn apart in interviews after revelations about his role in the interrogation of a boy who had been abused by a priest?
The whiplash speed of bishops’ fall is awesome. Now the Catholic Church no longer acts as a “sacred canopy” for social, political and economic life, says Prof Tom Inglis of the school of social science at University College Dublin.
“The main change now is in fear,” says Inglis. “There was a sense in which the church was an authority to be obeyed, and there was a fear of not being obedient. Then you moved into a phase where it wasn’t obeyed and it was respected. And now it has moved into a phase where the institutional church is not respected.”
In an academic paper in 2007, Inglis asked: “Are Irish Catholics becoming more like their fellow European Catholics and Protestants . . . ‘believing without belonging’?”
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