IRELAND
Toronto Star
Sandro Contenta
Feature Writer
DUBLIN, IRELAND—Rev. Seamus Ryan, a gentle Catholic priest on the verge of retirement, lives in a cluttered home next to St. Matthew’s Parish, where he ministers to a precipitously decreasing flock from the working-class neighbourhood of Ballyfermot.
On a September day that threatened rain, he sat with a cup of tea in a comfortable armchair, relaxing after having married a young couple. Baptisms, marriages and funerals still keep priests busy in Ireland. But Ryan takes little solace from a church reduced to what some call a “hatch, match and dispatch” service.
“People have lost contact with the church,” he says. “At the wedding today, they were no longer familiar with the responses. They’ve lost the language, even. There’s just a silence.” …
The backdrop to the battle is a Roman Catholic Church in crisis in Europe and North America. Vocations to the priesthood are drying up and sex abuse scandals reveal a hierarchy often more interested in protecting the institution than protecting children.
“The church is 200 years behind the times,” Cardinal Carlo Martini told an Italian journalist in comments he approved before his death in late August. “Why doesn’t it stir? Are we afraid?”
“Our culture has become old,” the highly respected cardinal added in his missive from the grave, “our churches and our religious houses are big and empty, the bureaucratic apparatus of the church grows, our rites and our dress are pompous.”
In this atmosphere of crisis, rebellious reform groups are multiplying. Hoban’s association began two years ago and already represents 1,000 of Ireland’s 4,500 priests. In Austria, a group called Preachers’ Initiative, which says it represents 10 per cent of the country’s Catholic priests, has issued a “Call to Disobedience” manifesto that demands the ordination of women and an end to priestly celibacy. Groups in Germany and the United States are making similar noises.
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