Everything you need to know about Ireland’s disaffected Catholics

IRELAND
The Week Magazine

How Catholic was Ireland?

It used to be easily the most Catholic country in the world. The church’s connection to the island nation dates to St. Patrick’s conversion in the 5th century, and the modern Irish state is explicitly bound up with the church. The constitution opens with the words, “In the name of the Most Holy Trinity, from Whom is all authority…” and continues with reference to “obligations to our Divine Lord, Jesus Christ, Who sustained our fathers through centuries of trial.” In Ireland, the church, not the state, runs almost the entire education system. Until recently, social life, too, revolved around the local church. In 1984, nearly 90 percent of Irish Catholics went to Mass every week. But by 2011, only 18 percent did. It’s a massive cultural shift.

What changed?

Mass attendance began dropping rapidly during the 1990s, as Ireland began its “Celtic Tiger” economic boom. The country was modernizing, urbanizing, and taking on a more global perspective, and the local church was no longer the only nexus of community life. For the first time, the country had a vigorous debate about abortion and began teaching sex education in schools. At the same time, several long-hidden scandals began to emerge. In 1992, the Irish learned that a powerful and beloved bishop, Eamon Casey, had a fathered a son, and that the Rev. Michael Cleary, the “Singing Priest” with best-selling records and his own radio show, had a secret family with his housekeeper. But the biggest seismic jolt came over the last decade, when the priestly sex-abuse scandal horrified the entire country.

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