The abuse of children in the care of the Catholic Church is a tragedy. The way the Irish Catholic Church has dealt with the abuse is descending ever more rapidly into farce.
It’s been a tough week for the church, as revelations have emerged about clergy in high places devising oaths of secrecy and pay-offs to keep abused children quiet, and then defending those actions. This gives the impression of a church whose top priority is protecting its own institutional reputation. It seems willing to apologise only after it has been caught.
Continue reading ‘Irish Catholic Church and Sex Abuse: Tragedy & Farce’
It’s been a hectic three days in Belfast with the Re-Emergence conference. I’m exhausted but left with a singular thought: the future of Christianity is ours for the making.
When many people think about Christianity, I suspect they reduce it to the institutions of the church or the doctrines that have been handed down to them from previous generations. When those institutions and doctrines seem to fail so spectacularly – just look at the institutional Catholic Church here in Ireland, or consider the ‘doctrines’ associated with dispensationalist theology in the United States – it may seem like Christianity itself cannot survive.
Continue reading ‘Re-Emergence Conference Belfast: Christianity is ours for the making?’
The conference, ‘Re-Emergence: Christianity and the Event of God,’ begins tonight, 15 March 2010, at 8 p.m. in McHugh’s Bar in Belfast. Tonight’s event is also the launch of the ‘Insurrection’ tour.
The conference runs until Thursday morning at the Irish School of Ecumenics, Trinity College Dublin at Belfast. Organised by post-modern theologian and ‘insurrectionist’ Peter Rollins, it features notables such as Phyllis Tickle, Dave Tomlinson, Samir Selmanovic, and others.
Continue reading ‘The Re-Emergence, and the Insurrection, Start Tonight …’
What will be the next headline when it comes to the Irish Catholic Church? We have now learned that in 1975, a then 36-year-old priest, and now Cardinal Sean Brady, was involved in ‘covering up’ sexual abuse by the infamous priest Brendan Smyth. This is serious: Brady is the archbishop of Armagh and primate of All Ireland, the highest ranking Catholic cleric on the island.
Abuse campaigner Colm O’Gorman has called on Cardinal Brady to resign, and we can expect other voices to join this chorus in the coming days.
Continue reading ‘Cardinal Sean Brady and Sex Abuse: Have we lost our capacity to be shocked?’
Fr Enda McDonagh, former professor of Moral Theology at St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, has devised a 12-step recovery programme for the Irish Catholic Church. I’m not sure if some Catholics would be uncomfortable with what might be considered a comparison of the Irish Catholic Church with Alcoholics Anonymous.
But these are desperate times for a church that often appears that it cannot help itself.
Continue reading ‘Fr Enda McDonagh: A 12-Step Recovery Programme for the Irish Catholic Church?’
Gene Stoltzfus, the founding director of Christian Peacemaker Teams, died Wednesday March 10, 2010, of a heart attack while cycling near his home in Fort Frances, Ontario. Christian Peacemaker Teams aim to ‘get in the way’ of war and violence. They have been prominent recently in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Stolzfus was a Mennonite who embodied some of the best qualities of that pacifist strand of Christianity. Simon Barrow, co-director of the religion and society think-tank Ekklesia, said of Stolzfus,
Continue reading ‘Gene Stolzfus: In Memory of a Christian Peacemaker’
What do young Irish Catholics think about their church? There was a fleeting insight into this in today’s Education Supplement in the Irish Times. Brief interviews with four teenage students from Coláiste Cillian in Clondalkin, Dublin, covered a range of topics, including church and going to mass.
Continue reading ‘Abuse Scandals in the Irish Catholic Church: What do Young Catholics Think?’
Yesterday, March 9, was the feast day of St Frances of Rome. Hailing as I do from a Protestant background, my knowledge of saints’ days is pretty thin on the ground. But yesterday I was visiting the Holy Cross Monastery in Rostrevor, and much of the day’s liturgical activities were given over to remembering and celebrating the life of the saint.
St Frances – not to be confused with St Francis of Assisi – lived between 1384 and 1440. She was a wife and a mother, but in later life became superior of the Benedictine Oblate Congregation of Tor di Specchi.
Continue reading ‘Lessons from the Benedictine Monks on the Life of St Frances of Rome’
This morning’s BBC Radio Ulster edition of Sunday Sequence featured an interview with the newly elected moderator of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, Norman Hamilton. Hamilton had a fairly wide-ranging conversation with presenter William Crawley in the ten minute slot which started the programme.
One of Hamilton’s more memorable lines was that ‘relationships matter,’ to which he added the words, ‘Institutions don’t deliver good relationships.’
Continue reading ‘Norman Hamilton, New Presbyterian Moderator: Relationships Matter’
Cardinal Sean Brady, and the Irish Catholic Church, have claimed that it is 
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