Ireland: What Happened?

Four months ago, in May, the Irish Free State overturned the Eighth Amendment, that once-proud Catholic country’s ban on abortion.

This sent shock waves throughout the world. Ireland; a tiny country whose out-sized influence on the world was due to the massive diaspora of its stubborn and resourceful people. A people which, perhaps more than any other, was imbued with an ethos of staunch Roman Catholicism.

Ireland and the Church. Catholicism and the Irish. Those words were inseparable in the popular imagination. The Kennedys, “The Fighting Irish”, Going my Way. Sr Mary Helen Dillahunty who rapped your knuckles with a yardstick if you stepped out of line in Jr High. The local police force.

You get the picture.

So what happened? Two words: sodomy and corruption. They are two sides of the same coin. Add them together and you get an arrogance that puts mere hubris to shame; an arrogance which can destroy a once-great civilization. One follows the other; indeed one necessitates the other. Consider “the glory that was Greece, the grandeur which was Rome”.

I realize that for some, this is a bitter pill to swallow but with the recent revelations out of Pennsylvania, the gloves have already come off in Catholic circles. No more are the growing legion of Catholic critics dancing around the issue, speaking only about “paedophilia” (which is the sexual exploitation of pre-pubescent children). We have numbers now: 87 percent of the cases of clerical and episcopal abuse concern the exploitation of post-pubescent young men. This is about homosexuality and the mindset which includes ephebophelia, the seduction of young men.
This much is obvious now.

And that’s the way horrified Catholics are talking. Why? Because they learned their lesson from the earlier scandal which broke in 2002. (I recommend the movie Spotlight for a good primer on this subject.) The insistence that the earlier scandal involved only pre-pubescent children (which were overwhelmingly boys) was a classic case of misdirection. Indeed, in comparison with what has come out now, the numbers were relatively small (as stated above).

Criminals do this all the time in order to deflect attention from themselves. After all, in both the popular imagination as well as most legal codes, the abuse of little children is worse than the abuse of teenagers. In doing so however, they throw a minority of the miscreants under the bus. Regardless, it’s all evil and it couldn’t be hushed up forever.

The monetary damages that the American Catholic Church has had to pay out (4 billion dollars so far) are bad enough but this pales in comparison to the destruction of souls and the loss of the Roman Church’s moral authority. Those losses are incalculable. No more can any Catholic bishop speak with authority about anything and be taken seriously, even if he is preaching the Gospel and he himself is as pure as the wind-driven snow.

The case in Ireland is particularly poignant. The loss of the Church’s honor was a long time in coming. The priesthood there (as here) had become a gay profession if you will. So when the time came to stand up to the secularist forces which want abortion-on-demand at all costs, they couldn’t do it.

Is there a lesson here for the Orthodox Church? Possibly. There has been a slow erosion of moral rigor in those churches aligned with Constantinople. The present Ecumenical Patriarch has signaled as much with his various pronouncements and –let’s be honest here–the elevation of certain men to the episcopate.

Let’s leave it at that for now. In the meantime, the dissolution of once-proudly Catholic Ireland leaves me with profound sorrow.

Monomakhos

Comments

  1. The question is where have the voices of straight, traditional, and right minded Roman Catholic priests,cardinals, and bishops gone? Yes many in their laity have left, but what of the devout, and conservative Catholics? You all believe the billions of dollars only went to victims, yeah right? This is more than sex, that’s why it will never stop, follow the money. Why do they not demand wholesale removals? The first scandal was not enough? Apparently the sodomites, and the liberal minded have taken over. Imagine the abuse in third world countries.

    This example from the first RCC scandal, and now with the second, which will go down as the first(no real change and obscene payouts), is why our Orthodox leaders don’t give a shit what we laity have to say, nor bad press, nor spotlight. They are choirboys compared to the RCC leaders, and will always be supported by their bootlickers and sycophants.

    Homosexuality has been spiritually destroyed the RCC, but they have the deepest pockets. The Orthodox Church is next for the queer minded. A good percentage of our bishops are either gay,liberal, or both so don’t look to them, to correct course, especially as there ranks grow.

    Maybe it’s a good thing Orthodoxy’s pockets are not deep. Our wallets and feet are our only nuclear option, and God forbid it comes to that, but then what to do? Do we allow the RCC infestation to attempt destroy, and splinter our church as well? Men who make excuses, for these sick and fake unbelievers, are simply accomplices and enablers. The greatest enabler preaches,”Whom Am I to judge?”

    • As the devil continues to try to stamp out Christianity we have no other option but to grow stronger in faith and grow closer together with like minded Christians. I think a time is coming where jurisdictional preference will be secondary to clinging to the truth but there will also be great confusion especially if the EP makes good on it’s fiction of having jurisdiction over the Ukraine. This is the beginning of the end, the great falling away. In a phrase: it doesn’t get better, it becomes more real. So prepare and be ready for anything, but don’t worry about corrupt bishops and priests. It is later than we think!

      Holy Fathers Seraphim and Dmitri pray to God for us!

  2. lack of mention of the magdalene laundries or bon secours or other non sodomy related major catholic scandals in ireland

    shocker

    not always about butt stuff

  3. FWIW, “the [Irish] Free State came to an end with the coming into force of the new constitution on 29 December 1937, which with the Republic of Ireland Act 1948 officially became the Republic of Ireland.”

  4. There will be a split between the New Calendar modernists and the Church Calendar traditionalists. The modernists will leave us no choice. Thus will the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church be preserved. The rot in modernism is already terminal. Just a matter of time.

    • I very much want to go back to the Church Calendar and know which group I will be joining if this happens, but I don’t look forward to this. All schisms are tragedies.

  5. Sean Richardson says

    It should be noted that Ireland had a centuries long tradition of Orthodox (Eastern Christian) monastic practice and Christian thought. There are many early Irish saints that are recognized within the Orthodox Church for their sanctity, teachings and life. The real change in Ireland happened centuries ago, it didn’t just happen this year when abortion laws were passed.

  6. Jonas Colicas says

    The idea of Orthodox Ireland is blatant OCA agitprop. The Irish vehemently deny it.

    • Tell that to St Patrick, who is very much an Orthodox saint and is on the church calendar of even the most traditional/older calendar Orthodox Churches. St Patrick’s Englishness/Irishness in no way makes him “not Orthodox.”

    • All it is is a recognition that Ireland and all the West was in communion with the Orthodox East until somewhere around the Great Schism. That’s simply a fact. Calling those pre-Schism Irish/Western saints “Orthodox” is simply an acknowledgment of that communion the same way RCs call pre-Schism Greek/Eastern saints “Catholic”. There’s no insinuation St. Patrick, for example, was Byzantine Rite or followed later “Eastern” practices.

    • Monk James Silver says

      Jonas Colicas (September 7, 2018 at 10:50 am) says:

      The idea of Orthodox Ireland is blatant OCA agitprop. The Irish vehemently deny it.
      ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
      Really?

      The Synod of Whitby forced Christians in the British Isles to abandon their Palestinian-Egyptian traditions a thousand years ago, and conform to Roman practice

      At that time, Christians in Ireland and the rest of the Isles were Orthodox, in full communion — along with Rome — with the other local churches. The Irish stayed with Rome after the Great Schism and after the Protestant Reformation, but they had remained Orthodox for six centuries after the Synod of Whitby.

      And this has, what? exactly, to do with the OCA, which came into existence only in 1970?!