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others are neglected or excluded. This is certainly true in relation to the study of child sexual abuse within the Catholic Church. Much scholarly work focuses on the assumed psychopathology of the perpetrator and on failures of individuals who were in positions of authority in the Church in relation to their handling of abuse complaints. I suggest that there is a need to expand such individualistic perspectives and examine how cultural, theological, organisational and institutional Church influences were integrated and assimilated into and in turn influenced the Irish
Catholic Church was in no position to voice its concern about these developments at the time, in the wake of the child- abuse and Magdalene laundry revelations. Moreover, the response in the public forum to the litany of Church-related offences has been to reject the institutional Church and, consequently, impede the creation of a space for the evaluation of the cultural legacy of Irish Catholicism. As a result, attempting to explore aspects of the Catholic Church without falling into outright condemnation of the entire institution and of its members is deemed insular
high-profile converts also such as Charles Moore, former editor of the Daily and Sunday Telegraph and of The Spectator magazine. For this reason, Catholicism has won greater respect from the media and would-be critics of Catholicism than that accorded it in Ireland. This disparity is still evident. Throughout most of the twentieth century in Ireland, Catholicism was not questioned except in media and literary circles. It lay embedded in a comfort zone that led to conformity between the institutional Church and the State, and this contributed to passiveness among
pastoral and social support. Some, such as Fr. Bobby Gilmore, engaged in political lobbying regarding miscarriage of justice cases, in particular the Birmingham Six case, using extensive institutional church and political networks globally, but particularly in the USA. Again in this decade, individuals such as Fr. Gilmore, criticized the absence of Irish state support for a new generation of emigrants (ibid.). By 1999 it was estimated that the Irish Chaplaincy in Britain (ICB) employed 150 full-time and 20 part-time staff, and had 659 lay volunteers (Harvey, 1999). The
important to remember that Irish Catholics became devoted to the institutional Church and its rituals. Many family homes became Catholic spaces festooned with crucifixes, statues, pictures and other religious imagery. Daily life and the calendar year were marked by Catholic rituals and events. People knelt to pray. There was a litany of saints to which people made petitions. Many of the devotional practices were magical in orientation, with prayers being said, novenas being made and pilgrimages being undertaken in the hope that God, Jesus, Our Lady or one the saints would
private losses, the sense of injustice is compounded by the abject failure to hold anyone to account. This, in turn, leads to an understandable and widespread discrediting of authority, whether it be vested in banks, institutional churches or the legal and medical professions. The crisis in authority can, of course, be addressed in two ways. One way is to render authority more authoritarian by making the State and its agents more coercive in their response to forms of criticism and dissent (for examples of this response in the Irish case see Cronin 2009
institutional Church, and also among lay Catholics, is abhorrent to him because he finds it contrary to the message of the Gospel and the spirit of the Second Vatican Council. In the same way, he is extremely critical of the place held by church tradition in the Catholic doctrine. He repeatedly demonstrates that the Vatican’s eternal truth is in large part a historical construct and that many of its aspects have no sound foundation in the Scriptures. He exposes the age-old misogyny of the Church, the well-attested medieval origin of mandatory clerical celibacy, the
‘good name’ of the Church and too little concern for victims.65 The winter 2005 issue contained several articles criticising responses by the institutional Church to the scandal of abuse. A 2010 essay, ‘No Cheap Grace’ by Seamus Murphy SJ, published in response to the Ryan and Murphy reports on child sexual abuse, bluntly started with ‘three simple facts’: a large number of priests had sexually assaulted children during the last forty FANNING 9781784993221 PRINT.indd 71 19/01/2016 13:25 72 Irish adventures in nation-building years; their superiors made no serious
which to give voice and to spread the good news. By revealing the power of love to the world the artist performs the service of the priest. Whereas the institutional church is ministered by ‘priested peasant[s] . . . who [are] but schooled in the discharging of a formal rite . . . [the secular artist would be] . . . a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life’ (Joyce, 2003: 240). That artist/priest carries out his mission in Ulysses by faithfully recording epiphanies of philia in the networks of
Ireland and Irish Catholicism by dethroning the Church, Taylor’s framework is also sensitive to modernity’s ‘dangers’ and Catholicism’s capacity to respond. For Taylor, the Church does not disappear but, freed from alliances with political and social power, takes on a new character. The Irish Church is well positioned to do this since, for all the changes it has faced, it does retain an often-overlooked vibrancy. While there has been a collapse of faith in the institutional Church and its hierarchy, many local nuns, priests, brothers and lay ministers continue to find