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elaboration of new identities of the type described above is arguably a symptom of the authority-Âcrisis which characterizes late modern societies. Today, communication and information make for innovation rather than transmission. In the context of distrust in institutional churches, better education, increased affluence, regular foreign holidays, the media and the internet bring exotic or archaic creeds to the attention of people in need of answers to their existential questions and who have put the past behind them. The Celtic Tiger turned Ireland into one of the most
paragraph. Inglis writes that ‘the bonds of censorship which the Church had tied around sex were shattered’, that ‘since the 1980s the Church’s monopoly on discourse about sex has been broken’ (Inglis 1998, p. 157), that ‘decline in practice has been dramatic’ (Inglis 1988, p. 209) and that ‘the institutional Church is literally dying off’ (Inglis 1998, p. 213) (my italics). Mary Kenny has written articles with titles such as ‘The End of Catholic Ireland’ (Kenny 2012) and ‘Is Ireland Divorcing from the Catholic Church?’ (Kenny 2011). She asks if Irish Catholicism is
analysis. She suggests that the Irish religious market has evolved from being monopolistic 14 Eamon Maher and Eugene O’Brien to becoming more pluralist, and she goes on to explore the nature of today’s religious market in Ireland from the perspective of the Celtic Tiger values as echoed by religious market theories and by the post- secularization theory. Finally, Brendan Geary looks at how assumptions about the Catholic Church have been shattered by the reports of child sexual abuse and their subsequent cover-Âups, and he examines how the institutional Church has
, squares), of transit (streets) and institutions (churches, schools, hospitals, prisons) where people gathered. The industrial spaces that encompassed great portions of the city were privately owned, but they could also be ‘lived’ as public spaces – as by the workers during a strike for example. This, in turn, caused spatial and social disruption, thereby placing the distribution of public and private into question. For Torino’s punks, this had clear ramifications: [As the city] decayed, so the perspective changed from one of seemingly eternal development to reveal the
society towards religion.87 There has never been an appetite in Irish thought, whether on the part of civic republicans or otherwise, either to strictly exclude religion from public life or to create a categorical constitutional barrier between the State and organised religion. Nonetheless, one of the aims of the United Irishmen’s insurrection had been the creation of ‘a society [where] the linkage between confessional affiliation and political power would be broken’. 88 We have argued that this general aim cannot be considered independently of the institutional Church
in the political arena under the influence of a commitment to the defence of human dignity. 7 At the same time Pope John Paul II was an astute political actor and, as we shall see, once democracy had been achieved in his own country and elsewhere, was more than capable of standing up for the interests of the institutional Church as well as pursuing his broader concern with human dignity as understood by that Church. In this sense Weigel reinforced an explanatory framework that stressed both theological change and the role of a religious leadership now convinced
institutional Church did not just have a responsibility to condemn but also quite explicitly to take the side of the poor and the marginalised, even if on occasions this might necessitate supporting the use of violence against oppressors. Of course, in this context we cannot do the complexities of liberation theology full justice, but whilst critics clearly exaggerated the role of Marxism and the ambiguity about violence in order to undermine the wider critique, with hindsight it is clear that at least parts of the liberationist critique were inadequate. In particular it
they were joined by a handful of priests and lay activists, with some support from public intellectuals who dressed their support in terms of campaigns on behalf of national culture, but the institutional Church remained silent, especially when religious dissenters began to link up with other human rights activists during the 1970s. 24 Similar situations prevailed in Bulgaria and Romania, where if anything the Orthodox churches were even more quiescent. In both countries a few individual priests and laymen occasionally launched protests on behalf of the Church or