Fall of the Catholic Church

The fall of the Catholic Church in Ireland as a social system with political power.

But Irish people were becoming atheists in the 1960s and it was ultimately that, and not this or that scandal, that did it for Christianity in Ireland imo.

Otherwise people could have joined other Christian churches, set up a new Christian church from scratch or demanded a cleansing/reformation of the CC from the clergy.

While most of southern Europe had overtly political conservative regimes, such as Franco is Spain, we just had a conservative regime that was veiled behind pious alter rail licking.

Sure. But my point is that robotic social conformity is not a good reason to be a Christian. Nor is it a good reason to be an atheist and political liberal.

People should read the Gospel of John and decide for themselves what to believe rather than claiming that their thoughts and actions are a second-hand reaction to corrupt institutions and leaders that they have no control over.

Religion and land, the two main causes of war and all things evil.

The sooner it's gone the better. It is nothing other than a way used to control people.

Don't forget he thinks not treating homosexuals as evil and women as 2nd class property are "ideological fads"

You can control people's actions but not their thoughts. I don't know what coercing people to simulate openness to things that are against their deepest beliefs is meant to achieve.

I think in some ways we had a continuation of Late Victorian and Edwardian British social conservatism that added a layer of an extremely conservative interpretation of Catholicism that wrapped itself around nationalism in a totally inappropriate way.

Many of the institutions that grew up around education and health are basically just a failure to reform 19th century concepts of Poor Law systems - we effectively were running privately operated Workhouses just rebadged as Magdalene Laundries and industrial schools well into the 20th century.

The state seemed to have largely turned a blind eye and stepped aside, almost voluntarily confining itself to areas that the church didn’t dominate. It didn’t touch primary and secondary education and health etc other than to expand its funding of it essentially through 19th century structures that remained unreformed.

It was a mess and I think in many ways we are only seeing Ireland begin to move through the kinds of reforms that were seen elsewhere in Northern Europe, in Britain and in the more developed of the former British colonies like Canada and Australia decades sooner than they happened here.

It often feels a bit like Ireland froze in the 1920s and didn’t have any of the post war reforms that were seen in Britain and elsewhere really until the 1970s and beyond.

The boat just wasn’t rocked and the church held and was allowed to grow and concentrate a totally inappropriate amount of power, in a political climate that was extremely weak and usually focused on other issues and an economy that didn’t really have much resources to take projects on.

I also think the church very much exploited a class divide that’s essentially Victorian too. The establishment experience of church institutions was very much through fee paying schools and private hospitals. They never had to depend on the church operated services in the same way. There was a huge swathe of suburbia that only ever saw lovely nuns and priests. It was the working class people and anyone who fell outside the norms (notably women who got pregnant outside marriage) who experienced the brutality of those institutions directly.

The result of that I think was an establishment that didn’t see the problems or chose to look away. In a lot of cases as they just didn’t experience the then first hand or had ways to side step them, but or the extreme cases saw them as “good enough for them” and there was an obsession with respectability.

Effectively I think Ireland was lost in some kind of Catholic Dickensian weirdness for far too long and the factors behind that are numerous. They include the church’s ambitions to control, but they also include a weak political system that never took the bull by the horns and was easily manipulated and kept in line.

We’re largely past it now but I think there’s a risk of a nostalgia being generated by some about bygone eras that were just awful in reality.

I fully believe they would do it all again in Ireland given the chance.

I don't trust the motives of any religious organizations

Anyone who supports an organisation whose members sexually abused children and put babies into a septic tank needs to have a good hard look at themselves.

This organisation is long past its sell by date in Ireland, and recent referendums on divorce, same sex marriage and abortion have proved that. As do the dwindling numbers attending their service.

Lots of organizations have members who abused children, and covered it up. Look at child abuse scandals in UK council childrens home, uk football coaches/scouts, irish swimming, Scouting everywhere, Danish government children homes (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-49320260).

• Should the same approach be taken to them? just shut them down?

I'm not religious, but I don't have many issues with the modern Catholic Church. I think there are unique aspects of Catholicism which need reform (celibacy, role of women, attitude to gays) but thats their business - the modern catholic church seems remarkably liberal compared with born-again Christianity or mainstream islam.