The Church in Ireland have a rightful moral claim to the properties they own due to the years of hard labour put into them by generations of priests and religious, says a UCD academic. Tony Fahey, Professor Emeritus at the School of Social Policy, Social Work and Social Justice at UCD, said that State-aid and public donations amounted to a kind of “earned income” for the services provided in health and education by droves of religious who worked for a pittance. Moreover, anything the religious congregations got from the State, he said, is dwarfed in comparison to the lavish grants and tax-breaks for multi-nationals today. Opposition to the congregations’ role in these services, he said, is often motivated “by hostility to their religious character”, adding, “[t]oday, a secular republic is likely to regard God as a foreign power and his agents as interlopers who are as unwelcome in the public sphere as Russian hackers in an American election.” He concluded by asking that the uncritical hagiographers of yesteryear not be replaced by equally imbalanced anti-religious commentaries: “we should avoid swinging to the opposite extreme and allowing the nuances of the historical truth to be buried in populist invective”.
The principal of a Catholic secondary school in south Dublin has called on the Department of Education to take it over and for its patron, the Edmund Rice Schools Trust (ERST), to step aside. The principal made the comments in response to a decision by the patrons of the school, the Christian Brothers, to sell some of its playing fields to a housing developer in order to raise monies for a government redress scheme. “This is a golden opportunity for the State to take ownership of these schools. They say school lands are being transferred to the State. Why not take the buildings too?”, said Edward Melley, principal of Clonkeen College in Deansgrange. Local TD, Richard Boyd Barrett, echoed the call and said it is “outrageous that this and future generations of students could be punished and pay for the Christian Brothers’ crimes against past generations. The Minister needs now to intervene and take the school from the trust to secure it and its facilities for the future.”
Emergency motions designed to prevent schools from selling off lands will come before Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown councillors on Monday night. The move comes after two Catholic schools had announced they were selling playing fields to housing developers. The land is currently zoned for residential use and the motion would change it to non-residential use so as to make it worthless to developers. The move has cross-party support with councillors from Fine Gael, Fianna Fail, Sinn Fein and the Green party coalescing around similar motions to give effect to the policy.
Hostility to the Catholic Church in Irish society has risen to the level of persecution says Bishop of Kilmore, Leo O’Reilly. Speaking at the welcome Mass for the relics of Saint Oliver Plunkett, Bishop O’Reilly said people from abroad are often astonished at the antipathy to the Church here in Ireland and, while it is unlike the violence of penal times, it is nonetheless a real, if subtle, kind of persecution. “It takes the form of gradual exclusion of Church people or activities from the public space. There is denigration of religious beliefs, practices and institutions on radio, television and on social and other media. There is often a focus on bad news about the Church to the almost total exclusion of any good news”, he said. It even acts as a deterrent to vocations such that anyone would need “real courage, deep faith and strong conviction to offer oneself as a candidate for the priesthood or religious life in a culture as hostile to faith as ours”.
Children whose parents have a bad divorce are more likely to have a weakened immune system, a scientific study suggests. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University exposed 201 healthy adults to a cold virus and found that those whose parents separated and were not on speaking terms were more than three times as likely to develop a cold compared to those whose parents stayed together or split up amicably. “Our results target the immune system as an important carrier of the long-term negative impact of early family conflict,” said Professor of Psychology, Sheldon Cohen. “They also suggest that all divorces are not equal” he said, implying that parents who kept in touch after splitting up could protect their children’s health.
Stones were thrown through the window of a mosque in Galway while people were at prayer, and in Kerry the wall of an ancient Cathedral was defaced with lewd graffiti in the latest incidents of anti-religious bigotry. Over 100 people were in the Mosque on Monday night when rocks smashed windows, leaving the people inside “terrified”. The Imam of the Mosque said he thought the attack was a reaction to the terrorism in London over the weekend. Meanwhile, in Kerry, ancient Ardfert Cathedral was daubed with obscene graffiti. The historic site had been the seat of the Diocese of Ardfert from 1117 and is dedicated to Saint Brendan. Locals are said to be “outraged” by the vandalism.
Two years after Ireland redefined marriage to make the requirement for sexual complementarity obsolete, the Irish Times is reporting the rise of a new kind of ‘marriage’ in the US that makes the requirement of a second person obsolete: solo-marriage or marrying one’s own self. There may be a ceremony where a person walks up the aisle, in the company of friends and family, makes vows to himself and then throws a party, but it is not yet recognised as marriage in civil law, so it confers no rights or responsibilities. Irish Times columnist, Padraig O’Morain, comments that he “cannot help seeing self-marriage as, on some level, a form of weirdness”, adding somewhat ruefully, “Perhaps I’m just old-fashioned and out of touch with the times”.
Sister Stanislaus Kennedy has spoken of her shock at the portrayal of the Sisters of Charity during the recent controversy surrounding the National Maternity Hospital and likened their depiction in the media to ‘elder abuse’. “A lot of the stuff that came out in the media about us was very hurtful. There was a lot of misunderstanding and misrepresentation. It was very distasteful.” Sr Stanislaus, the founder of Focus Ireland and the Immigrant Council of Ireland, is herself a Sister of Charity. She said her order had been unfairly portrayed as “a power-grabbing congregation” and “a group of old ladies who didn’t know what they were doing”, adding, “In another context, this would come under elder abuse”.
