The crisis over celibacy in the Church of Rome is now become acute world-wide but nowhere more so than in the Republic of Ireland, one of the most Popish nations under heaven. Its very constitution bears testimony to that. Now, we are told in a most revealing and damaging article in The Herald, the Pope is “deeply worried about morale in the Barque of St Patrick”. The lid is being slowly lifted off a can of worms and what is ugly, immoral and unacceptable is being exposed to the light. So serious has the situation become that the Pope felt it necessary to send Archbishop Jorge Mejia, secretary of Rome’s powerful Congregation of Bishops to investigate and report. He has now returned “with a voluminous report on child sex abuses involving priests that will make grim reading for the Pontiff.” Cases of deviant sexual behaviour are numerous. The Daily Telegraph recently reported (05/10/95) that a priest had paid £50,000 to a former altar boy in settlement of a civil claim for damages for alleged sexual abuse and that less than a week before that the bishop of Dublin, Dr Desmond Connell, had acknowledged that he had approved a £27,500 to a priest in 1993 to pay damages in settlement of a civil claim. At the same time the diocese of Dublin revealed that in the same year a priest in a separate case had settled a civil claim for £50,000, plus £6,000 costs. We are told that in the past three years there have been embarrassing court cases involving priests or religious brothers charged with child sex abuse or related offences in at least 12 of Ireland’s 26 Roman Catholic dioceses and that “an authoritarian church system with an addiction to secrecy has not been honest and forthcoming”. Dr Brendan Comiskey, the bishop of Ferns, brought matters to a head when he called for “a full debate
on celibacy in the context of the decline in priestly vocations in Ireland”. He earned for himself a public rebuke from Cardinal Daly and was summoned to Rome to give an explanation of his stance. This was, however, cancelled and the emissary from Rome was instead despatched. Meanwhile Bishop Comiskey has been packed off to the United States on what is described by the church as a “three-month sabbatical” but others, including the Herald journalist, say that he is there to be treated for alcoholism. As a damage limitation exercise, Cardinal Daly has publicly offered “the most abject and most humble apology to the victims of sex abuse and their families”. The mass media are being blamed and declared to be “obsessed with promoting a permissive agenda to undermine traditional Catholic values on marriage.” Marriage? Phyllis Hamilton, a priest’s housekeeper, has just revealed that she was married for years to “Father” Michael Cleary — “a popular radio padre who took a hard line against contraception and divorce”! John Cooney concludes his Herald article with these words: “However, if Archbishop Mejia is an accurate reporter of the Irish Church scene, he will inform Pope John Paul that most of the tabloid ooze in Ireland is church-sourced. It is the Catholic (sic) Church, not the media, that needs to clean up its act”. If space permitted, we would add as a postscript the opening verses of the eighteenth chapter of the book of Revelation.