Is Ireland Setting the New Standard for Government Treatment of Religion?

For much of Ireland's history, the Roman Catholic Church was a de facto government with the Church's power and influence extending into every area of Irish everyday life - even when what is now the Republic of Ireland was under British rule. Now, belatedly, the Irish government seems poised to end the Church's co-rule of the country and do much to limit the Church's ability to be above the law. It's a phenomenon much needed in other countries, the United States in particular where for far too long religious institution have been treated with kid gloves and afforded undeserved deference. In Ireland, the never ending exposure of new details of the Church's horrific sex abuse scandal has been the catalyst for this change. A similar change in government mind set is needed in America, although with the Republican Party now a quasi-religious party the change will be difficult to achieve at the present time. Here are highlights from the New York Times that look at the Irish governments moves to put the Church in its rightful subordinate place:

Even as it remains preoccupied with its struggling economy, Ireland is in the midst of a profound transformation, as rapid as it is revolutionary: it is recalibrating its relationship to the Roman Catholic Church, an institution that has permeated almost every aspect of life here for generations.

This is still a country where abortion is against the law, where divorce became legal only in 1995, where the church runs more than 90 percent of the primary schools and where 87 percent of the population identifies itself as Catholic. But the awe, respect and fear the Vatican once commanded have given way to something new — rage, disgust and defiance — after a long series of horrific revelations about decades of abuse of children entrusted to the church’s care by a reverential populace.

[S]o when the normally mild-mannered prime minister, Enda Kenny, unexpectedly took the floor in Parliament this summer to criticize the church, he was giving voice not just to his own pent-up feelings, but to those of a nation.

His remarks were a ringing declaration of the supremacy of state over church, in words of outrage and indignation that had never before been used publicly by an Irish leader.

The effect of his speech was instant and electric. “It was a seminal moment,” said Patsy McGarry, the religious affairs correspondent for The Irish Times. “No Irish prime minister has ever talked to the Catholic Church before in this fashion. The obsequiousness of the Irish state toward the Vatican is gone. The deference is gone.”

[H]is government’s feisty new tone has been met with widespread approval in a place that feels doubly betrayed: first by the abuse itself, and second by what many see as a cover-up by the church, compounded by the often opaque, legalistic language with which it defends itself.

The government has announced that it will introduce a package of new legislation to protect children from abuse and neglect, including a law — considered but rejected as too contentious by previous governments — that would make it mandatory to report evidence of crimes to the authorities. It has also established a group to examine how to remove half of the country’s Catholic primary schools from church control.

In a recent interview, Eamon Gilmore, Ireland’s deputy prime minister, said that Ireland had asserted its role as a “modern democracy.” No longer would the church enjoy its previous privileges and powers as in times past, when it, with the government’s collusion, “effectively dictated the social policy of the state,” he said.

He added: “The Catholic Church is perfectly entitled to have its own view and its own rule and to view matters according to its own light. But this is a republic. And there is one law.”

Again, such a development is long overdue in America where for far, far too long conservative Christians have endeavored to dictate social policy and legislation.