Sections of society indifferent to religion, says report

LARGE sections of Irish society are culturally Catholic but becoming religiously indifferent, concludes an international report to be published next week.

Freedom of Religion and Belief A World Report, is edited by Prof Kevin Boyle of Essex University and Ms Juliet Sheen, fellow of the human rights centre at the university.

The report, the first comparative study on the status of religious freedoms worldwide, gives a generally positive report of religious tolerance in the State, while expressing some concern over the rights of religious minorities in education and health matters.

It says that among the urban young and deprived working class communities, religious adherence has slumped, "with fewer than 10 per cent of people in more marginalised areas of Dublin and Cork now attending church on a weekly basis". This, it feels, is a challenge the Irish Catholic church "with a conservative hierarchy which has been accustomed for the past 150 years to being accepted as the unquestioned religious leaders of the broad mass of the people" is singularly ill equipped to confront.

The report attributes the Catholic Church's diminishing appeal and authority to a range of factors, including the opening up of the State to foreign investment in the 1960s, the arrival of television, the Second Vatican Council, and entry to the EU (EEC) in 1973.

More recent events which have contributed include "the sensational resignation" of Bishop Eamon Casey in 1992, but even more so "the extraordinary rash of clerical child sex abuse scandals which erupted from the middle of 1994 onwards," it concludes.

This and a perception that Church leaders had attempted to cover up the crimes of some priests, had a powerful impact. "For a people which had placed such a near absolute trust in its priests, this had a shattering effect on the Catholic Church's traditional moral authority," it says.

A significant factor in increasing tolerance it attributes to ecumenical contact between the churches at leadership level since the 1970s.

The report describes as "scrupulous" efforts by the State to uphold the right of the Protestant community to its own schools, similarly where the Jewish and Muslim communities are concerned, but expresses concern at the overwhelming dominance in primary and secondary education of the Catholic Church.

There have been allegations of discrimination "from a small but growing number of parents" who wish their children to have a more pluralist or secular form of religious and moral instruction, it says. There have also been complaints about the dominance of the Catholic Church in the management of hospitals, and the extensive nature of Catholic medical ethics in health matters, it says.