Madam, We now have a Pope in Rome who implicitly says that gay people represent a greater threat to the world than climate control; who has reconciled a Society of Saint Pius X bishop who is a holocaust denier; and who has appointed an Austrian bishop who believes that God flooded New Orleans because of the city’s tolerance of homosexuality and liberal sexual mores.
In his short time as Pope, Benedict has managed to offend and alienate the world’s Islamic, Jewish, liberal Catholic and LGBT communities – and God knows how many others.
Here in Ireland we have a Roman Catholic Church with a dark legacy of clerical and religious sexual abuse and Magdalen Laundry activity and the covering up of that abuse and activity by hierarchy and religious superiors.
To this day we have at least one bishop who has blatantly failed to observe both the civil and ecclesiastical rules for reporting and managing clerical sexual abuse and insists on staying in his post with the support of some of his colleagues.
In spite of all of this, the Roman Catholic Church, in Ireland and internationally, insists on regulating every detail of bedroom, reproductive and sexual life; tells married people and women that God could not possibly be calling them to priesthood; refuses to allow married priests to return to ministry, preferring instead to close down parishes; refuses a second chance to people whose marriages have broken down; tells gay, lesbian. bisexual and transgendered people that they are “disordered”; and informs Anglicans, Presbyterians, Methodists and all other Protestants and believers that their churches and faiths are not real churches or faith communities at all.
Am I the only Catholic in Ireland who believes it is way past time that we told our Roman colonialists and their Irish branch managers where to go and reconvened an Irish Catholic Church, independent of Rome, while preserving all the essentials – the Bible, the sacraments, the priesthood, and our rich heritage of Irish spirituality and mysticism, while at the same time being open to the new? “Is not the Kingdom of Heaven like a householder which bringeth forth out of his treasure things new and old?” (Matthew 13:52.) – Yours, etc,