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Pastimes : Ask God -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: mark silvers who wrote (13353)	4/5/1998 7:07:00 PM
From: Grainne	Respond to of 39621

Mark, actually today in Ireland there is a movement to separate church and state. It is long overdue!!! Although there are vestiges of Catholic domination of the schools and government policy, in the last ten years or so there have been so many instances of Catholic priests being convicted on multiple charges of child sexual abuse, and jailed, that there is growing mistrust and disgust among the populace. When the Bishop of Galway admitted finally that he had sired an illegitimate child, a boy who is now grown, and that he used several hundred thousand dollars in Church funds to pay off the child's mother, an American woman who wrote a book, that did not go over very well, either, as you could well imagine. They are finding it increasingly difficult to recruit young priests and nuns, and many Catholic schools are closing now for want of teachers. And there are new laws in the last few years restricting them from hitting the children with rulers, or beating them with paddles, at school. Of course, as more Irish children get college educations, they are exposed to different opinions and belief systems, and so they cannot be dominated in the same way as poor, uneducated, and fearful parishioners were when the local priest instructed everyone in church exactly how to vote in the general elections. There is also quite a movement towards knowing and understanding the old Celtic pagan ways of life. There are covens of white witches all over Ireland now, some of whom are brave and open enough to have web pages on the internet, and there is much more acceptance of folk medicine and general reverence for nature as they were practiced under the pagans. In fact, if you study Irish history, go into the homes of the Irish and look at items like St. Brigid's crosses, which are actually pagan, or go to any festivals, like the annual Puck Fair, at which a goat is crowned and led in a parade through the streets, or celebrate Halloween, which started in Ireland, it is obvious that Catholicism is a very thin veneer over the more robust pagan Ireland, and that many people are returning to the Old Religion that was practiced there for thousands of year.