New Humanist 🔖 Book review ✑ The Best Catholics In The World


Richard Scorer

A new book traces the collapse of the moral and political authority of the Catholic Church in Ireland.

When Pope John Paul II visited Ireland in 1979, he drew an audience of over a million – around a third of the country’s population – to mass in Dublin. 

Barely three decades later, the moral and political authority of the Catholic Church in Ireland had collapsed, destroyed most of all by devastating revelations of clerical sex abuse and cover-up. 

How and why Ireland lost faith in the Catholic Church, and how it feels about Catholicism now, is the subject of this book. 

Derek Scally is a Berlin-based Irish journalist who returned to his homeland to explore how his and his country’s Catholic past “went from rigid reality to vanishing act” and to “reflect on the trauma that remains”.

Post-independence Ireland was not quite a de jure theocracy, but for many decades it was certainly a de facto one. 

The Best Catholics in the World: The Irish, The Church and the End of a Special Relationship (Penguin) by Derek Scally.

Continue reading @ New Humanist.

Best Catholics In The World

New Humanist 🔖 Book review ✑ The Best Catholics In The World


Richard Scorer

A new book traces the collapse of the moral and political authority of the Catholic Church in Ireland.

When Pope John Paul II visited Ireland in 1979, he drew an audience of over a million – around a third of the country’s population – to mass in Dublin. 

Barely three decades later, the moral and political authority of the Catholic Church in Ireland had collapsed, destroyed most of all by devastating revelations of clerical sex abuse and cover-up. 

How and why Ireland lost faith in the Catholic Church, and how it feels about Catholicism now, is the subject of this book. 

Derek Scally is a Berlin-based Irish journalist who returned to his homeland to explore how his and his country’s Catholic past “went from rigid reality to vanishing act” and to “reflect on the trauma that remains”.

Post-independence Ireland was not quite a de jure theocracy, but for many decades it was certainly a de facto one. 

The Best Catholics in the World: The Irish, The Church and the End of a Special Relationship (Penguin) by Derek Scally.

Continue reading @ New Humanist.

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