The lasting legacy of Bishop Josephy Duffy

I've just been upstairs cleaning up my four year old's vomit - I wonder was she reading the Irish Catholic.

Sometimes you think you can't be any more shocked by the scandals and then you get a little more.

Front page of tomorrow's Irish Catholic has headline "Irish Church is crying out for reform - Bishop".

Oh, says I to myself, I wonder who this can be.  Well, well. Joe Duffy of Clogher, apparently has discovered a conscience and some insight half a minute before he retires.  This is the man who famously said about twenty years ago "The Church will do us for our day" and now he's discovered the need for change.

And what is his big regret?  "That Church leaders have not fully embraced the Second Vatican Council".  Yes, that was the problem.  Well, he's right of course, only not the way he thinks he is.  In Ireland embracing Vatican II meant destroying as many churches as possible, including in his case the Mc Carthy gem that was Monaghan Cathedral.  It meant refusing to maintain Latin in the liturgy.  It meant embracing the modern world - including the psychiatric advice that bishops seemed to follow when deciding on the allocation of abusing priests.  It meant destroying religious education so that no one in Ireland has received adequate religious formation for forty years.  It meant embracing moral relativism so that legislators could pretend to themselves and the electorate they were Catholic while voting for divorce, abortion, same sex marriage and contraception.  It meant bishops being afraid to dress as bishops when meeting in Maynooth.  It meant bishops being embarrassed by meeting the Pope.  By God we've had a fill of their interpretation of Vatican II and now we have to listen to the likes of the him telling us what we need. 

Bishop Duffy had discovered what way the wind is blowing and he is pretending he's doing the blowing.  It is cynical without compare.  I'm struggling to find an analogy for this.  I'm seeing Joe Stalin for some reason.

Here's what he said:  "We've got far too many dioceses, far too many parishes, far too many Masses...our structures need reform, we're crying out for it".

And the Pope's letter, the one in which he admonishes the bishops for doing what centuries of persecution couldn't do?  Well, what do you know?  It was Joe Duffy's idea:

"A lot of people are surprised that the letter is so strong, what many people don't appreciate is the fact that the letter is so strong because the Pope was listening to the bishops when we were in Rome.  The Pope knew what needed to be said in a frank fashion because the bishops with him".

Beyond cynical.

Meanwhile inside the Irish Catholic Managing Editor O'Sullivan is telling us we don't need an Apostolic Visitation.  He writes "surely we could organise a Church group made up of representatives of bishops, priests and religious as well as a good helping of distinguished professional lay people".

And that's the thing.  Every time you hear some lay person talking about a National Synod, you know they expect that they will be taking part.  You can imagine who'd be on it in Ireland, Gary and his mates, Maura Hyland, every lay person already working in every episcopal commission, all gathering to tell us more of the some things they've been telling us for forty years.

The Irish Catholic does have one good writer, John Watters, who so often hits the nail on the head:  "This is not merely, or even primarily, an internal crisis.  This is a crisis besetting all of Irish society.  It is a crisis with roots going back perhaps 160 years.  It is a crisis that screams out about the absence of Jesus Christ from the Church he founded".