Re: Re: reorganisation and destruction of irish catholic churches

Well, Bruges, “idolatry” is a value term indicating religious blame and hardly appropriate here.

1. The point at issue in Cobh was rather simple. The official requiremenets of the Catholic liturgy can be accomodated without wrecking the historical interior of the building.

2. What is oficially required for Catholic worship is stipulated in the Canon Law of the Catholic Church.

3. The Canonical discipline of the Catholic Church does not exclude State intervention in the regulation or preservation of historical churches. Indeed, it stipulates that ecclesiastical authorities are bound to adhere to the civil law (conservation law) . No where does it suggest that such civil provisions are an enchoachment on freedom of worship.

There has been a bit of shrill on the subject of freedom of worship in the aftermath of the Cobh decision. This is eye-wash. Read your Constitution and you will see that the right to freedom of worship in Ireland is not an absolute right. It is conditional on “public order”. [On this subject, the guardians of the faith would want to be concerning themselves with an award for discrimination made to a person on the basis that his name was not included on a confirmation list. It was reported in yesterday’s newspapers. The implications of this for freedom of worship are much more grave and begin to sound like the communist set-up in Czecoslovakia. Admission of candidates to the sacraments is no one’s business but the Church’s.]

4. The Rabbit report did not go into the liturgical question. Indeed, its treatment of the liturgical question was fairly basic if not inadequate. Little or no attempt was made to ascertain what the official liturgical requirements of the Catholic Church are. [And by this I do not mean recourse to the over educated semi-zwinglian Historical Churches Commission]. In so far as those requirements were made available to Mr. Rabbit, he made no attempt to distinguish them from the personal liturgical assertions of various persons present at the oral hearing, nor even to distinguish between the serious and the dafter personal liturgical asertions that were made (though, I would have to concede that his task in this matter was at times rather difficult). Had Mr. Rabbit made the fundamental distinction bewteen the public objective liturgical norms of the Catholic Church and the private subjective opinions also advanced, he would have cleared a good deal of fog.

5. The liturgical problem with the trustees’ application in the Cobh case was that they had bought into a certain liturgical theory which is not an official position of the Catholic Church. To portray it as such is mendacious.

6. In so far as political considerations are concerned, I think that it should be noted that the Irish Bishops were consulted as an interested party on the present Act before its enactment. They appeared not to have had any problems with the provisions of the act.

The guidelines on which so much ink has been spilled is another example of a Martin Cullen gubu. Curiously enough, the famous guidelines were worked out by the minister and the Bishop of Cloyne – who may have thought that he was a getting a package tailor made for the Cobh scenario. Gubu prone as Cullen is, he did manage not to mention to the good bishop that although he might have been a legislator, his was not the interpretation of the law.