ABUSE SCANDLES USED AS EXCUSE TO LEAVE CHURCH

Clerical sex abuse scandals have sometimes been used by Catholics as an excuse to abandon the Church when the real reason is that their lifestyles have become incompatible with their faith, Cardinal Cahal Daly has said. Referring to the decline in religious practice, Cardinal Daly said: "The appeal to justifying causes, such as clerical abuses or institutional failures, is often used when people who have ceased to practice wish to justify their behaviour to themselves or to others.".............. Cardinal Daly was speaking at the launch last night of a new book on the French theologian, Yves Congar. He was challenging the idea that the decline of Catholicism is due mainly to the "reflective decisions" people make, or because of the scandals and "faults in the hierarchical/clerical Church"............. Cardinal Daly remarked that while the scandals have contributed to the decline of the Church, they have been secondary in the main. He suggested, however, that because they have often been presented as the most important factor, the hierarchy and the clergy have been unfairly blamed for a decline "which is due in significant measure also to sociological factors".............. Among these factors, the Cardinal said, are "the decline in rural living, urbanisation, geographical mobility, breakdown in community and in sense of parish, change of work patterns and of travel-to-work patterns, and the replacement of the traditional Sunday by what the French call 'Le weekend', with its altered pattern of daytime and nightlife". Cardinal Daly continued that because of these lifestyle changes "religious practice can gradually become intermittent rather than regular, until gradually other habits are formed which do not include Sunday Mass"................. He added: "The appeal to justifying causes, such as clerical abuses or institutional failures, it seems to me, becomes operative mainly at a second level, when people who have ceased to practice wish to justify their behaviour to themselves or others." Cardinal Daly was speaking at the launch of the book 'Yves Congar's vision of the Church in a world of unbelief' by Dr Gabriel Flynn at the Milltown Institute of Theology and Philosophy, Ranelagh, Dublin. Irish Independent 19Oct 2004