THE DEMORALISED state of the Catholic Church in Ireland “may have something to do with its lack of ecumenism”, the Very Rev Robert MacCarthy (71), Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, has said.
“While I have been happy to welcome the present Roman Catholic Archbishop of Dublin as a preacher here, I have to say that there has been no reciprocal invitation to the Pro-Cathedral,” he said.
Ecumenism in Dublin seemed “to be equated to fellowship between the two archbishops; that should merely be the first step”, he said in his final sermon as dean at evensong in St Patrick’s yesterday. He steps down from the position on Wednesday.
Last month he announced his retirement as life had been “made more difficult” for him by the attitude of some members of the cathedral chapter and board.
“They have not supported me all along and they can find someone else to carry on,” he said.
Yesterday, he recalled that when he was elected dean in 1999, “a bishop remarked that it would be interesting to see how an iconoclast did as an icon”. The “special position” of a dean of St Patrick’s in the Church of Ireland “was resented by the previous Archbishop of Dublin [John Neill], who challenged my position as ordinary, declined to preach in the cathedral and abolished the cathedral parish”, he said.
The Church of Ireland itself showed every sign of splitting into “a sort of Catholic sect in the South with married clergy and a body indistinguishable from other Protestant sects in the North”.
The former and current Catholic archbishops of Dublin, Cardinal Desmond Connell and Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, had “both refused to appoint a Roman Catholic chaplain to St Patrick’s, and in this they were supported by their Anglican colleague”, even while such chaplaincies were “commonplace” in England. He disagreed with those members of his church who felt it could benefit from the abuse crisis in the Catholic Church in Ireland. They had been “lucky that there was no inquiry into sexual abuse within the Church of Ireland – if there had been, I doubt if we would have been found to be blameless”. Clericalism “was at the root of the church’s ills” and was “alive and well in the Church of Ireland.” He did not attend a reception at Dublin Castle in 2001 to mark Cardinal Connell getting the red hat, “since the invitation was in the names of the then Taoiseach and his then mistress”.
He said “the affair was well summed up by a priest friend of mine at Maynooth who said: ‘Isn’t it great to see the Protestants standing up for what we once believed in’.” As a member of the board of the Rotunda Hospital, he “was in a minority of one in opposing the move of the hospital to the Mater site”. He introduced elections to the board and in return it passed a vote of no confidence in me and “attempted to muzzle my public utterances”. Dealing with the board and chapter at St Patrick’s “has shown me how unchristian the institutional church can be”, he said.
