Nature's cruelty and sex pose some tough questions

RELIGION: The world of religious affairs was dominated by the themes of death and sex, writes Patsy McGarry , Religious Affairs…

RELIGION: The world of religious affairs was dominated by the themes of death and sex, writes Patsy McGarry, Religious Affairs Correspondent.

By any measure it was an extraordinary year in the world of religious affairs. Dominated by the great themes of death and sex it could be said to have begun somewhat earlier than usual – on St Stephen’s Day, December 26th, 2004.

On that day the tsunami hit southeast Asia, setting off one of the worst natural disasters in history, leaving more than 227,000 dead and a further 50,000 still missing. In the letters pages it led to profound debate on the existence of God and the possible nature of a divinity which could allow such suffering.

An Irish Times/TNS poll on January 24th found that 19 per cent of those who believed in God (87 per cent of those polled) had their belief strengthened by the tsunami. Two thirds of believers said such disasters made no difference to the strength of their belief.

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In February, sex emerged from the shadow of death to dominate debate in world religion with the meeting of the world’s Anglican primates at the Dromantine centre near Newry Co Down, to consider the Windsor Report, prepared by a commission set up by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, to consider how the worldwide Anglican Communion should cope with diversity.

The commission, chaired by the Church of Ireland primate Archbishop Robin Eames, was a response to the ordination of actively gay Canon Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire by the Episcopal Church of the

USA in November 2003 and the sanctioning of same-sex blessings by a Canadian diocese earlier that year.

The commission’s brief was the seeming impossible – to avoid schism within the Communion. Some Anglican churches, notably in Africa, Australasia, and the southern US, were fiercely opposed to tolerance of same-sex unions particularly and homosexuality in general.

Only a man from Northern Ireland could have overseen production of the Windsor Report which, through creative ambiguity and proposed delay, avoided the widely predicted split. But later in the year the Nigerian primate Archbishop Peter Akinola’s church deleted all references to the Church of England in Canterbury, historic home of the Anglican faith, from its constitution.

The Church of Nigeria had already broken off links with the US and Canadian Anglican churches.

March 2005 was dominated by the long, slow death of Pope John Paul on Saturday April 2nd. It was clear afterwards that for Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, this death did not simply mark the end of a momentous era in the Catholic Church, but that it was a deeply personal experience for him.

He had known the pope so well in his 30 years at the Vatican before being appointed Archbishop of Dublin. The world has rarely seen anything like the funeral or the extraordinary days preceding it when more than three

million crowded into Rome to see his remains lying in state at St Peter’s basilica. Two hundred heads of state and prime ministers attended the funeral Mass.

The death and funeral, followed by the election of Pope Benedict XVI on April 19th and his installation the following Sunday, dominated the world’s media for April. No group was more taken by surprise at the positive nature of all this coverage than the Catholic Church authorities whose attitude to media is at best suspicious, generally hostile.

That latter view was not helped by the distinctly mixed response to the election of Cardinal Ratzinger as Pope. But there was general agreement that the man should be allowed a decent honeymoon period to see whether "God’s Rottweiler" could become "God’s Labrador" as he was presented by his cardinal-electors in hastily arranged press conferences throughout Rome.

Summer supplied a welcome hiatus, interrupted only by the new pope’s visit to his homeland in August when he took part in World Youth Day events in Cologne.

There was also one worrying straw in the wind suggesting this leopard hadn’t changed his spots. At an ecumenical meeting in Cologne on August 19th, Benedict began with a greeting to "the representatives of the other churches and ecclesial communities".

The "churches" to which he referred were the Orthodox, while "the ecclesial communities" were the Protestants. It was in his infamous Dominus Iesus document, published in 2000 by him as prefect of the Congregation of

the Doctrine of the Faith, that he first used that phrase to describe Protestants and it caused deep offence to members of the Reformed denominations then. Here he was at it again.

On August 31st, he approved an instruction from the Congregation for Catholic Education, not published for a further three months, which banned from priesthood all men with "deep-seated homosexual tendencies". It said

men who experienced such tendencies as "a transitory problem" should be allowed to become deacons only after they had overcome such tendencies for three years.

It repeated his assertions of 1986, as prefect at the congregation, that homosexual tendencies were "objectively disordered", while such acts were "intrinsically immoral and contrary to natural law".

Leaks from the document emerged in September, before the three-week Synod of Bishops in Rome began. En route there Dr Martin said that as far as he was concerned, as long as a priest was celibate it didn’t matter whether he was homosexual or heterosexual.

On October 23rd, the Pope reaffirmed the rule of celibacy for Catholic priests two days before publication of the Ferns Report, one of the most significant events in the history of the Irish Catholic Church.

This State inquiry into how allegations of clerical child sex abuse allegations had been handled in the predominantly Co Wexford diocese, established there had been such allegations against 26 priests of that diocese, one of the highest recorded anywhere in the Catholic world to date.

It found two bishops, the late Bishop Donal Herlihy and Bishop Brendan Comiskey, were negligent in handling the issue and recommended that a new crime of reckless endangerment be introduced to deal with people in authority who were found to be so negligent.

It heard evidence from more than 100 complainants whose stories retold in the report had a deeply shocking effect on a wider public. The publication was followed by media investigations of similar allegations in the 25 remaining Catholic dioceses on the island.

The Irish Times reported that more than 250 priests in those dioceses already faced child sex abuse allegations.

In the new year a State inquiry into the handling of clerical child sex abuse allegations in the Dublin archdiocese begins.