I’m an American Catholic, and I’ve always been under the impression that Irish were particularly pious people. But after looking into it a bit, it looks like religion is dying in Ireland just as fast as in America.
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/religion-and-beliefs/young-irish-people-among-the-most-religious-in-europe-1.3441046
“Just 15 per cent attend weekly religious services outside of special occasions such as weddings and funerals, while 26 per cent never take part in any religious services.”
I took a look at some Mass live streams from Ireland, and the attendance looks basically the same: the pews are about half full and almost everyone is over 70 years old.
So what is your religious experience? Did you attend Mass as a kid? Now? Do you have any grievances with the church? Any warm fuzzy feelings for the church?
22 comments
a great deal young people whos parents are catholic are now atheist.
>Do you have any grievances with the church?
You missed that global scandal eh?
Any grievances? Are you taking the piss? The Catholic church is pretty much the greatest evil inflicted on this country. And considering our history, that’s saying a lot . ..
Used to attend church with my parents as a kid. I don’t anymore. They don’t anymore. I don’t know anyone who attends church.
Yes, the majority of people I know would have huge grievances with the church.
I would like to see most places of worship put to other use. Some churches in this country have been converted to music venues, for example.
95% of young Irish Catholics today are either what I call “culturally Catholic” or do not have any link to the church anymore whatsoever. Because under British rule Catholicism was synonymous with the Native Irish and the troubles up in Northern Ireland most people will say they are an Irish Catholic, but they don’t believe in any of it.
By “culturally Catholic” I mean people like myself who don’t believe that Jesus was any sort of divine being or basically anything the church teaches but still go to mass a few times a year, Christmas, Easter, Grandparents Anniversary, the Pattern. It’s more of a family/community thing than a religious thing, plus Granny would be upset if I didn’t.
The churches relationship with “young people” hasn’t been great in fairness.
My mother always described herself as a lapsed Catholic and my dad identified as an atheist although from a Catholic background. I was baptised and made my Communion and Confirmation but I was never brought to mass when it wasn’t a special occasion. I used to go to mass with my friends families if I went to a sleepover on a Saturday night, it was just expected that everyone would go. That would have been in the 90s.
Now I would go to funerals, weddings and christenings but I’ve stopped taking communion on those occasions because I thought it was hypocritical to go through the motions as a non believer so I just stay in the pew while the others go up.
I’m going to say that there will be little to no churches here in another 30/40 years. Ireland is very rapidly becoming a secular country and for the better.
>Do you have any grievances with the church?
Mother and baby homes
Industrial schools
Magdalen laundries
Child abuse
Selling babies
Illegal adoption
Control of the state
Just a few….
>Do you have any grievances with the church?
Lol, apart from the stranglehold the Catholic Church had on this country for decades while facilitating mass rape of children, imprisoning of “immoral women”, fighting against contraception/divorce/etc etc and condeming gay people, etc etc etc, nah no grievances at all. The sooner the church dies in this country the better.
I attended mass as a kid as I was forced, by about 10 I simply refused to go. No young person in Ireland gives a flying fuck about the church. It will be completely gone in a few years. I have massive grievances with the church due to the abuse my family suffered because of the cunts.
Good fucking riddance to them.
Not very. More like traumatized and convinced the older generations all 100% have lead poisoning.
Not very. Even the ones who still have church weddings, etc. tend to do it out of tradition/habit rather than faith.
When the evils done by the church came out in a big way in the 90s, a lot of people (me included) turned away. Combine that with a huge increase in the amount of Irish people with a good education, economic prosperity, etc., and the things that religion had to say were just not as important any more.
I’m a teacher in a Catholic school. We have to give Religious instruction to our pupils, prepare the for communion etc. It’s unusual for a child from a Catholic background to opt out of these lessons but most of their parents have no faith and very few of them ever go to mass. Their only source of anything about Catechism is school and the chances are they’re being taught by agnostic teachers like me. I try my best but it all feels quite pointless.
“The pews are about half full and almost everyone is over 70 years old”… they’re cramming for the finals.
Not very, a lot of people do the sacraments out of tradition, but the church has lost so much face in their corruption, that people rightly treat them like any other service to avail of.
Growing up, the parish priest would have been revered, feared even. Now they’ve been reduced to the MC’s of life’s milestones. And they did it to themselves.
Most young Irish Catholics aren’t religious in any meaningful way. With older people it varies but even with those people it’s nowhere near the level of religiosity that would have been the norm a couple of decades ago.
My Mum would still describe herself as a Catholic, though I wouldn’t consider her a serious believer and it’s more of a sentimental/cultural practice for her than anything else. She rarely goes to Mass nowadays. Dad doesn’t seem to have any overt religious inclinations. We went to Mass as a family back in the 90s but stopped in 1999 and that was it for my brother and I, excepting Christmas and the odd funeral.
I’ve personally been an agnostic atheist since the late 90s. Nothing to do with resentment of the Church. I simply read up about evolution and the like and essentially outgrew magical/supernatural beliefs. As for my view of the church today – I admire the old church buildings and there can be a certain aesthetic beauty to the rituals. I’m also really interested in the history of Christianity in general, being a huge history buff. But I’m totally an advocate of secularism and resent the influence the church used to have on Irish society and the state years and years ago. A lot of very bad things happened under their watch and the rampant clericalism was not healthy for our society. Ireland back then was basically a democratic version of Francoist Spain. Poverty and lack of education obviously played a role in how things unfolded. I’m glad that’s no longer that case.
After reading dozens of books about the historical Jesus and how the New Testament came to be*: I can confidently say that I am as Catholic as Jesus was.
*mostly by Bart Ehrman
The Catholic church was a true evil masquerading as the foremost moral authority in this country.
Pious. That’s a new one.
No. We’re not pious. The older generation will attend mass come hell or high water, but these are of the same generation who would force their daughters into a mother and baby home or force them to give away their child if it was born out of wedlock. ‘Pious’ isn’t the word I’d use. Old fashioned, bigoted and hypocritical, maybe. Backward at times. Ignorant might be the best word for them.
With education came the death of the catholic church in Ireland. The younger generations aren’t a fraction as religious, by and large, because they *know* better.
I’m not going to air my grievances here. The church damaged my family. The sooner it dies out here, the better.
The church is the complete antithesis of what it claims to be.
They hijacked Christianity and most importantly, hacked peoples’ brains with their “shame” bs for centuries.
So many traits which are essentially a faculty of a normal functioning human was turned into a sin or something worthy of shame and punishment. Many people are still innately shameful about sex thanks to this ridiculous rubbish they’ve caused.
They shame normal adults having consensual sex while many of their own raped and mentally tortured children for decades. That’s before we even look at what they did to women in this country and their poor children.
They should count themselves lucky no such thing as the second coming will ever happen as they’d be first in the firing line for judgement.
People have seen through their abuse, depravity and hypocrisy now and are choosing to leave them where they belong, in the dark recesses of human history.
I will never understand how people who have the sense to condemn the monarch of a nation who invaded and tortured our country can justify worshiping blindly the head of another, religious empire who did the same but in a much more subtle and subliminal manner.
All in all, they get in the bin.
OP is a cumboi. Thought you would be Greek orthodox like our pig friend