Pay attention to the Church? Count me out
Wed 03 Feb, 2010
The anti-clerical ‘Count Me Out’ inflates the importance of Ireland’s rotting Catholic Church, says JASON WALSH
BY NOW even Osama Bin Laden in his cave in Afghanistan must know the story of Irish Catholicism’s collapse: it seems that a few too many priests were disrobed and not nearly enough were defrocked.
Although Church attendance hasn’t flatlined there is a growing movement of people, called ‘Count Me Out’, who want their lapsed Catholicism to be noted by the Church hierarchy. Count Me Out provides people with a simple way to demand the Church accepts that someone is no longer a member of the religion.
Challenging the Catholic Church’s stranglehold on Irish social life was a vital task for secularists – but why now?
The Catholic Church is in a pathetic, sorry state – but, sadly, not because secularists and humanists wrought it low in a forthright battle of ideas. Instead the Church simply rotted from the top down, like so many other institutions in Ireland.
Today the intellectual climate is significantly less hostile to secularists than it has ever been. In times gone by attacking the Church meant putting yourself at the risk of significant physical injury. During the 1960s, for example, New Books, the bookshop of the Communist Party of Ireland (now Connolly Books) was burnt-out by militant Catholic activists. Today you could take a hammer and sickle to a Marian shrine and a good half of the population would be pleased.
Demanding the Church hierarchy removes people from its registers is meaningless. The state bases its religious affiliation statistics on the census, not the dodgy claims of churches. After all, for all you know you’re actually going to be a Mormon in the afterlife: the Church of Jesus Christ and the Latter Day Saints performs unauthorised baptisms on everyone it can get biographical details for – once they’re the dead. ()
Worse still, it doesn’t address the very contemporary problem of widespread disgust at the Church’s cover-ups of sexual abuse being generalised into a wider distrust of the public.
It may be a satisfying feeling to know some sacredotal functionary has had to note that you don’t care for the Vatican but it makes no actual difference. However strong people’s convictions are, it is futile gesture politics. If we want a secular polity we have to argue for it, not just against the Church.
Moreover, telling the Church to remove you from its registers is to imbue it with a significance it simply does not have. The Church can parade out all of the baptism certificates it wants but if you don’t actually attend Mass, make donations or even believe in God, it will do them no good. Why bother arguing this with some creepy cleric?
By all means challenge Church doctrine and lingering control of institutions such as education but do yourself a favour: ignore any claims is makes on your behalf. It has no authority to do so.
COMMENTS
Your comment about Mormons performing “unauthorized baptisms on everyone it can get biographical details for” is false and you cannot provide one shred of evidence to substantiate such a claim. The church does believe that as part of its mission as the only true church on the earth, it is responsible to make sure that all of god’s children have the opportunity to accept the gospel of Jesus Christ and so does perform baptisms for those who are dead but we believe that as in all of God’s commands, we are free to accept his will or not-and that freedom is also extended to those who have died. They still can decided not to accept the baptism performed on their behalf here on earth. As far as baptizing the living without their permission-that’s just factually incorrect.
By lfsalt on 2010 02 03
“After all, for all you know you’re actually a Mormon: the Church of Jesus Christ and the Latter Day Saints performs unauthorised baptisms on everyone it can get biographical details for – including the dead.”
Comments like this make it very difficult to take the author seriously. A simple google search will reveal that Mormons do not perform “unauthorized” baptisms of living individuals. Ah, the long lost days of journalistic integrity…
By JDD on 2010 02 03
Thank you. We’ve counted six thousand pedophile priests in US Catholic churches so far. Ireland, Australia, Germany, Haiti, Mexico, these stories are breaking all over the world, and the bishops’ behavior and response was the same in every city. Doesn’t that sound like organized crime to you? Read ongoing coverage of the pedophile epidemic in the Catholic Church at City of Angels Network, out of Los Angeles, written by me, one of hundreds of thousands of adult survivors of these crimes. You can’t have this much criminal activity in an organization and the supervisors don’t know about it. It’s time to prosecute the bishops.
By Kay Ebeling on 2010 02 03
My parents signed me up for that nonsense when I was four weeks old. That cult uses my name (for the last 34 years) on its book as a reinforcing message to government that they still have relevance in Irish Society.
I’ve seen it first hand, the boys in the collars using their membership statistics as a reason why they should continue to receive government funding, control management of schools and be included in discussions on issues which they think their cult has some supernatural guidance on.
They never mention the CSO Census figures, its always their “special” tally from their own books.
By Andy on 2010 02 03
I suggest that any sense of closure that some people may get from formally defecting from the RCC has value in itself.
Further, one never knows whether some of clerics reading reasons for people wishing to defect might find the reasons thought provoking, perhaps even compelling.
I see the CountMeOut website as something very positive, which is why the secular discussion board of which I am a founder admin (see my URL) has listed it among our friends.
David B
By David B on 2010 02 03
David, URLs aren’t linked in comments. We only ask for them as a courtesy.
If anyone want to visit David’s web site, it’s: http://www.secularcafe.org/
By Jason Walsh on 2010 02 03
How can you take anything in this article seriously, when the author
is so inept, as to post such ridiculous statement about the LDS church. Time for a retraction perhaps?
By Larry on 2010 02 03
Larry, are you claiming the LDS doesn’t baptise the dead? Because Jewsish organisations had lot to say about the unauthorised baptism of those who died during the Holocaust. Remind me again why the Church is so interested in genealogy… Actually, don’t bother. Personally, I don’t care. You can baptise whomever you like – I don’t believe it anyway.
Moreover, this article is about the Irish body politic and only mentions the Mormon Churuch as an aside.
By Jason Walsh on 2010 02 03
It’s funny to see an attack on Catholicism become a barely veiled swipe at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The author managed to reveal his prejudices against two targets for the price of one. Economical, but inaccurate.
By spamlds on 2010 02 03
Larry, relax would you. My opinions on religion are of no significance. I don’t believe in God. I do however believe in religious freedom, including for the LDS. You have my full support for that, it’s not anyone else’s place (mine included) to tell you what you can and can’t believe. The article is about the Irish polity, as I have already stated. The reference to Mormon is simply to illustrate that Churches speak on people’s behalf without their permission all the time but it doesn’t matter. In fact, all Christian Churches do it all the time. So what? It doesn’t bother me.
By Jason Walsh on 2010 02 03
Jason,
“After all, for all you know you’re actually a Mormon: the Church of Jesus Christ and the Latter Day Saints performs unauthorised baptisms on everyone it can get biographical details for – including the dead.”
This implies that the church performs baptisms for the living without their consent. It was either poor writing, poor research, or intentionally worded that way, to imply exactly that.
Which was it?
By Larry on 2010 02 03
Larry,
It’s poor writing. But isn’t it normal to write asking for a correction rather than use an internet campaign to spam a website with off-topic comments? No-one has yet asked for a correction. When they do, I will issue it. Manners.
By Jason Walsh on 2010 02 03
In fact, I was going to correct it anyway – until I saw the SPAMLDS Ning group and was severely irked by its (your?) jumping the gun. All you had to do was tell me, not start a campaign.
The moral of the story here is don’t jump to conclusions. Sometimes a mistake is just a mistake, not a conspiracy. Journalists make grammatical mistakes all the time and sometimes they have the inadvertent result of distorting meaning. However, we also correct our stories.
I will now edit the story to reflect the correction and note that it has been made. However, I would ask you to reflect on this: just because you may (and I presume you do) take a lot of grief from other churches etc doesn’t mean that everyone is out to get you. I have little interest in the LDS Church – or any church that has no effect on the polity in Ireland. A one line e-mail would have got the sentence that annoyed you fixed much more quickly than complaining on here or a Ning group dedicated to fighting Mormonism’s critics. It’s just possible that such tactics will actually make people with no opinion on Mormons think negatively of them.
By Jason Walsh on 2010 02 03
Jason,
I would hardly call it a campaign. If it was, the number of comments would be substantially higher. You may be overly dramatizing the facts once again.
By Larry on 2010 02 03
I didn’t say it was a campaign against this but it’s clearly a campaign - it’s called SPAMLDS (which is kind of funny, I grant you). Look, this is totally bizarre. You’re free to say what you like, including on here, but the whole thing is a storm in a tea cup.
For the record, I understand full well why the LDS Church baptises the dead and were I a believer I would consider it a charitable act. I don’t understand why it is controversial. Pascal’s Wager and all that. Anyway, I don’t believe in God so I’m not bothered about who is baptised and who isn’t. It’s a non-issue to me.
By Jason Walsh on 2010 02 03
Thanks for the attempt at a disclaimer at the end of the article. The author wrote:
“The original text of this sentence inadvertently implied that the Church of Jesus Christ and Latter Day Saints performed unauthorised baptisms on the living. It doesn’t. The Church only performs its baptisms on the dead.”
There is a distinct difference between the prepositions “on” and “for.” The Church performs proxy baptisms on living individuals for and in behalf of their ancestors who died without having had the opportunity to receive baptism by proper authority.
Baptism for the dead is a Biblical doctrine contained in 1 Corinthians 15:29. Despite it’s mention in the Bible and the obvious fact that Paul states that it was practiced by 1st Century Christians, latter-day saints are the only ones who practice the rite today. It is one of the characteristics that distinguishes us as the restoration of ancient Christianity.
If you would like more understanding of this commonly misunderstood and misrepresented doctrine, I invite you to read the article linked below.
http://spamlds.ning.com/profiles/blogs/christians-divided-fate-of
Knowledge has a tendency to dispel prejudice. I invite the author and his readers to become informed on the teachings of latter-day saints before considering making light of them in the future.
By spamlds on 2010 02 05
I have looked at the teachings of the latter-day saints at some length. I’ve also been made aware of the damage they inflict on family relations when a member of the family decides that they can no longer believe in the doctrines.
The doctrines do not stand up to critical examination, to put it mildly. Miraculous golden plates containing words inconsistent with archaeology, linguistics, and DNA evidence, for starters.
By David B on 2010 02 05
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