"Younge Peeple Of Ireland I luf U"

It's been a while. I was completely laid up with the nastiest flu ever. Ten days in bed and each morning I felt like a bunch of Limerick gangsters had spent the night working me over with claw hammers. To compound the effect, the whole thing mutated into a nasty chest infection. The media, online, offline, and everywhere else were full of death. The Pope, Terri Schiavo, Prince Ranier. It all seemed appropriate, because for the first time in my life death seemed attractive! Thank God, (I was beginning to feel the need to believe), or to be precise, Alexander Fleming, for antibiotics. I resisted taking any until a nice doctor, advised that I could either risk some very serious consequences in my weakened state, or just take the damn things. I acquiesced.
I borrowed a friends Xbox and between extended cable news marathons I Halo'ed myself into oblivion, blasting aliens to bits. The virtual violence took my mind off of how bad I felt. I discovered that Halo and Nyquil are a powerful combination - a free and legal hallucinogen. My nights were filled with fevered dreams of day glo colours, explosions, and bad ass evil aliens out to get me. Fun, fun, fun till Gareth took the Xbox away.
I really wanted to blog about the Pope's death, or more to the point, the Pope himself. Despite the endless commentary in all media, I rarely came across any thoughts by, or interviews with, people like me. People who were brought up Catholic, and who may have admired the Pope for his stand on communism, or the death penalty, but ultimately who had lapsed from any formal religious practice. In other words the people the Pope lost. Every Limerick child went to see the Pope in Greenpark in 1979, but when I think through all my friends today, I cannot think of one who attends Mass regularly, in fact I cannot think of one who attends Mass at all! Even more shocking I can't think of many who baptised their own children. That’s a pretty shocking statistic - but not surprising to those of us of that generation. Our parents worked hard to provide us with options, and almost all of us went to college. I don't think they realised how much we would rebel against the Vatican's convervative interpretation of church teaching. I don't think we ourselves realised how much we would rebel. The Pope liked to blame the church's and the world's problems on our materialism. He missed the point, educated free people don't need the panacea of religion as much. They ask questions and don't accept dogma so easily, especially when it seems to make no real sense. Despite his laudable exhortations to his countrymen to "be not afraid" in the face of communism, and his encouragement of peaceful political protest, he was utterly intolerant of any dissent within the Church. He came down particularly hard on liberal Catholic theologians. Real intellectual discourse was discouraged and even punished if it disagreed with accepted doctrine. Questioning was not persmissible and was often dismissed outright as sacrilege.
His position on women was particularly obnoxious. They were to be placed on a pedestal and worshipped. The Virgin Mary was his template for this. But even a rudimentary reading of the Bible would illustrate the she was one tough broad. She raised the son of God for cryin' out loud. She was an independent women who stepped outside her society's norms, as did other strong biblical women, Mary Magdelene for example. Those women would never have stood on the sidelines, worshipped but ignored.
Ultimately, people realised that they could have the life they wanted by simply ignoring the Church when they wanted to. Society had evolved to where there were no negative consequences to this. Initially, most people probably still attended Mass and broadly accepted Church teaching, but as scandal after scandal went unanswered by the Vatican and a whole new generation of kids grew up, they simply decided that the Church was irrelevant to them. And as things stand now it is. It will take a sea change to win us back.