Adorning books about Ireland’s storied past are such titles as How the Irish Saved Civilization. Today’s Ireland, however, is busy losing it. In recent decades secularism has coursed through the country, transforming a pious island that once dispatched missionaries to foreign lands into an agnostic muddle that now needs them.
The news of November brought yet another illustration of secularism’s dismal triumph in Ireland: its government decided to shutter the country’s Vatican embassy. The Irish government will henceforth maintain remote diplomatic ties from Dublin, a move widely seen as a snub to the Vatican.
As if to underline the small-minded materialism that now holds sway over the Irish elite, Foreign Affairs Minister Eamon Gilmore explained the decision on grounds of crass and dubious economics. “While the embassy to the Holy See is one of Ireland’s oldest missions, it yields no economic return,” he said.
Ireland has reaped spiritual and cultural riches from its close historic relationship with the Vatican, not to mention material ones through a tourism industry heavily dependent upon the country’s charming Catholic past. But Ireland’s cocky secularists don’t care. Like third-rate Jacobins, they seek to rebuild Irish society from scratch, using the Church’s recent disgraces as an anticlerical pretext to turn their backs on history, tradition, and faith.
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