Ireland: The Irish people adopt same-sex “marriage”
The Irish voted ‘Yes’ on May 22nd, 2015, at the referendum held on whether to amend their constitution in order to allow two persons of the same sex to marry. 1,201,607 voted in favour and 734,300 voted against—62.1% to 37.9%. In total, 60.5% of the population took part in the referendum. The ‘Yes’ side was supported by all major Irish political parties, including the somewhat ‘conservative’ Fine Gael, the party of Prime Minister Enda Kenny.
Ireland has thus become the first country to legalize homosexual “marriage” via popular vote. Until now, it was legalized following votes held in twenty parliaments throughout the world. For English daily The Guardian on May 23rd, such a referendum would have been “unthinkable” twenty years ago. Homosexual acts were only decriminalized in 1993 in Ireland, the Guardian’s Dublin correspondent Henry McDonald recalled.
According to Scottish daily The Scotsman, quoted by Le Monde on May 24, 2015, political analysts who have been covering referendums in Ireland for decades are in agreement that the overwhelming landslide of Yes votes indicates a significant generational turning point away from the 1980s when voters always firmly upheld Catholic traditions and voted in great numbers against abortion and divorce.
Le Monde also quoted on May 24th a BBC analyst who said that the results of the referendum show the extent of the change within the Republic of Ireland, and it is tempting to say, “Catholic Ireland is dead and buried.”
In an editorial published on the website independent.co.uk May 24th, Paul Vallely, professor at the University of Chester in the UK, opines that the child abuse scandals that have shaken the Irish clergy have caused the rift between the Church and society. He notes that attendance at Sunday Mass in Ireland, which was over 90% in the 70s, fell to 34% in 2013. In a country where the majority of the population is now “effectively atheist,” the Church has lost its influence over the Irish. He also observes that Archbishop Diarmuid Martin did not really campaign for the ‘No’ side; “the bishop’s tone was remarkably moderate.”
Roberto de Mattei expressed his dismay at this in Corrispondenza Romana of May 27th, writing that “the greatest cause for scandal is the silence, the omissions and the complicity of Irish priests and bishops during the campaign.” He recalled that before the referendum the primate of Ireland “stated that he would vote against homosexual marriage, but that he would not tell Catholics how to vote.” “The true cause” of the referendum’s results is to be found in this “cultural and moral surrender of the shepherds to the world, accepting this degradation as a sociological inevitability, without considering the question of their own duties,” according to Roberto de Mattei.
According to Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Secretary of State of the Holy See, on May 26th on the occasion of a conference in Rome reported by iMedia, the referendum is a “defeat for humanity.” British Catholic journal The Tablet was quoted by news agency Apic as reporting on May 28th that Cardinal Raymond Burke had declared that this referendum “is a way of defying God. It is quite simply incredible. The pagans may have perhaps tolerated homosexual behavior, but they never dared to assimilate it to marriage…” a moral and public regression in which the Irish people has nonetheless foundered. Roberto de Mattei questions the reason for the “sepulchral silence of Pope Francis regarding Ireland… Why, in the days preceding the vote, did the Holy Father not launch a vigorous and afflicted appeal to the Irish, reminding them that violation of divine and natural law is a social sin for which the people and their pastors will one day render an account before God? With this silence, is not he too an accomplice in the scandal?”
(Sources: kipa-apic.ch – Le Monde – Huffington Post – The Guardian – Independent – Benoitetmoi – DICI no.316 June 5, 2015)
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