It is less than a week now until the Pope will be in Dublin and up to 500,000 people from all over Ireland will assemble in Phoenix Park for a mass (which seems to me far above the number of normal weekly mass goers, but that’s only an unimportant side observation).
It will probably be the biggest event in Dublin in my lifetime and in addition it is free, but I have decided that I will not go to Phoenix Park. I would have access to tickets and I even could have sang in a humongous 5000 people big choir that sings at the Phoenix Park Mass or in a 1000 people strong choir in Croke Park, but I will stay at home instead.
It is not the Pope that gets me to stay away, I actually think he is one of the most progressive Popes (if these two words “progressive” and “Pope” are even compatible) that ever was in that job. But I also think that he is heading a rotten organisation that refuses to see its own rottenness.
I am raised catholic, I would call myself somewhere between “a la carte” catholic and “spiritual” (whatever that means!) and even go to mass regularly because I am involved with a Gospel Choir, so I am definitely not a church hater. I even think that the community that a grass roots church provides is a positive thing, but so is a community that a sports club or music club or even an atheist group provides.
But the thing that gets me really upset and annoyed is when there is hypocrisy.
300 priests in Pennsylvania abusing thousands of kids and a few years ago the scandal in Boston and all the cover ups and Ireland had its own scandalous Church. How can these animals look in a mirror?
I know plenty of great and caring priests and nuns and I know that not everyone is like that, BUT an organisation that can have that level of horrible behaviour that even condones or at least covers it up is rotten to the core and should be broken up!
