Throw off the yoke of the Church

THE vast amount of replies and comments to Friday’s Late Late Show discussion and the intensity and passion that has been displayed shows how contentious an issue this truly is.

We are supposed to live in a republic, but this will never be the case as long as the Church has such a death grip on our society, our children, our schools and our community as a whole.

It invades every facet of our lives from birth through to death. We are pressured by our community to conform and to get babies baptised, we must send innocent children to confess non-existent “sins” to purify them before they have their Communion and Confirmation.

We should marry in churches because the shame of a registry office ceremony will have the neighbours talking.

At funerals, rosary beads are wrapped around non-believers clasped hands by so-called Catholics and decades of the rosary are said one after another in a cult like chant.

This is despite the knowledge that the deceased may never have attended a church service. There is nothing the Church revels in more than a good funeral, disaster, tragedy or accident — they use the captive audience at funerals and the attendance of an unwilling congregation to preach and rave about God’s will and other such nonsense. We are constantly bombarded with religious teaching in our schools. Morning prayer (even our Oireachtas sittings are preceded each sitting day by an opening prayer), lunch prayer, going home prayer, crucifixes in our classrooms and so on. Parents should demand to have the right to choose not to have Catholic religion force fed to our children. If such tuition is to be taught, it should be outside of the curriculum of the school and not during school.

If this were done, and religious tuition was carried out after school or on weekends, we would soon learn the true numbers of faithful Catholics in our communities. These numbers would then be truly reflective of the falling church population in Ireland. Maybe then we might wake up to the reality that the church is like an interfering relation who is always telling us how things were in their day, and that we must live in constant fear of the past, present and future, or face the wrath of the almighty.

The vast numbers of parents scrambling to enrol their unborn children into Educate Together schools should be an eye-opener to us all as to what we really want for our children. We will never truly have our beloved Republic until we have separation of church and state.

Greg Gabbett

Wexford