This article is from page 14 of the 2011-09-27 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 14 JPG
THIRTY people officially defected from the Catholic Church in the Killaloe Diocese in the 12-months before Canon Law was changed to prevent the process from taking place. The Cla r e People understands that 30 people wrote to the diocese offices in Ennis, asking to be removed from the Catholic Church between May of 2009 and May of 2010.0
This process was brought to a close by the Church through a change in Canon Law at the end of 2010 but the “Count Me Out” organisation say that they are on the verge of finding a new way of allowing Irish people to leave the Church – and could be up and running again in a matter of weeks.
“We had a lot of people contacting us about leaving the Church before the change in Canon Law. It was around the time of the Ryan Report so there was a lot of angry people out there. We had thousands of people contacting us in the first couple of days but of course all of them did not go through the formality of actually leaving the Church. Most people are happy enough just to stop going to mass but some people out there are keen to formally disassociate them from the Church,” said Paul Dunbar of Count Me Out.
“After the change in Canon Law the Church in Ireland said that they would no longer accept formal letters of defection, instead they would only keep a register of people who wanted to leave the Church. Since then we have been trying to get around this and we have been working with a Canon Law expert to find a way around this. But at the moment you effectively can’t leave the Church,” he said.
Count Me Out have been working with Canon lawyer Fr Tom Doyle who has just completed a report on the options now available under the new Canon Law.
“We are hoping to have something up and running again in a matter of weeks. It will be a trial and er- ror process and there is no guarantee that that what we do first will work but we are hopeful,” continued Paul.
“We are hoping to do it through Canon Law but if we can’t do that we might look at a civil way of trying to find a way of allowing people to leave the Church.” The Cla r e People contacted the Killaloe Diocese in relation to this story but no official comment was forthcoming at the time of going to press.