A Very Familiar Schism

Be in no doubt: in its call for the "ordination" of women, in particular, the Association of Catholic Priests is already a schismatic body. As well as a knowingly deceitful one, equating that absurd and heretical demand with more legitimate discussion about the discipline of priestly celibacy (specifically reaffirmed in the Latin Church by Vatican II) and about how bishops are appointed.

They will not join the Church of Ireland, nor would it take them. The tribal division is still far too deep and too wide for that. It always will be. But how the two bodies relate to each other will hasten the coming schism within the C of I, between those in the Republic who think exactly like this Association but who happen to identify more with their English and Huguenot than with their Gaelic ancestors, and those in Northern Ireland who are fully integrated into that territory's Conservative Evangelicalism and in many cases never wanted the ordination of women any more than the Pope does.

The belief in some right to an autonomous "Catholic" church baptising the morality of the politically dominant class, and effectively subject to the anti-Papal State, has arisen in eleventh-century Byzantium, in sixteenth-century England, in seventeenth-century France and the Netherlands, in eighteenth-century Austria, in nineteenth-century Germany and Switzerland, among the Croats at least since the early 1990s, and in today's China, although at least that last makes some effort to involve the Holy See and to preserve traditional forms of piety. None of those histories is a happy one. Munich laymen who imagined that their financial contributions entitled them to run the Church through quasi-parliamentary institutions gave much succour to early Nazism, although that went on to become absolutely peculiar to the Protestant areas of Germany and to the anticlerical Third Lager in Austria.