“Why are you troubled?” Jesus asks his disciples when he presents himself to them after his Resurrection. The recently troubled relationship between Ireland and the Catholic Church has entered into a new chapter and perhaps moved toward some resolution, with the Irish government's plans to end the Catholic Church’s monopoly on the nation’s primary school system.

An initial government study has identified 50 schools in Dublin and 43 towns where the demand for multidenominational education was greatest and school control could be shifted to other sponsors, secular or religious. The government has not yet announced a timetable, emphasizing that the shift will be respectful of religious tradition but firmly nondiscriminatory. Ruairi Quinn, the education minister, foresees “radical change,” estimating that as many as 1,500 of the 3,169 schools the church now controls will eventually be transferred to other sponsors.

Leading members of the Irish clergy have praised the plan as a good step forward, noting that surveys find only half of Irish parents want their children in religious schools. State control is favored by 61 percent of the population, according to The Irish Times. In addition, the change should help accommodate the growing numbers of foreign-born residents, whose representation has tripled since 1991 to 17 percent of the population.

The move comes in the wake of the government’s blistering documentation of the church’s failure to protect children from abuse and its long refusal to admit culpability, as well as Prime Minister Enda Kenny’s closure of the Irish embassy in the Vatican last November. “The change,” said a New York Times editorial, “should promote healing in a country traumatized by the church’s cover-up of years of sexual abuse of children by rogue priests.”

Source: An April 14, 2012 editorial in the New York Times