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Humanism Ireland Overwhelmed By "Godless" Weddings

spnadmin

1947-2014 (Archived)
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Jun 17, 2004
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Ireland overwhelmed by "godless" weddings

By Tom Heneghan, Religion Editor

http://news.yahoo.com/long-backlog-godless-wedding-services-ireland-124447364.html

(Reuters) - Traditionally Catholic Ireland has allowed an atheist group to perform weddings this year for the first time, and the few people certified to celebrate them are overwhelmed by hundreds of couples seeking their services.

Demand for the Humanist Association of Ireland's secular weddings has surged as the moral authority of the once almighty Catholic Church collapsed in recent decades amid sex abuse scandals and Irish society's rapid secularization.

Until now, those who did not want a religious wedding could have only civil ceremonies. Outside of the registrar's office, only clergy were permitted to perform weddings.

But statistics show rising demand for non-Church weddings. In 1996, 90 percent of Irish weddings were performed by the Catholic Church or the Church of Ireland. But by 2010 that percentage had fallen to 69 percent.

The pent-up demand from those who want more than a civil ceremony in a registry office but reject a religious wedding has created a major backlog for the humanist group's ceremonies director.

Brian Whiteside, initially the only humanist "solemnizer" certified to legally marry couples, was already booked well into next year when the civil registry office agreed in late June to approve 10 others, taking some of the pressure off him.

"It remains very, very busy," Whiteside said. "We're all finding it difficult to keep up with the inquiries. We had 595 new inquiries in the first three months of this year, which in a little country like Ireland is quite a few."

The Irish parliament legalized secular wedding services last December, after a 10-year campaign by the Humanist Association. The law went into effect on January 1. Similar options are also allowed in Australia, Canada, Iceland, New Zealand, Norway, Scotland and some U.S. states.

COUPLE GAVE UP ON CATHOLICISM

Brendan Hastings, originally from South Africa, and his Irish bride Suzy Addis had Whiteside preside at their recent humanist wedding in Slane, a village north of Dublin.

Soft modern music accompanied the relaxed ceremony and the main reading was a passage on love from the 1994 novel Captain Corelli's Mandolin.

"Basically we are both atheists and didn't want a religious ceremony," said Hastings, at 32 a year older than Addis. "Other weddings we have gone to tended to be all about Jesus and we're not into that. We were both raised as Catholics but kind of gave it up."

Whiteside, a retired Dublin businessman, said he began presiding at humanist weddings back when they were simply a symbolic ceremony rather than the official act.

The association also offers strictly secular funerals and naming ceremonies, which have no legal status.

Being the only certified humanist celebrant for the first half of the year, Whiteside was officiating at one or two weddings per week. He was scheduled for about 90 weddings this year and about 50 in 2014.

"It became a sort of second career," he said. "I don't want to make a business out of this, but it means a lot to me."

The recent ruling means the work can now be divided among the other solemnizers - the Irish bureaucratic term for all legally recognized wedding celebrants - living in Dublin, Wicklow, Cork and Galway.

NOT FOR PROFIT

The law says solemnizers cannot work for profit. Whiteside said he usually asks 450 euros per wedding, although it might be more if long distance travel is involved.

"We don't have salaries, so we have to have some kind of income," he said, noting that priests had salaries and used their own churches for weddings.

That price is low compared to other countries. The Dutch Humanist Union sets a base price of 475 euros while rates in Germany and Austria, where humanist weddings cannot replace the official civil ceremony, go from 650 to over 1,000 euros.

Scotland legalized humanist ceremonies in 2005 and saw them jump from 100 that year to 2,846 in 2011. Humanist weddings are now the third most popular choice for Scottish couples after the Church of Scotland and the Catholic Church.
 

Rory

SPNer
Jul 1, 2012
218
323
Ireland
Definitely understandable in this current climate of seeming nonchalance on part of the Church here regarding the abuse scandals.. since speaking to Vouthon on here I did realize there is much more to my birth-faith than I realized. I find it very difficult however to reconcile the good of Catholicism with the half-assed method in which the Archbishops and Pope Benedict dealt with the sex abuse scandals. Even more recently Ireland has been reminded of the cruel abuse by nuns in the Magdalene Laundries which occurred right up to the 90's. (The Magdalene Laundries were essentially prisons which parents would send their unmarried & often underage daughters if they became pregnant. The women were denied their constitutional rights despite having not committed any actual crime, and were forced to do labour under the authority of nuns who treated them as less than animals. Read here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magdalene_asylum)

It's really enraging how little the Church or nun groups care about their abuse victims. We all know that the abuse scandal was covered up for years by the Church and child molesting priests were defended by bishops who ignored the abuse complaints and simply moved the priests on to new dioceses where nobody knew of their crimes and they could abuse new victims freely. And recently the Irish government paid out compensation towards the victims of Magdalene laundries whom they failed to protect; every single order of nuns responsible for the laundries refused to contribute a single penny towards compensating their victims.

People in Ireland are really struggling with the Church at the moment. Nobody is under any illusions; it's clear that Catholics in this country are quickly losing their faith as the days go by.
 

Tejwant Singh

Mentor
Writer
SPNer
Jun 30, 2004
5,028
7,188
Henderson, NV.
Godless weddings is a welcome change. The fake Elvi wedding ministers with long side burns in Las Vegas are screaming: Hip Hip Hurray!

Any religion that represses its own people leaves the cracks of the doors open for others to come in. If any religion can not offer mental and personal freedom than it becomes worse than a Catholic run laundromat where young girls were abused.

Having said that, the opposite is also true when the dictators who try to repress the religions of the country. The case in point is the rise of Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the other Muslim radical groups taking advantage of the dictatorships in Africa.

In my opinion, Catholicism is akin to Islam as far as the freedom of choice of the peoples is concerned.

Tejwant Singh
 
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