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Heart and Soul: Ireland's Troublesome Priests

Ireland's Troublesome Priests

26/05/2012 GMT

BBC World Service - Heart and Soul, Ireland's Troublesome Priests

Ruth McDonald examines why Ireland's clergy are now at war with the Vatican.

Ruth McDonald meets the rogue priests who are challenging the Pope's conservative doctrine and the covering up of child abuse.

Ireland's Catholic priests are on the warpath. 

They have left their pulpits in their hundreds and marched on Dublin to campaign for reform and modernisation from a church many of them have served for decades, which now, though, has denounced them as traitors.

For Heart and Soul from the BBC World Service, Ruth McDonald examines how Ireland, once the most loyally-Catholic of countries, has come to a point where its clergy are now at war with the Vatican, over celibacy, divorce and the role of women.

How will this revolution play out in a country still shaken by the scale of sexual abuse, cover-ups by Bishops and an increasing secularisation?

(Image: Pope Benedict XVI blesses the faithful at the end of a Pentecost Mass inside St Peter's Basilica, at the Vatican. Credit: AP Photo/Andrew Medichini)

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