Ah, the Irish...

...so far from God and so close to England."
That's from the old saying about Mexico and the United States, and Russell Shorto's article in The New York Times shows just how far from God the Irish, and especially the Catholic Church, have gotten:

Andrew Madden is one of a relatively new breed of Irish celebrities who would just as soon be less well known. He was among the first people in Ireland to go public about being sexually abused by Catholic clergy, and isMadden has recounted his tale many times for the Irish media, and there was a rote, dutiful quality to the recitation of the details. It wasn’t until we pulled up in front of the house where Father Payne had lived— the scene of the abuse Madden endured, to which he had not returned since his teens— that he tensed with what seemed like deeply coiled anxiety and whispered: “Oh, my God.”
My afternoon with Andrew Madden might serve as a snapshot of what Ireland has been through lately. The country is preoccupied with the fallout— personal, social and political— from the crash and burn of the Celtic Tiger. But beneath that, and in a way connected to it, is a more primal pain: one deeper, lodged in the bones, maybe. The phenomenal economic boom over the past two decades, and the secularization that came along with it, allowed Ireland to think it was no longer what it once was: a backward land dominated and shaped by the Roman Catholic Church. But, as the economy has crashed, the Irish have come face to face with their earlier selves, and with a church-state relationship that was, and in many ways still is, as quite a few people in the country see it, perversely anti-modern.
Of the various crises the Catholic Church is facing around the world, the central one— wave after wave of accounts of systemic sexual abuse of children by priests and other church figures— has affected Ireland more strikingly than anywhere else. And no place has reacted so aggressively. The Irish responded to the publication in 2009 of two lengthy, damning reports— detailing thousands of cases of rape, sexual molestation, and lurid beatings, spanning Ireland’s entire history as an independent country, and the efforts of church officials to protect the abusers rather than the victims— with anger, disgust, vocal assaults on priests in public, and demands that the government and society disentangle themselves from the church.
This past December a fresh bout of fury was touched off by the publication of the investigation into perhaps the worst clergy sex offender: the Reverend Tony Walsh, who raped and molested children while serving as a priest in Dublin, and who was shielded by the Vatican even after Irish Church officials wanted him defrocked. Yet another large-scale report will be released shortly. And a 1997 letter— in which the papal nuncio to Ireland told Irish bishops that the Vatican had “serious reservations” about a plan for mandatory reporting of clergy sex-abuse cases to the police— came to light last month, causing further anger.
Among those who were most outraged by the abuse reports were people in their 20s and 30s, who came of age during the economic upswing, and who grew up in a newly secular culture without a sense of obedience to the church. “When I saw the reports, I thought: I can’t even pretend to be part of this club anymore,” says Grainne O’Sullivan, a 32-year-old graphic designer. Late in 2009, together with a web developer named Cormac Flynn and a civil servant in Cork named Paul Dunbar, she began a website, CountMeOut.ie, which walked Catholics through a three-step process for formally defecting from the church. It was to be, she said, “a way of protesting, using their own process against them.” Over the next several months, CountMeOut became a focal point of anger at the church; 12,000 people downloaded the official form for defection— Defectio ab Ecclesia Catholica Actu Formali— from the site.
Then, last August, the Vatican introduced a change in canon law that will apparently make it impossible for Catholics to defect. Flynn, O’Sullivan and Dunbar have thus suspended their service. But the website continues to be a clearinghouse for information on the church in Ireland and its abuses, and it has helped start a debate on Irish identity on the possibility of separating the two parts of the term “Irish Catholic”, one which set off the intense bout of soul-searching that has racked the country lately. When I met Madden last fall in Dublin, the early rumbles of the collapse of Ireland’s economy were shaking the country, and throughout much of a pub lunch he talked about the failures of the government and the banks. It was only later, once we were driving around his old neighborhood, past the pebbledash house where he grew up and where his parents still live, that he began to talk about his childhood. As we sat in his car in front of Christ the King Church, where he spent much of his youth as an altar boy and a choir member, he outlined the four years of torment he suffered in the late 1970s at the hands of the Reverend Ivan Payne, one of the infamous serial sex offenders among the Irish Catholic clergy whose stories have transfixed the country over the past year and a half.

Rico says there's a lot more of this sad story here. But making it "impossible for Catholics to defect"? Didn't the Church see how well that worked for the Soviet Union and the North Koreans?