How long was the rape scandal going on?

[Pat Mustard]

Funny really that churches always found it easy to get priests and ministers easily enough when their sexual activities were thought to be protected, but now they struggle .... Is it a matter of that now one of the biggest perks has been exposed that the job isn't so appealing anymore?

Nihilist Virus may have something ... all these arguments stating that the goodness of Jesus is why the church flourished over the last 2000 years ... may have been just because all the sexual deviants had a safe "calling"

In Ireland the vocations were pretty much tied to the church's perceived or actual power within the state. Up until the early 1980's when over 80% of the country attended mass and where a priest's word could blacklist you throughout a whole community (especially in the country) the numbers entering the orders were high. You've got to think too of people like John Charles McQuaid who were able to dictate large slices of government policy in the 1940's and 50's. And remember priest and civil servant were often the only decent professions available to clever men who had no great patronage behind them (to be able to enter medical school for example, it was pretty much necessary that you needed a close relative as a doctor already). And if you were a woman, and wanted to work, well often times becoming a nun was the only option (until the 1970's women were sacked from the civil service by law if they married, and most private companies did the same thing).

Once Irish people started waking up to the nature of the church, numbers started dropping and news outlets found their balls to start reporting on the scandals, the number of vocations fell off a cliff. In the space of about twenty years from the 1970's to 1990's the numbers entering into clerical orders in Ireland fell from nearly thirty thousand to less than three thousand.