A Catholic monastery in Ireland was attacked and vandalized in broad daylight, to the shock of the nuns and those attending mass at the monastery.
A group broke into an Irish Carmelite monastery during the daytime, vandalized its chapel and shouted slurs at the elderly nuns who lived there on Monday.
“The poor sisters who live there play such an integral part of life in the area and it’s outrageous that a small group of thugs would target them like this,” a local parishioner who regularly goes to the chapel told the news site Dublin Live.
The incident happened after 1 p.m. Nov. 11 at Star of the Sea Monastery in Malahide, about 10 miles north of Dublin City Center.
Fr. Jimmy McPartland, co-parish priest at the nearby St. Anne’s Church in Portmarnock, announced the incident to parishioners during a morning Mass.
McPartland said the vandals had “desecrated” the chapel. The gang had shouted “very horrible things” about the nuns after the vandalism.
The parishioner told Dublin Live the priest was “visibly upset” in reporting the news and the congregation was “shocked.”
“He mentioned that the thugs had said very offensive things about the nuns and there was possibly racist graffiti,” the parishioner reported. (source)
Anti-Christianity has significantly grown in Ireland, one of the oldest nations with a Christian presence in Europe and for a long time one of the greatest sources of missionaries for the Church. The spread of the Church around the world cannot be told, for the good, apart from the influence of the Irish.
However, this is not the case today. For those people who identify as Catholic or even any form of Christianity, the numbers are dramatically skewed towards elderly people, and many of the young just do not care or hate religion completely. Some say it is because of the sodomite abuse and the history of the Church, but this is only partially true, as many people just do not care. Mass attendance is about 30% as of 2016, but this likely has declined as well if trends follow the patterns current since the early 1970s.
It would be good to hear details about who the people were that attacked the monastery, for that would provide a clear insight into the nature of what happened. While there is a strong chance that it may have been anti-religious or possibly even Irish Protestants (the Protestant-Catholic conflict in Ireland, as Shoebat.com has pointed out, is very real and could restart), or it may have even been a foreign group such as Muslims, as they have vandalized and attacked churches in the British Isles before.
But regardless of who did it, the brazen nature of this attack and how the Church is responding by closing off public access to the building, and in combination with the apathetic view toward religion, one must wonder about the future of what will happen with Christianity in that nation, for while it will still likely have a presence, there is also the potential for great persecution and violence.