Monday, March 31, 2008

Diversity of faiths is changing Ireland (Contribution)

The clerk behind the desk at my hotel in this historic capital of Ireland had a Polish accent.

My waiter was from Egypt and the chambermaid was Chinese.

The cab driver who took me to the Dublin airport was from Nigeria and fittingly used a GPS to find his way.

It takes only a few minutes in Ireland these days to realize that the country is changing rapidly. It is not just Catholics and Protestants anymore.

There are Nigerian Baptists, Polish Catholics and Russian Orthodox. There are Sikhs, Hindus and Buddhists from India, and Muslims from all over the world.

An estimated 10% of the country is made up of immigrants and they've brought their voices, their foods, their music and their faiths with them.

And while most of the adult immigrants have accents from foreign lands, their children - the next generation - are speaking with perfect Irish brogues even as they perform religious rituals quite alien to most Irish.

I was in Dublin to lead a group of my students from Columbia University on a study-tour to look at the changing nature of religion in Ireland.

The tables have turned. For more than 100 years, Ireland was a country people wanted to escape from. More than a million Irish, driven by famine and conflict, left for America and other lands.

But today, Ireland - with its economy booming and its internecine "troubles" in the past - is a destination for immigrants.

All this diversity has been good for new religions in Ireland, especially at a time when traditional Irish religious institutions are in decline.

Many people have turned away from the Catholic Church, especially in the wake of revelations its higherups stood silently by while some priests sexually abused youngsters in their care.

Church attendance has gone from 90% in the 1970s to just over 40% today.

Many historic Irish Catholic church buildings have now been taken over by Catholics from Poland and Hungary.

An old Church of Ireland sanctuary in Dublin now houses a Russian Orthodox congregation. In Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland, a Protestant church has become a Hindu temple.

On Friday, we attended the Islamic Cultural Center of Ireland, which drew more than 1,000 worshipers to its massive domed mosque in the south of Dublin. My teaching colleague, Niall O'Dowd, who grew up in Ireland but has lived in New York for decades, said that the mosque visit was the most striking indication of change.

"I lived in Dublin 10 years," he said. "I never met a Muslim. Today, I saw 1,000. The diversity is incredible."

Some native Irish want to learn more about the faiths of the new immigrants. At the Jampa Ling Tibetan Buddhist Center in the heart of the Irish countryside, the lectures of the chief lama, who is from Tibet, draw 30 people a week, twice the number that came 10 years ago.

Buddhism is taking root in Ireland, said Ani La, one of the nuns at the center. "Maybe in 50 years, we'll be wearing green robes," she joked.

Of course, there are also Christians who are reclaiming their faith. One we met in Northern Ireland was Alan McMullan, who had been a member of a violent paramilitary organization that was hellbent on keeping the north, known as Ulster, part of Great Britain.

After a few days in prison, McMullan said he had a conversion experience, renounced violence and is now a "born-again" Christian.

"I went from working for 'God and Ulster' to working for God," he said.
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