The appointment this week of the Venerable Dermot Dunne, a former Catholic priest, as Dean of Christchurch, one of Dublin's two landmark Anglican cathedrals, highlights a growing trend of "denominational migration". Up until recently it was regarded as a social stigma, even a badge of shame, for a Catholic to convert to Protestantism, or for a Protestant of whichever strand -- Anglicanism, Presbyterianism or Methodism -- to embrace the Roman Faith.
Indeed, much of the history of 20th century Ireland, especially since the foundation of the State in 1921, was bedevilled by the decline of the minority Protestant population, mainly as a result of the Catholic Church's strict mixed marriage regulations requiring children to be raised as Catholics.
Memories still linger, particularly in the West of Ireland, of the crusades by Protestant evangelicals in the mid-19th century to provide soup-bowls to the starving Catholic poor on condition that they committed their souls to the Bible as propounded by the anti-Romanist preachers since the 16th century Reformation.
When introducing Dean-elect Dunne, and his English wife, Celia, the Archbishop of Dublin, Dr John Neill, admitted that it was no great shock to him that at a time of change within each of the Christian traditions, individuals are finding their expression of Christian faith in another tradition.
Noting that last year Mrs Anita Henderson, the wife of the Anglican Bishop of Tuam, Killala and Achonry, Dr Richard Henderson, was received into the Catholic Church in Ballina, Co Mayo, Dr Neill said the important thing is that "we do not go seeking people from other denominations to attract them into our own."
Noting that proselytism was something unfortunate that happened in previous generations, he added: "The freedom and acceptance of change and the way that ecumenical relationships remain strong when people change from one denomination to another is not causing great pain," he insisted. "I do not see this as anything like triumphalism. We are all part of the Christian Church."
The reforms of the Second Vatican Council in the mid-1960s spawned a new era of ecumenical détente among previously feuding Christians, but 'the Restoration' policies pursued by the late Pope John Paul II and his successor, Pope Benedict XVI, have put the brakes on the pace of the church unity movement on issues such as shared Eucharist, Rome's continued non-recognition of the validity of Anglican Orders, the compulsory celibacy of Catholic priests, and Rome's refusal to ordain women and its consequent alarm over the ordination of women and gay men to the Anglican episcopacy and priesthood.
At the same time as the re-imposition of Rome's doctrinal authority, increasing numbers of Irish Catholics have adopted 'Protestant' attitudes on issues of personal conscience such as birth control, cohabitation and divorce -- and are out of tune with the Sistine choir.
One option for disaffected Catholics is to join the Church of Ireland. It is estimated that 10pc of its 125,585 members in the 2006 census were born Catholics. This represents the highest figure for the Church of Ireland in the Republic since 1936.
Dean Dunne is but one of several ex-Catholic priests in the Anglican ministry. Another notable recruit is a former Dublin priest, the Rev Mark Hayden, now Rector in Gorey, Co Wexford, who describes his spiritual journey in his book, Changing Collars .
"I was a devout Mass-going Catholic, but I could not take the 'one shoe for all sizes' doctrinal hard-line from the Vatican, as the fate of many distinguished theologians from Jacques Dupuis to Charles Curran amply demonstrates," he says. "I also felt alienated and unwelcome in parish churches which were dominated by poorly read, loud-mouthed Catholic conservatives whose ignorance of theology was matched only by the emptiness of their unthinkingly conformist rhetoric."
Clearly, Rome and Maynooth are losing bright luminaries to the more liberal Church of Ireland. 'Denominational migration' has winners and losers.
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