Robert Walter Dudley Edwards

3 weeks ago | britannica.com | Robert Walter Dudley Edwards |Sean Kay

Ireland - Social, Religious, Changes: The close relationship between the Irish republic and the Roman Catholic Church was highlighted by the visit of Pope John Paul II to Ireland in 1979, the first visit there by a reigning pontiff. But the fraying of that relationship, signaled in the 1960s and ’70s by a collapse in vocations to the priesthood and a decline in attendance at mass, continued in the 1980s and ’90s. The clause in the 1937 constitution acknowledging the special position of the Roman Catholic Church had been removed in 1972, although in 1983 the conservative resistance of Catholic pressure groups resulted in a