Hundreds of free tickets for Pope Francis’ visit to Ireland this weekend have been reserved by a group of protesters that is purposefully planning on not showing up to any of the events in order to deal a blow to attendance and disavow the Catholic Church’s “stranglehold” on culture and government in Ireland.
“We are actively and deliberately not using our tickets as a form of silent and peaceful protest,” organizers of the protest wrote in the Facebook group “Say Nope to the Pope,” which has more than 9,000 members.
Instead, the protesters will walk from the General Post Office in Dublin, Ireland, to the city’s Garden of Remembrance on the afternoon of Aug. 26 at the same time that Pope Francis is scheduled to hold a closing mass at Phoenix Park.
The Pontiff’s Irish tour – the first papal visit to Ireland since Pope John Paul II visited in 1979 – will feature three events open to the public as part of the World Meeting of Families, including a visit to a Marian shrine in Knock. Organizers made 500,000 tickets available to the public for the papal mass and an additional 45,000 tickets available for the Knock visit.
One person wrote in the Facebook group that he had secured 1,312 tickets to the events, including many that he booked under the name “Jesus Christ.” Another member claimed to have booked 800 tickets by using several email addresses.
Taoiseach Leo Varadkar denounced the protest, describing the people who applied for free tickets without any intention of attending as “petty and mean-spirited.”
“Protest is legitimate and OK, but denying other people the opportunity to attend a mass or an event is not legitimate protest in my view and is most unfair,” he said. “It should be condemned.”
Organizers claim that they have not instructed protesters to snap up as many tickets as possible and that it is not their goal to get in the way of other people practicing their religion. Their absence from the events, they say, is meant to demonstrate “support and solidarity with any and all victims affected from this organization.”
Andy Lavery, a survivor of child sex abuse who plans to participate in the protests, told CTV News Channel that even though the Church has issued apologies for child sex abuse in Ireland, he doesn’t believe that it has done enough to hold the people who covered up and enabled the abuse accountable.
“Even though I had my attacker sent to jail, the Catholic Church still says the man has nothing to do with them,” said Lavery, whose attacker was moved around to two continents where he abused more children before he was convicted. “The Irish people are tired of the lies. The Pope is not welcome here.”
Ireland has undergone seismic shifts since the last papal visit nearly four decades ago. Since then, the country has embraced divorce, same-sex marriage and contraception. In May, its people voted overwhelmingly to overturn a constitutional ban on abortion by 66.4 per cent.
The organizers of the protest say they hope their demonstration will also raise awareness of decades of clerical sexual abuse and cover up; the harsh treatment of “fallen women” – prostitutes or unmarried women who became pregnant – and orphans at the notorious Magdalene Laundries; and the forced adoption by Catholic groups of babies born to unmarried women.
Last year, investigators found a mass grave containing the remains of 800 infants on the site of a former home for unmarried mothers in Tuam, Ireland. Some of the babies and young infants had been interred in a sewage treatment facility on the grounds after their deaths.
“If you are concerned your elderly neighbour will be without a ticket, remember that (he or she) will get over it,” organizers wrote in the Facebook group. “The elderly woman, searching for her now adult child, not knowing if he or she was sold or buried in an unmarked grave, will never get over her torment.”
With files from the Associated Press
