Irish teacher Enoch Burke was arrested and jailed in November 2025. He was charged with contempt of court, and authorities insist this has nothing to do with his refusal to use a transgender student’s preferred pronouns.
Technically, they are correct that his imprisonment stems from repeated violations of a court order barring him from returning to the school during his suspension.
However, it is also true that the entire case began with his refusal to give in to transgender ideology, which led to his suspension in the first place. Burke was a teacher at Wilson’s Hospital School in County Westmeath, Ireland.
In 2022 the school instructed staff to refer to a transgender student by a new name and the “they/them” pronoun, and Burke refused to comply.
After he publicly objected at a school event and confronted school leadership, he was suspended pending disciplinary proceedings.
The school then obtained a court injunction barring him from its premises for the duration of his suspension.
Despite that order, Burke repeatedly returned to the school, prompting officials to seek court enforcement. He has since been found in contempt of court multiple times.
In late November 2025, a High Court judge ordered his committal to prison again, describing his repeated attendance as trespass and noting that fines were no longer effective.
Along with jail time, Burke is now facing fines exceeding 225,000 euros.
Historically, Ireland was one of the strongest Catholic countries in the world.
For most of the twentieth century more than 90 percent of the population identified as Catholic, and weekly Mass attendance often exceeded 90 percent.
Religious vocations were high, with thousands of priests and more than a thousand seminarians in the mid-1960s.
Catholic identity shaped Irish culture, politics, and law, influencing national positions on marriage, contraception, divorce, and abortion. Until the 1970s Catholicism was virtually synonymous with Irish national identity.
That picture has changed dramatically. By the 2022 census, Catholic affiliation had fallen to 69 percent, down from 79 percent in 2011 and roughly 89 percent in 2002. The number of people reporting no religion has surged, rising by more than 60 percent since 2016. Weekly Mass attendance has collapsed from around 92 percent in the 1970s to about 27 percent today, with even lower rates in urban dioceses.
Vocations have plummeted, with only a handful of new seminarians entering studies each year and the number of working priests reduced by half over the past three decades. Abuse scandals, rapid modernization, and cultural liberalization are widely cited as factors accelerating the collapse of Catholic authority and practice.
Ireland has also become significantly more secular and liberal in its laws. In 2015 the country legalized same-sex marriage by referendum, the first nation in the world to do so by popular vote. In 2018 voters repealed the pro-life Eighth Amendment, opening the door to liberal abortion legislation.
That same year Ireland removed the constitutional offense of blasphemy, dismantling one of the last vestiges of confessional law.
State schools have increasingly adopted secular or multi-faith models, moving away from traditional Catholic symbols and structures.
Although the constitution still guarantees freedom of religion, many Catholics argue that recent legal changes weaken the cultural and legal protections the Church once enjoyed.
Concerns about religious freedom have intensified under proposed hate-speech legislation. Christian advocacy groups warn that vague definitions of “hate” could allow prosecutions for expressing beliefs commonly held by Christians, particularly around gender and sexuality.
Legal commentators argue that possession of material deemed “likely” to incite hatred could carry serious penalties, raising fears that traditional Christian teaching could be criminalized in practice.
Public polling shows a notable portion of the population is concerned about the implications for free expression. The case of Enoch Burke heightens those fears.
Although his imprisonment is officially tied to contempt of court, many Christians see his situation as evidence of a broader environment in which traditional beliefs, especially on gender, place individuals at legal risk.
Despite the fact that Pope Francis and Pope Leo, the two most recent popes, took liberal stances on aid to the poor and in support of illegal immigration, the official stance of the Church has not changed regarding transgenderism.
In 2019 the Vatican issued a formal guidance document titled Male and Female He Created Them, which set out the Catholic Church’s position on gender ideology.
The document states that God created only two sexes, male and female, and rejects the idea that gender can be self-defined or separated from biological reality.
It warns that gender ideology threatens the integrity of the human person, undermines the family, and contradicts Catholic teaching on creation.
The Church affirms that every person has dignity, but it maintains that transgender identity is incompatible with the natural order established by God and cannot be endorsed within Catholic doctrine.
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