"A nation that kills its own children has no future," said Pope John Paul II. If that be true, the Republic of Ireland signed away not only its future on Friday, but also the last vestiges of what had been the most distinctive and morally coherent culture in Europe. For better or worse, I have been able to witness the transformation up close. I first visited the country in the early 1970s as a student hitchhiker and came back a year or so later for a more extended stay. In the early 1990s, my family and I spent the better part of a year in Galway, in the west of Ireland, where my wife taught at the city's university. Like most Americans of Irish descent, I felt a certain attachment to the country, and during that year in Ireland I had a chance to explore it. Although the churches were not quite as full as they were in the 1970s and the girls not quite as chaste -- or so I was told -- not much appeared to have changed in the twenty years since my last extended...(Read Full Article)