Dust to dust: the collapse of Irish catholicism
When it was published earlier this year, an emigre journalist’s attempt to look at the collapse of Irish Catholicism with fresh eyes was acclaimed by critics inside as well as outside the Church
I remember where I was when I understood, finally, why Ireland’s
Catholic Church collapsed. It was a grey January day in 2019 and I had
slipped into St Monica’s church on Dublin’s northside.
Mass had
just ended – with more brass memorial plaques on the pews than people
sitting in them – and I headed into the low-ceilinged sacristy. I hadn’t
been here since serving Mass as a child: listening closely for the
moment to ring the consecration bells; begging the thurible charcoal to
burn. I sought out the dim room beside the sacristy where I would change
into my cassock and surplice. There are no altar servers now in St
Monica’s and the old changing room is a cluttered storage space. In a
corner I caught sight of a block of Oasis, those green blocks of
sponge-like foam used to arrange flowers. Soaked with water, the block
is heavy and firm. As an altar boy, though, I loved to break off a dry
corner, rub it between my fingers and watch it turn to dust.
This, I realised, is what had happened to Irish Catholicism.
John McGahern once described ours as a “fortress church … that, very much like an army, demanded unquestioned allegiance”. For centuries Ireland was a spiritual superpower, sending out priests and Religious around Europe to light once more the Christian flame. In the last century, Ireland raised entire generations for export to every corner of the world: preaching, teaching, nursing and comforting from Liverpool to Laos. But 25 years of clerical abuse revelations and cover-ups, coupled with an unprecedented period of prosperity and liberalisation, emptied Ireland’s churches of people. Like Oasis without water, what was once solid and firm was now dry and fragile; Ireland’s ageing spiritual army of priests, nuns and bishops are now more figures of pity than fear.
Over the last 20 years, returning regularly to Ireland from my
adoptive home of Berlin, I’ve had an emigrant’s time-lapse perspective
on the fall of this fortress. Each return visit, though, increased a
nagging feeling that, in Ireland’s rush to put the past behind us, an
effort was underway to disown the Catholic past and our part in it. I
went looking for a book that could explain to me why Catholicism rose so
high in Ireland and fell so far. Realising it didn’t exist, I decided
to write it myself.
My starting point was my seat in the front
row, observing a process Germans call Vergangenheitsbewältigung – the
task of coming to terms with the past. Through institutions, exhibitions
and research, ordinary Germans are given opportunities to reflect on
how two dictatorships took hold in quick succession. The point is not to
create a paralysing guilt-cult but to cultivate an awareness of
responsibility for historical memory. Real historical understanding is
about locating yourself, your family or people like you, on the spectrum
between the extremes of perpetrator and survivor. Empowering people to
explore their own past circumstances, reflecting on why they reacted as
they did, is a crucial part of being German.
I saw no appetite
in Ireland for this; we already had our perpetrators. Within my lifetime
Ireland’s priests and Religious – once our holy anointed – became a
disgraced “them”. Knowing things were more complex than this, I began a
journey of many surprises. Perhaps the greatest was how uniquely Irish
our brand of Catholicism was – and how it is a decade younger than The
Tablet.
Things many of us assume are intrinsically Irish Catholic
– the Sacred Heart, the devotions, high Mass attendance – only became
mainstream after the 1850 Synod of Thurles. Attuned to the needs of a
people traumatised by Famine, Ireland’s first cardinal, Paul Cullen,
carried out root-and-branch reform of the Irish Church. His new
Catholicism was one of ritual and rigour that emphasised a
suffering-salvation narrative.
It was in this period that Irish
Catholicism became the Victorian prude we remember today. Historian J.
J. Lee suggests Cullen’s Irish Church was a response to middle-class
needs, framing sex “as a satanic snare”. Sex, in particular unexpected
heirs, “posed a far more severe threat than the landlord to the security
and status of the family”. To avoid the risk of a return of Famine-era
degradation, middle-class Irish Catholics idealised self-control and
restraint to the extent that, eventually, they were internalised. The
consequences are clear today: a faith once embraced as a comfort and a
path to education is now rejected as a mental prison of shame.
IReland’s Catholic prison break was so sudden, though, that many
don’t see the lingering effects in the Irish psyche: deference to
bishops transferred to medical professionals and US multinationals; the
survival of shame as a control mechanism, as seen during the early phase
of the pandemic. Some argue that Catholic Ireland’s shame containment
infrastructure of mother and baby homes and Magdalene laundries has,
metaphorically, been re-purposed by modern Ireland to lock away, or at
least silence, priests and nuns.
Life in post-Catholic Ireland
can resemble a spiritual game of snakes and ladders straight out of a
David Lodge novel: not everyone knew about abuse but enough people knew.
This is something everyone knows, but no one must acknowledge. This was
clear when, a few weeks before my book appeared earlier this year,
Ireland was confronted with the latest in a series of state reports into
Ireland’s toxic Catholic past. This time, the subject was the mother
and baby homes familiar to anyone who has seen the film Philomena. The
report was met with anger by survivors and exhausted silence by the
wider population.
After two decades of inquiries and reports
examining the question of where guilt lay for the decades of abuse, my
book suggests a new approach is required. To move forward, Ireland needs
to go beyond emotive attack and sullen denial and embrace empathetic,
informed reflection. That was the approach I took when I met Cardinal
Seán Brady, a tragic figure whose appointment as Archbishop of Armagh
and Primate of All Ireland in 1996 became tainted by an old link to a
notorious paedophile priest. We met four times in total, filling two
chapters that one interviewer described as my “Frost/Nixon” encounters.
Now retired, Cardinal Brady reflected on his life and why he wasn’t
emotionally open to the suffering of the abused children he had
interviewed as a young priest. Eventually he conceded his anger now at
the discretion the Church had demanded of him. That had contributed to a
priest abusing children for 20 more years and, in the eyes of many, has
left Brady a disgraced man.
Over two months after my book was
published, I’m heartened by its positive reception in Ireland, both from
critics and readers, inside and outside the Church. Many former
neighbours in Dublin I spoke to on Zoom last month enthusiastically
endorsed my decision to empathise rather than judge. “The priests made
you feel like a child,” one woman said. The next evening, in an online
discussion with Irish priests and Religious, one nun admitted she was
reading my book slowly, “taking it like medicine”. Of the 100 people
participating, all over 60, none expressed any desire for Irish
Catholicism in its current form to survive. Indeed, many saw the
Church’s leadership in self-preservation mode, and an impediment to a
new beginning. One priest, back from a lifetime working in Brazil,
recalled how the life of faith there took place outside churches,
without priests: people meeting in homes to pray, reflect on Scripture
and co-ordinate community work. Another priest suggested the pandemic
had opened the door to this in Ireland, with Sunday Mass replaced for
many by online gatherings for reflection and prayer.
Perhaps the
strangest experience was joining the Zoom book club of former
schoolmates I hadn’t seen in 25 years. They were delighted by the book.
It struck a chord: none was any longer a Mass-goer, most had young
children and most said they were struggling with how to give them some
sort of moral foundation. One former classmate told me how he had set up
a (successful) campaign to change an admissions policy that allowed
Ireland’s largely church-run primary schools to discriminate against
non-baptised children. He argued that taking religious instruction and
faith formation out of the classroom is the only way religious belief
can survive. Most on the Zoom call nodded in agreement.
My generation – now in our mid-40s – was the last to have an Irish
Catholic childhood. We are young enough to have been spared its excesses
yet old enough to notice the gap left by its passing. Catholic Ireland
achieved much but it collapsed under its own emotional and intellectual
narrowness. The child-like approach to faith and the undue deference
given to bishops, priests and Religious had, in hindsight, left
staggering opportunities for abuses of children and of trust. When that
all emerged, it is no wonder people were annoyed – at Church
representatives and, quietly, at themselves.
The more recent
embrace of marriage equality and legal access to abortion, and the
widespread lack of interest in Pope Francis when he visited in 2018,
suggests Ireland’s teenage anger is now cooling off into a young adult
apathy. Ireland’s recent ban on religious services on public health
grounds – more stringent than anything elsewhere in Europe, and with
fewer exemptions than those imposed under British rule at its most
brutal – was for many a decisive secular, “end of history” moment. Some
15 centuries after Patrick, had the “Best Catholics in the World”
finally moved on?
When I put that question to a senior Irish
cleric in the Holy See, he snorted: “In our lifetime we have gone from
believing we were the last Catholic country of Europe to thinking we are
now in the vanguard of philosophical secularism. Maybe we need to get
over ourselves.”
Derek Scally is Berlin correspondent for The Irish Times. The Best Catholics in the World is published by Penguin Sandycove at £16.95 (Tablet price, £15.26).
WOW! 😪
ReplyDeleteAnd now what? 🙄🤔