Irish people have forgotten their anti-British sentiments... now they must forget hatred for the Church
While not yet on the official itinerary published by the Vatican, Pope Francis will almost certainly meet with survivors of clerical abuse during his short trip to Ireland next month. Perhaps nowhere in the Catholic world has the pain of the abuse crisis and subsequent cover-up been so acutely felt as in Ireland.
Francis will have to tread carefully. What the Pope chooses to say will be parsed and analysed intensely. We can be certain that — whatever he says — it will be judged inadequate by some.
But there’s another group of people who are deaf to anything the Pope will say, simply because they are hostile to everything the Catholic Church stands for. It’s that knee-jerk hostility that saw a small group of people try to snap up thousands of tickets to see Francis that they have no intention of using.
While some of the ‘Say Nope to the Pope’ keyboard warriors claim their actions are in protest at past abuses perpetrated by the Church, the reality is that many of them simply want to deny ordinary decent Catholics the opportunity to celebrate with the leader of their faith.
The Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, was right to describe the activists — mostly lapsed Catholics — as petty and mean-spirited. While eight out of 10 citizens in the Republic describe themselves as Catholic, Ireland is not a Catholic country anymore.
In the minds of some Irish people, the Catholic Church has replaced Britain as the ‘auld enemy’, to be blamed for all the nation’s ills. With the Church firmly in the line of fire, we are free to avoid deeper questions about the nature of Irish society. The message is simple: Catholic Ireland equals bad; new Ireland equals great.
It’s not that there isn’t much to criticise the Church about.
I’ve spent my entire career as a journalist writing about the failings of the institutional Church and calling for heads to roll and greater accountability from top to bottom.
But a superficial, one-dimen- sional critique of the Church fails to grasp the complexity of every organisation and institution.
The history of the Catholic Church in 20th century Ireland is, in part, a story of cruelty, abuse and arrogance. It is also, in part, a story of education, of caring for the sick and the elderly and of everyday acts of kindness and holiness.
To protest the first without acknowledging the second is to ignore history and is itself a form of arrogance.
If the Irish Catholic Church stands today humiliated under the weight of its own sins and crimes, it also stands on the shoulders of the giants of heroic virtue in every generation who have kept the faith alive for close on 16 centuries.
Even today — though depleted in numbers — religious sisters and brothers work with some of the most isolated and vulnerable communities in Ireland.
Elderly nuns in the midlands visit direct provision centres to share the hopes and despairs of asylum seekers and provide essentials, like shampoo and toothpaste. Spiritan priests in Dublin counsel refugees who have fled to Ireland having been tortured in their home countries.
There are hundreds of good causes around the country that rely on the quiet, yet unrelenting, work of priests and religious organisations. Many of the beneficiaries are either not Catholic, or non-churchgoing.
As one nun said to me recently about her time ministering to asylum seekers: “I do it not because they are Catholic, but because I am.”
This is the essence of the charitable drive at the heart of Catholicism when it is lived well. We shouldn’t allow the sort of one-eyed nationalism that once marked our hysteric attitude to all things British to be transferred on to the Catholic Church.
As the enthusiasm and warmth shown for this week’s visit of Prince Harry and the Duchess of Sussex demonstrates, most people have gotten over irrational anti-British sentiment.
Some people now need to build a bridge and get over their irrational hatred of all things Catholic.