A very different Ireland hosted John Paul in ’79
followed by statements from the Orange Order and from Ian Paisley, warning the Pope off: Paisley called him the “anti-Christ”. This was the height of the Troubles.
The previous year, 80 people had died at the hand of violence and, by the time the Pope arrived on Irish soil, in September 1979, a further 68 died, the total for that year being 120 killed.
The Pope was keen to visit Northern Ireland, not least because he wanted to contribute, in some way, to the peace process, but the worsening security situation forced the cancellation.
Just weeks earlier, the Queen’s cousin, Lord Louis Mountbatten, and three others, had been murdered in an IRA bomb attack on his boat at Mullaghmore in Co Sligo, while 18 soldiers were killed in two explosions near Warrenpoint, Co Down.
Elsewhere that year, the ‘Shankill Butchers’ were sentenced to life in prison, Margaret Thatcher won a landslide victory to become Prime Minister and the INLA assassinated Conservative MP Airey Neave as he left the House of Commons.
In my report (headlined ‘The Sermon on The Mount’), John Paul II — declared a saint by Pope Francis in 2014, along with John XIII — recalled his own attendance at the canonisation of Saint Oliver Plunkett, four years earlier. The saint’s relic had been brought from Drogheda to Killineer and, afterwards, the Pontiff knelt and prayed before the relic for peace.
One-time Primate of
All Ireland, Plunkett was found guilty of high treason in June 1681 “for promoting the Roman faith” and condemned to death. In passing judgment, the Chief Justice said: “You have done as much as you could to dishonour God in this case; for the bottom of your treason was your setting up your false religion, than which there is not any thing more displeasing to God, or more pernicious to mankind in the world.”
That day in September 1979 John Paul II described Oliver Plunkett as “forever an outstanding example of the love of Christ for all men”.
Like the rest of the world, the Republic of Ireland, 39 years ago, was a very different place.
Three out of every five Catholics attended Sunday Mass, the churches were open day and night, newspapers like de Valera’s now-defunct pro-republican Irish Press sold by the truckload outside church gates and if a cleric said black was white on Gay Byrne’s Late Late Show it made the front page, the Catholic Church’s moral authority being wholly unquestionable.
These were the days long before Sky TV and social media, where gay people struggled in fear with their identity, of being ‘outed’, and divorce and the repeal of the Eighth Amendment were still a long way off being realised — days when clerical abuse allegations were merely nasty rumours and secularism was still something of a dirty word.
Ireland has had to wait almost four decades for another papal visit and, in that time, much has changed. When Pope Francis arrives next weekend, he will find a Republic where fewer than 29% of Catholics attend Mass, divorce and gay marriage are legal, the Troubles are effectively over and the Catholic Church has been damaged — perhaps irreparably — by a litany of sexual abuse and exploitation scandals.
In Northern Ireland, the demographics of Catholic v Protestant have changed and the eventuality of a united Ireland no longer seems so remote.
The Republic today is a much more secular, urban, society, with a highly educated youth, a society tolerant to all shades and hues of preference and predilection, where the four-letter word on the airwaves no longer shocks and repeated re-runs of Father Ted still raise big belly-laughs at the idiocy of the high esteem in which Rome’s rule was once held.
Almost 40 years on, however, John Paul II’s stirring Sermon on The Mount, starting with the words “The cry of centuries sends me here”, still resounds.
In the end, though, it fell on deaf ears.
The Pope departed from Ireland on October 1, 1979. On October 3, the IRA rejected John Paul’s plea, saying: “Force is by far the only means of remov- ing the evil of the British presence in Ireland ... We know also that upon victory the (Catholic) Church would have no difficulty recognising us ...”
As I write, I am travelling by train to Knock in Co Mayo, where next weekend Francis will ascend on the village where there was, allegedly, an apparition of the Blessed Virgin, St Joseph, St John the Evangelist and Christ in 1879. Sitting opposite me are a couple from Belfast with their 10-yearold grandson.
“It’s a pity the Pope is not visiting Northern Ireland,” I say, with the rider: “It would make for a great headline: Frankie goes to Holywood (Co Down)!”
“Thank God he’s not,” the Belfast man says.
“Why is that?” I inquire. “Why? Because there are still those who would seek to kill him if he set foot in Northern Ireland.”
It seems the more things change, the more things stay the same, I think, looking out the window as my train hurtles at full throttle towards a holy place of pilgrimage.
Paul Hopkins is a commentator and syndicated columnist. His 1979 report, ‘The Sermon on The Mount’, was chosen by the-then Papal Nuncio, Gaetano Alibrandi, for a place in the Vatican archives