You can deny it all you like, but anti-Catholicism is rife
YOU could argue that, within certain limits, anti-Catholicism is respectable. You could argue that it is sometimes justified. You could argue that the Catholic Church deserves a great deal of the criticism coming its way. What you cannot argue is that antiCatholicism does not exist in this country when it has become as manifest a feature of life here as the anti-English sentiment of old.
I doubt if the Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Diarmuid Martin, would say that the attacks on the Church at present are anti-Catholic per se. He prefers to be understated. But it is the fact that he is usually so understated that made what he said in a little-noticed homily last week so remarkable.
He described a “culture of relentless[ly] reminding the Church of the sins of its members and at times of painting every individual and every moment in the history of the Church with the same condemnation”.
He went on: “I notice a certain justified resentment among priests and religious and committed Catholics at somehow being unfairly under attack as they live out their faith and their ministry generously and with dedication.”
The latest outburst of anger at the Church, and let’s call some of it anti-Catholic, was sparked by the news that the Order of the Sisters of Charity, via the St Vincent’s Healthcare Group, will own the new National Maternity Hospital, although it will have no clinical control over it and therefore we face the possibility that it will be performing abortions for broadranging reasons on land the order owns a few years down the road.
Even though we knew the order would own the new hospital when the deal was announced last November, the deal only caused anger fully five months later when it was linked by the media to the alleged non-payment by the order of its promised commitment to the redress scheme for victims of abuse.
The nuns have now found themselves thoroughly demonised. The public was reminded that the order ran a number of Magdalene Laundries. The uproar over the hospital came hard on the heels of the re-revelation that hundreds of babies had died of natural causes at the Tuam mother and baby home between 1925 and 1961, with many buried in an unmarked grave of an as yet to be determined nature.
A few weeks before that we had more uproar when the Public Accounts Committee showed that some religious orders have not yet met their full commitment to the redress scheme for victims of institutional abuse.
So, in recent weeks we have had three outbursts of anger in quick succession at the Church connected to past sins.
Is this anger necessarily antiCatholic? Not at all.
Many Mass-going Catholics are angry as well.
But it is the relentless nature of the criticism, which Archbishop Martin referred to, the refusal to acknowledge the enormous good work the likes of the order have also done, and still do, that veers towards anti-Catholicism.
When can we say a person is strong against something, that they are anti that something?
Well, as an example, no one who pays attention to these things is in any doubt that the likes of the ‘Daily Mail’ in Britain is anti-EU. It is relentless and unceasing in its criticisms of the EU. It puts the worst possible interpretation on every EU activity. It draws little or no attention to the good the EU does.
Put all this together, and how could it deny the ‘Daily Mail’ is anti-EU? There isn’t a journalist in Ireland who does not believe that the ‘Daily Mail’ (the British version at any rate) is anti-EU.
But most journalists would probably deny that there is any real anti-Catholicism in the Irish media.
They would think any attacks are fair criticism.
However, the attitude of large parts of the Irish media to the Catholic Church is the same as that of the ‘Daily Mail’ to the EU, or for that matter of the hard left towards Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael. The attacks are similarly unrelenting. The worst interpretation is frequently put on the actions of the Catholic Church. The bad things it does, or did, are continually highlighted and the good mostly ignored.
We find the same in Irish drama. When was the last time you saw a sympathetic portrayal of a priest or a nun in a major Irish drama, aside from the movie ‘Calvary’? Instead we get the worst kind of priests and nuns in the likes of ‘Song for a Raggy Boy’, or ‘A Love Divided’, or ‘The Magdalene Sisters’.
The very worst kind of priests and nuns are passed off as representative of all of them. The only good priests and nuns are the ones who dissent from Church teaching.
A few years ago, Amarach Research conducted an opinion poll (commissioned by The Iona Institute, which I head) which found that one-in-five people in Ireland would be happy if the Catholic Church disappeared from Irish society completely. If this isn’t anti-Catholicism, then what is? The public also grossly overestimates the number of priests guilty of child sex abuse.
There is no major organisation, idea, religion, society or civilisation with a long history that does not have dark chapters. Britain, for example, has plenty, as we used to love reminding ourselves. But it would be a travesty to reduce British history to the Great Famine, the Black and Tans or Bloody Sunday and leave out, for example, its fantastic tradition of parliamentary democracy, or the way it stood alone against Hitler for part of World War II.
Similarly, it is a travesty to reduce the Catholic Church to its dark chapters only. Yes, there are plenty of those, even without the exaggerations. But that is not the whole story by a long shot. When it is turned into the whole story, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that there is a certain amount of anti-Catholicism at work. And if we can’t recognise some of what is happening as anti-Catholicism, then what will it take, the full restoration of the Penal Laws?
When was the last time you saw a sympathetic portrayal of a priest or nun in an Irish drama?