The ‘Pope’s children’ are aged almost 40 – and their world is very different now
APPROPRIATELY enough, the London-based firm that installed the 1,400 lavatories in Knock for the crowds attending the papal visit was called Archangel Interiors.
Even for somebody who lived through those extraordinary days, September 29 to October 1, 1979, the scale of the crowds that turned out remains truly mind-blowing.
Pope John Paul II concelebrated Mass in the Phoenix Park in Dublin before a crowd of 1.25 million people. He travelled to Killineer, near Drogheda, Co Louth, where more than 250,000 people heard him issue a heartfelt appeal for peace in the North. Back in Dublin that evening, he spoke to journalists and then visited President Patrick Hillery at Áras an Uachtaráin.
On Sunday, September 30, he travelled to Ballybrit race course in Galway for a Mass attended by 200,000 young people. On his way to Galway, he had stopped at the Clonmacnoise monastic site, in Co Offaly, where he was met by 20,000 people.
From Ballybrit, he flew to Knock where he spoke to a crowd of 400,000 people. On Monday, October 1, the Pope met seminarians in Maynooth and then travelled to Greenpark race course in Limerick where he addressed 400,000 people on the theme of family, before flying on to the USA out of Shannon.
The entire visit was an intense communal experience which at the time was compared with the Eucharistic Congress in Dublin way back in 1932. The total attendance topped two million and for some at the time it seemed to presage a new “golden age” for the Catholic Church in Ireland.
For the historian JJ Lee, writing less than a decade after that epic visit, he still saw it as “a rallying point for a variety of mentalities resentful at recent social changes”. In his remarkable ‘Ireland 1912-1985’, Mr Lee saw it as helping the lead-in to the September 1983 Eighth Amendment to the Constitution about abortion, a move which was only undone by voters last month.
Writing some 15 years later again than JJ Lee, historian Diarmaid Ferriter noted that subsequent events showed that “in retrospect it seems to have been one last blast”. Earlier indicators of waning commitment by many Irish people to the Catholic faith resumed in the ensuing years following on from John Paul II’s memorable visit.
The Church’s decline in popularity was compounded by a series of child sex abuse scandals which emerged in the 1990s and beyond. Things were not helped by a slow response by the Church authorities which further disenchanted even some of their more loyal followers.
Social change on the issues of sexual morality, so often emphasised by the leaders of the Irish Catholic Church, has come slowly but in a continued trend. In 1995, Irish voters narrowly endorsed divorce, having rejected it back in 1986, and in 2015 they resoundingly backed same-sex marriage.
After last month’s big result in favour of a more liberal abortion regime, it was remarkable to hear two Catholic bishops describe the Church’s position as “minority”. The Primate Archbishop of Armagh, Dr Éamon Martin, spoke on RTÉ about wanting to be “a relevant minority”. Clearly, a heck of a lot has happened between two papal visits.
Some social commentators have noted that a baby boom emerged in summer 1980, directly after that 1979 visit by John Paul II.
Those children, many of the boys inevitably named John Paul, are facing their 40th birthdays inside two years.
They have lived through a period of frenetic economic boom, depressing slump, and now boom again. They have seen the emergence of 24-hour news, social media and other high-technology gizmos. They live in a vastly different Ireland to the one they were born into, not least because of a significant rise in secularism.
This population cohort’s response to the visit of Pope Francis will be worth studying. Like John Paul II, the current Pope is charismatic and decidedly different from the stereotypical view of a high-ranking prelate.
Pope Francis is also two decades older than John Paul was in 1979. This is advanced in part as a reason for curtailing the scale of his visit, including ruling out a visit to Northern Ireland.
Yet it remains very sad that the Pope cannot visit the North this time either. Pope John Paul’s plea for peace outside Drogheda on September 29, 1979, still resonates to this day.
The image of Arlene Foster and her Democratic Unionist Party colleagues shaking hands with the pontiff in Armagh should not require such a leap of imagination.