Church has become the new ‘auld enemy’
The history of the Church hasn’t all been glorious, but it hasn’t all been terrible either
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. For generations, Catholicism has been synonymous with Irishness and this has contributed to the overarching sense of betrayal many Irish people feel about the Church.
Francis will have to tread carefully. As well as the private meeting with those who have experienced abuse, the Pontiff will also likely address the scandals in his public utterances. His predecessor, Benedict XVI, wrote to Irish Catholics in 2010 and didn’t pull any punches when he observed that the Church’s failures to tackle abuse “have obscured the light of the Gospel to a degree that not even centuries of persecution succeeded in doing”. Expect something as strong from Francis.
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. At one level, that’s hardly surprising. Nothing anyone says can heal the wounds of those who have been hurt.
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 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 any more – not really. Many people have decided that they’re just no longer interested in buying what the Catholic Church is selling. Most just get on with their lives, it’s only a small core that continues to obsess about the Church. It’s almost like if the Catholic Church didn’t exist, they’d have to create it in order to hate it.
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.
It’s a lazy and clichéd version of history that quickly (and conveniently) absolves people of the sort of self-reflection that would lead us to ask questions like why our grandparents were so quiet about places like Magdalene Laundries.
With the Church firmly in the firing line, we are free to avoid deeper questions about the nature of Irish society. The message is simple and constantly reinforced: Catholic Ireland = bad; new Ireland = 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-dimensional 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 by many priests, nuns and religious brothers.
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. Religious brothers run education classes for teenage boys who have been excluded from schools as a result of their behaviour. 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 and any fair-minded person would acknowledge this.
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. The history of the Church in Ireland certainly hasn’t all been glorious, but it hasn’t all been terrible either.