Pope is not like a plumber - he can’t just pop in and fix it all
What, then, is to be hoped by Catholics for Pope Francis’s 36-hour visit to Ireland this weekend? In a word, grace
IT HAS been said that Pope Francis comes to a very different Ireland in 2018 than the one Pope St John Paul II visited in 1979. In some ways that is obviously true. After all, that Ireland was on the verge, partly in response to that papal visit, of passing constitutional protections for the life of the unborn, while this Ireland has just resoundingly rejected those same protections.
That Ireland was one where most people went to Mass, more than 90pc of marriages took place in Catholic churches, and Ireland was still a land with multiple seminaries and plentiful vocations. Today’s Ireland has seen swift and steady decline in all those variables.
Yet if we consider more deeply, John Paul II’s 1979 visit was necessary, and the Eighth Amendment was conceived of, because the trends so dramatically evident today were already well under way. Thus, in 1979 no less than now, though less visibly, Ireland was on a path away from traditional forms of observance and practice of the Catholic faith.
What, then, is to be hoped by Catholics for Pope Francis’s 36-hour visit to Ireland this weekend? In a word, grace. Grace is the “free and undeserved help that God gives us to respond to his call to become children of God”.
Two days, two months, or two years of a papal visit would not in itself in any direct way reverse the trends of secularisation that are well noted in the Irish secular and religious press on a regular basis. But popes do have the ability to help people be open to the grace that God offers, if only because the office still commands a certain awe, retains a certain aura of mystery that lifts the mind to wonder “what if it’s true after all, that hope-filled tale we had begun to think was merely a dream?”
Pope Francis arrives in Dublin to a Church abuzz anew with fresh horror at a scandal that is not new but is certainly still raw. He arrives to a World Meeting of Families intended to celebrate and support an institution that is under strain throughout Christendom.
Should we expect and hope for important gestures like meeting with victims of abuse and perhaps even announcing more concrete reforms, say to discipline bishops, which is perhaps the key untended task of reform in the wake of a global scandal? Perhaps. Should we hope for an inspiring elaboration on the need for loving families to be a cornerstone of society? Of course. But to address either of these topics adequately in 36 hours would be a daunting task – to address both may well be a feat beyond any mortal.
And perhaps that makes the point. The visit of a pope is not like the visit of a plumber or an electrician. He can’t pop in and fix what seems broken before returning to his shop in Rome. A papal visit is rather a time to stop paying attention, as best we can, to Donald Trump, to ‘The Great British Bake Off’, and even to sport. It’s a moment to pause and gather with others who, mostly in our infancy, were “claimed for Christ” at our baptism, and to reflect on what that means for us as we are living now.
The Church is not a social services agency or a network of schools and hospitals. It is our spiritual home as the people of God.
When Pope Benedict XVI visited Washington DC in 2008, I was able to attend his remarks on the South Lawn of the White House as well as his Mass in Nationals Park. What stands out for me was not the words he said in either place, but the transcendence of the day that made even the hardened Washington press corps standing near me look at one another in awe and a shared awareness they had been a part of an encounter with the eternal.
In particular, I recall how moving it was to hear confessions for three hours with dozens of other priests around the stadium, often from people who were returning to the
sacrament after many years away. The Pope had no power to force them there, but his arrival was a moment of reflection, a pause and an opening to grace and mercy that many suddenly realised they needed and welcomed.
And so here, in a very different Ireland in 2018, an Ireland far less visibly Catholic and sometimes angrily and stridently postCatholic, we find ourselves stopping and wondering what to hope for from this visit.
We see a Church and a world which, in the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins SJ (who wrote and died very near my office here on St Stephen’s Green) is “seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; and wears man’s smudge share’s man’s smell”. Scandal and lament have a staleness about them which dulls and depresses. A papal visit interrupts the tedium and gives a chance to consider whether Hopkins wasn’t also correct that, despite it all, “there remains the dearest freshness deep down things”.
That pause is an opening to grace, and it is no small thing to hope for. Such moments are essential along the way to conversion, our lifelong journey of accepting the call to live more truly as God’s children.