In defence of Catholics and also of Catholicism
With liberalism the new dominant ideology, maybe we need to change the tone slightly when we talk about Catholics,
AT Mass last week the priest made an interesting point. He was saying that people have to have a reason for their faith now, an explanation for it, a story of why, if you will. What was interesting was his reasoning as to why the congregation needed a reason, a story to tell. It is, he said, because Catholicism is no longer the dominant ideology in Ireland. It didn’t sound like he was saying it with regret. He was just stating a fact. It sounded like he had adjusted to this new reality and he was telling us, the congregation, that we needed to adjust to it too.
Indeed, Father Criostoir sounded buoyant last Sunday about the state of the Church. He pointed out that he had had packed houses on Good Friday despite there being no obligation on Catholics to attend church on Good Friday, and he had been busy all weekend. And there were lots of young families there too, he said.
A cynic might have countered that the young families were there for many reasons, not all of them to do with devotion. But they were there. Father Criostoir reckons the foundations are solid. And he wants the congregation to have a reason for their faith, even to communicate it to others, a bit of old-fashioned evangelism.
Coincidentally I met Father Brian D’Arcy the other night and I was asking him about it and he had a similar story. Packed houses all weekend. He had Easter eggs for the kids — 300 of them. And he ran out. Again, there are presumably all kinds of reasons why there were hundreds of kids at Mass last weekend — Easter, eggs and Father Brian being among them. But still. It made me wonder if there is a story here that the media is missing. Is the Church as deceased as all of us in the liberal modern metropolitan media believe?
I think we in the media can sometimes be guilty of ignoring the facts and telling the story as we think it should be. For example, when the recent census figures revealed that 78.6pc of Irish people identify as Catholics, it was characterised everywhere as “a sharp drop”, from the 84.2pc who identified as Catholics five years before. An alternative view of those figures is that it is astonishing that four in five of the people in this country still call themselves Catholics, for whatever cultural or convenient reasons they do. It is astonishing too that, in five years in which the Church was pretty much public enemy No.1 in this country, as more and more scandals continued to unfold and as old scandals refused to go away or got worse, only 6pc of people stopped calling themselves Catholic.
You would have thought that this incredible resilience should be examined. It is an enormous story. Nearly four-fifths of people still identify themselves in some way, through religion, culture or identity, with an organisation that has been found in recent years to have presided over the most appalling abuse of children, an organisation that was complicit in and has been blamed for a whole culture of subjugation of women in this country.
Four-fifths of people still use the name of probably the most maligned institution in Ireland, possibly the world, to self-identify. We didn’t get much examination beyond an acceptance that most of these people are probably not practising Catholics and most of them just ticked the box because they were born into the Catholic faith.
I still find it extraordinary, given the antagonism towards the Catholic Church, that four fifths will call themselves Catholic, however convenient it is.
I’m not suggesting for one second that 80pc of the population are Catholic, or that all those people at Mass last weekend are all devout believers, or that the Church in Ireland is thriving the way it used to. And we have no measure of the number of core believers out there. But I do think that we are possibly missing something here. And maybe we are missing it because we are in a bubble that has a very fixed view about Catholics.
There is a certain tone now to any conversation around the Catholic Church in much of this country, especially among the metropolitan elite. It is assumed that all right-thinking people think the Catholic church is an appalling thing. Those who still believe are a dying breed of dinosaurs, knuckle-draggers, sexist. All priests are slightly creepy guys, most of them with some kind of a want in them. Many of them are just gays who didn’t have the courage, or the opportunity, to be gays in the real world. And while that Pope Francis seems like a progressive enough chap, he is just a dead cat bounce in an outdated institution that’s been found out.
And look, people have plenty of reasons for their attitudes to the Church. And the idea of giving a bunch of nuns ownership of a maternity hospital built by the State is probably best summed up in Peter Boylan’s two words “Come on!” Indeed, as David Quinn pointed out in the Sunday Independent why do the nuns even want to own a hospital?
But there is often a nasty undertone to all these conversations. We liberals can tend not to be the most tolerant of people with different beliefs. And the Catholic Church is as different from us as it gets. Preachy, dogmatic, intolerant of anyone with different views... Oh. Hang on!
Joking aside, there is often this certain undertone to conversations that involve the Catholic Church. Fundamentally the undertone is that Catholicism is evil, and sometimes even that the people who subscribe to Catholicism are bad people, people who would deny women and children their rights, people who stand over abuse, people who want to hold back progress. And it’s true that there are aspects to some Catholic’s beliefs that would be offensive to the average non-believer. But equally there is a casual intolerance towards Catholicism in general that is a bit nasty, and that we would not dare apply to any other belief system or religion.
And look, I know, I know, they are often guilty of forcing their beliefs on the rest of us, and they run all the schools and they run the health service and the Church has an inglorious history in this country. But most Catholics I know are not bad people, or judgemental people, or hectoring people. I probably know more hectoring liberals than I do hectoring Catholics at this stage. I even find myself wondering if, in its humbling, the Catholic Church has become a better place, and the devout better people, who have been allowed to go back to what it is all about. Most Catholics you meet are miles ahead of Church dogma, miles ahead of the institution, in their views on sexuality, divorce, and even nuns. And Catholic churches can be places of great joy and community, places of huge diversity, where the old, the young, the poor, the disabled and the vulnerable are welcomed as equals.
When the Catholic mammies of Ireland went out and voted for gay marriage it is because they were reminded that gay people were not “Other”. Gay people were their sons, their daughters, their sons’ and daughters’ friends, our brothers and our sisters.
Now that liberalism has replaced Catholicism as what Father Criostoir would call the dominant ideology, certainly in the public discourse, maybe it is incumbent on us to remember that Catholics are not “Other”. They are our mothers, our fathers, our brothers and sisters and neighbours and friends. It doesn’t mean we have to let the nuns run the maternity hospitals, but perhaps we should try and change the tone slightly when we talk about Catholicism.
The institution of the Church has failed Catholics as it failed all of us and it’s been difficult for many of them. But surely they deserve some modicum of respect for their beliefs.
‘They are our mothers, our fathers, our brothers and sisters...’