Two popes, two very different countries
WHEN the St Patrick, the flagship Boeing 747 of the Aer Lingus fleet, banked slightly over Dublin’s Phoenix Park to give Pope John Paul II a view of the crowds waiting to hear him celebrate Mass, what he saw was not what he thought he saw. Yes, there were 1,250,000 people waving the white and yellow flags of the Vatican, and they sent out a roar so loud it seemed entirely possible he might even have heard it.
Over the three days of his visit, 2.7m Catholics – and maybe members of other denominations who were captivated by his undeniable charisma – saw him in person. Having reached well over two-thirds of the population at the time, it surely was with some confidence he felt able to say, just before his departure, ‘Ireland – semper fidelis.’ Ireland, always faithful.
Except it wasn’t that simple. Revolutions usually start in pockets before the factions coalesce to become an unstoppable force, and the seeds of massive social change already were being planted before September 1979. Indeed, awareness of the emerging progressive spirit of the time surely led to the visit in the first place, in the hope that the tide of secularism, or at least the early ripples, might somehow be reversed.
John Paul confirmed this at his final Mass at Greenpark racecourse in Limerick.
‘Your country seems in a sense to be living again the temptations of Christ,’ he preached. ‘Ireland is being asked to prefer the “kingdoms of the world and their splendour” to the Kingdom of God. Satan, the Tempter, the Adversary of Christ, will use all his might and all his deceptions to win Ireland for the way of the world.
‘What a victory he would gain, what a blow he would inflict on the Body of Christ in the world, if he could seduce Irishmen and women away from Christ.’ But being seduced they were. The movements that dominated the Western world – the women’s lib crusade that developed into modern feminism, sexual freedom, the defiance of Humanae Vitae by couples who wanted to limit the size of their families, the drive for gay rights and for civil rights in general, the urge to throw off the most repressive of the doctrinal shackles – did not go unnoticed here, or unenvied.
While many countries were a generation, or at least half a generation, ahead in questioning the pillars of the faith, already there was a thirst among a diverse group of agitators for Ireland to catch up.
For the Church, it was a last chance to draw a line in the sand. Always faithful, Ireland surely could be relied upon to become an exemplar to Catholics everywhere, and return to a life of quiet obedience and public devotion. Indeed, for a time it did. Just four years later, the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, that copperfastened the ban on abortion was passed by a significant majority. That same year, 1983, the Supreme Court dismissed David Norris’s challenge to the 1885 law criminalising homosexual acts, referring in its judgment to the ‘Christian and democratic nature o f the Irish State’. In 1985, a referendum that would have allowed divorce was defeated. To many, this must have seemed the greatest dividend of the visit, reinforcing the sway of traditional values and dealing a blow to the growing mood for change.
It dropped slowly, but change came nonetheless. As the World Meeting of Families gets under way, this week, perhaps the biggest upheaval since 1979 has been in our understanding of what family actually is. In 1979, the Pope was unequivocal. ‘May Irish mothers, young women and girls not listen to those who tell them that working at a secular job, succeeding in a secular profession, is more important than the vocation of giving life and caring for this life as a mother,’ he said. ‘The future of the Church, the future of humanity, depend in great part on parents and on the family life that they build in their homes. The family is the true measure of the greatness of a nation.’ That might well have been true, but it was predicated on a very narrow definition of family, and one which, in the four decades since, has expanded dramatically.
It wasn’t impossible back then for unmarried girls and women to keep their children, but outside the bigger urban areas, it certainly was unusual. Nowadays, births to unmarried women, whether in relationships or not, are commonplace.
Families are smaller. In 1979, most parents still had at least three or four children, and others considerably more, and they had them much younger. Generations of women gave birth to their last child at a younger age than others now become mothers for the first time, a consequence of women staying in the workforce for longer and then juggling the two roles. The Pope, at his peril, had failed to appreciate multi-tasking.
Divorced parents can remarry, leaving two families blended, or custody arrangements established by the courts. Gay women can enlist a donor to become pregnant, and gay men can have children by surrogacy. All can legally adopt. Men and women alike can change their gender identity and, if they
choose surgery, their sex too. We have families of many different faiths and ethnicities. In the 1979 Census, delayed for three years because we couldn’t afford the one that was due in 1976, there were no Muslims. In 2016, there were 62,032. And, ironically, the massive influx of Pope John Paul’s fellow Poles since 2004 has reinvigorated Catholicism in some areas.
All of these changes took time, though, and the reason for that also had it roots in 1979, and the years immediately preceding it. In 1973, President Éamon de Valera died, and he was among the last of the political figures who had fought in the 1916 Rising and the War of Independence. He and his fellow insurgents became respected statesmen, and they fashioned an Ireland that was insular and devout.
In matters of morality, they bowed to the will of the bishops, and at local level, villages and towns were policed by priests who had unchallenged power. Rigid censorship left people ignorant of matters political and sexual, and the ban on contraception left women exposed to multiple, and often fatal, pregnancies.
The generation that followed in the footsteps of the founders of the State were more worldly wise. Charles Haughey acquired a large fortune and his acolytes bent the rules for personal gain.
Fianna Fáil won a landslide victory in the 1977 general election by promising the sun, the moon and the stars to voters, but the price of that victory, coupled with the second oil crisis, in 1979, was punitive.
The teens and young adults who cheered the Pope for four full minutes at Ballybrit racecourse in Galway were the same generation that left on the ferry to London or the plane to Boston.
They might well have been an accelerant for change but they left an older generation doggedly defending the ways of the past. It was a decade of stasis moping around in a duffel coat and desert boots.
And then two things happened. The first was the Celtic Tiger. It seemed like we had been let out of boarding school, maybe even the borstal the Eighties felt like, and we let our hair down a little. We didn’t all party, as Enda Kenny once accused, but we were able to afford to travel a bit more and see how others did things. Satellite television brought a new window onto the world, and affordable computers and the internet placed all human knowledge at the fingertip placed on a mouse. It was an intoxicating leap into the future. The second thing that changed everything, though, was the tsunami of scandals that rocked the Church. In 1994, there was the case of the snarling, brutish Fr Brendan Smyth, who sexually abused at least 143 children. We were shocked when Bishop Eamonn Casey was revealed to have fathered a child with Annie Murphy, a vulnerable divorcée entrusted to his care. Popular singing priest Fr Michael Cleary, Casey’s partner on stage at that Mass in Galway in 1979, fathered two sons with his housekeeper.
Thanks to the brave testimony of their victims, we learned of serial abusers Fr Seán Fortune and Fr Ivan Payne, the latter of whom molested children in hospital when he was chaplain in Our Lady’s in Crumlin.
We heard of the reign of savagery in Goldenbridge Orphanage from Christine Buckley. There were endless revelations about the cruelty inflicted on women in unpaid slavery in the gulag of laundries across the country. More recently, we learned of the callous disposal of children’s remains in Tuam.
This did not dent faith in God, but it severely damaged faith in the Church, especially when its policy of simply moving offenders from parish to parish and covering up their actions became public. As we saw this week in Pennsylvania, that is a worldwide phenomenon.
It is not yet known how directly Pope Francis will address these issues when he arrives here next Saturday. What we do know is that there will be no repeat of the moment John Paul II looked out an aeroplane window and saw one-third of the population of an entire country in one place.
How his heart must have soared to see Ireland. Semper fidelis Ireland. The rock on which a new and invigorated Church would thrive…
But that’s the thing about change. It happens behind your back and by the time you realise the scale of it, you’re unlikely to be able to do anything about it. Parents know this and deal with it daily, fine-tuning their responses to guide children through the fun years of absolute dependence, the trials of puberty and adolescence and, ultimately, the reward of raising rounded adults who understand responsibility, feel empathy, and project joy.
As Pope Francis arrives for the World Meeting of Families, he might humbly ponder the fact that, very often, lessons can be learned from the bottom up rather than from the top down.