Irish Catholic Church still unable to face truth

I ’m gobsmacked! The Catholic Church in Ireland has been through such a difficult time in recent decades that you would think it’s the one institution that has managed to learn something from its many mistakes. Like, for instance, being able to recognise a simple truth after its multitude of lies and cover-ups were exposed! But no! The Church in Ireland appears still to be totally unable to face the truth. The blame it has placed on RTE for the poor attendance at Pope Francis’s Mass in Phoenix Park in Dublin defies credibility.

As a journalist, and on behalf of all my journalistic colleagues in RTE, how dare the Church blame messengers who did their best to promote Pope Francis’ Irish visit. We were well aware we had a much different task than the only time a pope ever visited Ireland before – in 1979 when one million people had already gathered in Phoenix Park even before Pope John Paul II landed, and another couple of million greeted him elsewhere in Dublin, and in Drogheda, Galway and Limerick.The world’s head of the Catholic Church was a welcome visitor, then.

The messengers, us in newspapers and colleagues in RTE and other broadcasting outlets, had no difficulty in spreading the word. This time, it was much different. Only 152,000 from the anticipated 500,000 turned up for Pope Francis’s Phoenix Park Mass. So, the Catholic Church blamed RTE. What absolute tripe! People stayed away from Pope Francis’ mass because of what happened in Ireland since Pope John Paul’s visit. Has the Church forgotten the extraordinary revelations about the behaviour of the two most prominent clerics on the stage with Pope John Paul in Galway? Mind you, it’s no longer regarded as that extraordinary! At least the people involved in sex partnerships with the late Bishop Eamon Casey and Fr Michael Cleary were adult women! The history of abuses that have unfurled since – and the Church’s appalling attempts to cover them up – involved a series of appalling offences, including sexual abuse by clerics of children.

Surely, the Church today hasn’t forgotten any of that, or has it? It cannot possibly have forgotten the dreadful abuses of young people by two clerics whose victims still shudder at the very mention of their names; Sean Fortune, who sexually terrorised young boys in Wexford, Belfast and Dundalk, and Brendan Smyth who sexually abused more than 200 children in 40 years in the priesthood. I could go on with a very long history of why Catholics didn’t flock to see Pope Francis. It’s a list that would include scandals in Cloyne and Dublin and many more dioceses. It would include horrendous details of young women used as slave labour because many gave birth outside marriage and were forced into institutions run by nuns.

It would include the shame of hundreds of dead bodies uncovered in a mass grave near a home run by nuns in Tuam. None of what I listed above was public knowledge before Pope John Paul’s visit in 1979. All of what I listed, particularly the Church’s continuing attempts to cover up its scandals, contributed to a massive fall-off in attendances at Mass, to a growing queue of couples marrying outside the Church, and – very sadly – to a lengthening line of couples who no longer bother to have their children baptised in the Church. That’s what affected attendances at Pope Francis’ functions in Ireland. The sooner that’s accepted, and the weather and RTE coverage no longer blamed, the sooner the Church can start on a long road to recovery in Ireland.

The idea of Ireland as the last bastion of a stable Catholic society has been a myth for decades. The numbers of those who opt to join the priesthood, to become nuns or to join other religious vocations has been in serious decline since as early as the 1960s, driven not by revelations of abuse, but by the same factors that have been at work in other Western societies. As Ireland became better educated, richer and more secular, its people were increasingly less prepared to accept blindly the dictates handed down by priests and bishops on how they should live their lives.

To outsiders, the church in the 1980s might have appeared at the height of its power; with the emphatic support of the electorate, it won two referendums to keep divorce and abortion illegal in the first part of the decade. But serious challenges to church hegemony were already taking root. The introduction of free secondary education in the 1960s, along with the growing prevalence of television in Irish homes, enhanced disposable income and increased access to foreign travel, meant that a new generation, exposed to other types of societies, came of age in the 1980s who would eventually lead and win what journalist Patsy McGarry referred to as the “moral civil wars” on matters of contraception, divorce, homosexuality and, ultimately, abortion.

And yet if the dislodging of the church as Ireland’s most important institution has been a longer, slower process that many recognise, the idea that Ireland has simply transformed into another secular Western European country is also a caricature. In 2013, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin published an article entitled “A Post-Catholic Ireland?” in America: The National Catholic Review. In it, he explained that one can “fully define post-Catholic only in terms of the Catholicism that has been displaced.” For the sociologist Gladys Ganiel, “post-Catholic” does not mean that the island of Ireland was once Catholic and now is not.

Rather, she believes that the dominant, traditional form of Irish Catholicism is losing ground, but that different spiritual outlets are emerging to fill the void. In some cases, this has meant other forms of Christianity; in others, it has meant extra-institutional religion; in others, a new relationship with the church. But in all cases, the people Ms Ganiel interviewed for her work could not stop talking about Catholicism, defining their choices in terms of the church or against it; Irish Catholicism may be in decline, but its legacy continues to cast a long shadow.