Patsy McGarry: How Ireland Lost Its Faith
There was a time when Irish Catholics might have been delighted to see the pope lavishing attention on their bishops. On Feb. 15 and 16, however, when Ireland's bishops were at the Vatican to discuss an ongoing child sex abuse scandal, Catholics back home were furious. Catholics were already upset about Pope Benedict's refusal to apologize to the thousands of abuse victims in Ireland or even hint that he would meet with them, as some had requested. But what really set them off seems to have been the images of their bishops kissing the pope's ring....
Andrew Madden, the first person in Ireland to go public about his abuse by a priest, described the meetings at the Vatican as "a complete waste of time" and the greatest act of window dressing he had ever seen. Abuse survivor Marie Collins said it was an insult that the resignation of bishops didn't even make the agenda. Additionally, she said it was deplorable that the pope's statement was "so far away from accepting that there was a policy of coverup."...
Not so very long ago and for the great majority of Irish people, their Catholicism was synonymous with their national identity. To be Irish was to be Catholic. It was something of which most Irish were very proud.
In the latter part of the 19th century, the church grew to become the most powerful civic institution on the island, controlling most of Ireland's schools and the greater number of its hospitals.
This allowed the church unparalleled influence throughout most of the 20th century in what is now known as the Republic of Ireland. That continued to be the case until the latter decades of the last century when its influence began to wane due to increased affluence and a better-educated population. With the events of the last few years, church leaders can no longer ignore the extent to which they've lost control of Irish society.
The most recent scandal has centered on a series of damning government reports into the physical, emotional, and sexual abuse of children by clergy members. The Murphy Commission report, published last November, found that in Dublin's Catholic archdiocese, by far Ireland's largest, "clerical child sex abuse was covered up" by church authorities from 1975 to 2004. It also found that all four archbishops of Dublin over that period investigated sexual abuse complaints and that many of the auxiliary bishops handled these complaints badly. None of the four archbishops reported their knowledge of abuse to the police "throughout the 1960s, 1970s or 1980s."...
Not surprisingly, the combined effects of these sex scandals have driven Irish Catholics away from the church at a time when many were already drifting away. For instance, according to recent surveys, 43 percent of Irish Catholics attend weekly Mass, a drop of 52 percent since 1973, though still about twice the average for most Catholic countries in Europe....
Meanwhile, fewer and fewer young men are entering the priesthood. For people of a certain age, the very idea of an Ireland without Catholic priests is truly beyond imagination. The bishop of Killaloe, Willie Walsh, recently recalled that of the 50 students in his Leaving Cert class (equivalent to the U.S. 12th grade) in 1952, 20 went on for the priesthood. In 1961, Pope John XXIII even said: "Any Christian country will produce a greater or lesser number of priests. But Ireland, that beloved country, is the most fruitful of mothers in this respect."
Almost 50 years later the situation is dramatically different. The archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, has said his archdiocese will soon have barely enough priests to serve its 199 parishes. "We have 46 priests over 80 and only two less than 35 years of age. In a very short time we will just have the bare number of priests required to have one active priest for each of our 199 parishes," he said in November. The average age of Irish Catholic priests today is 63. Members of religious congregations have an average age in the early 70s. Each priest must retire at 75. As the Americans say, you do the math!...
In a 2003 article for the Irish Times, Father Vincent Twomey, a retired professor of moral theology at St. Patrick's College who studied with Pope Benedict himself at a postgraduate program in Germany, wrote, "Irish writers in the early part of the 20th century ... sensed that something was seriously wrong with 'traditional Irish Catholicism'. They saw it as narrow-minded, anti-intellectual and rigorist on morality. They were right."...
With Irish society largely lost to it, the church's final frontier may be the primary-school system, of which it controls 92 percent. But now, the child sex abuse scandals, along with substantial immigration into Ireland over the past 10 years, have significantly increased pressure toward more pluralist control of primary education, something which -- to the surprise of many -- the Catholic bishops now say they favor. Archbishop Martin even called the Catholic control of schools a "historical hangover that doesn't reflect the realities of the times and is, in addition, in many ways detrimental to the possibility of maintaining a true Catholic identity in Catholic schools." If this is the case, it seems the last great battle of Ireland's moral civil wars -- that over control of education -- may be avoided.
And the Catholic Church in Ireland will continue its retreat from a position of unquestioned dominance in society for more than a century and a half, to a more humble role on its margins. "In the painful solitude of the desert, the church must learn how to return to its fundamental mission," Archbishop Martin has said. Some might suggest that is exactly where it belongs.