'The
Church Brought to its Knees': Two books on Catholic
Ireland's retreat
Irish
Catholicism since 1950: The Undoing of a Culture,
by Dr Louise Fuller
(Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2004 pbk)
Goodbye
to Catholic Ireland:
How the Irish Lost the Civilization They Created,
by Mary Kenny
(Springfield, Illinois: Templegate, 2000; 1st ed.
London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1997)
Book
Review
Seaghán Ó Murchú • 26
June 2006
Michel
Houellebecq, the French "right-wing anarchist"
provocateur living in Ireland, in his new novel
translated as The Possibility of an Island,
has his atheist protagonist from the very near future
(who as in his previous three fictions seems nearly
identical with his creator!) reflect how:
the
last thirty years of European history had been
marked by the massive and amazingly rapid collapse
of traditional religious beliefs. In countries
like Spain, Portugal, and Ireland, social life
and all behaviors had been structured by a deeply
rooted, unanimous, and immense Catholic faith
for centuries, it determined morality as well
as familial relations, conditioned all cultural
and artistic productions, social hierarchies,
conventions, and rules for living. In the space
of a few years, in less than a generation, in
an incredibly brief period of time, all this had
disappeared, had evaporated into thin air. In
those countries today no one believed in God anymore,
or took account of him, or even remembered that
they had once believed.; and this had been achieved
without difficulty, without conflict, without
any kind of violence or protest, without even
a religious discussion, as easily as a heavy object,
held back for some time by an external obstacle,
returns as soon as you release it, to its position
of equilibrium. Human spiritual beliefs are perhaps
far from being the massive, solid immovable block
usually imagined; on the contrary, they are perhaps
what is most fleeting and fragile in man, the
thing most ready to be born and to die. (245)
Since
Michel and I are about the same age, we may represent
the last generation able- if barely- to recall a
childhood filled with these now vanished verities.
'All that's solid melts into air' matches not only
Marx's manifesto. The dissolution in the last third
of the last century of one of the Church's last
European bastions, Ireland, can now be analyzed
thanks to two recent studies. Compared to Dr Louise
Fuller's Irish Catholicism since 1950: The Undoing
of a Culture (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan,
2004 pbk), journalist Mary Kenny's Goodbye to
Catholic Ireland: How the Irish Lost the Civilization
They Created (Springfield, Illinois: Templegate,
2000; 1st ed. London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1997)
is lighter not only in size but in style. But, as
with Fuller's academic study of five decades, Kenny
traces too (if in condensed form) the previous history
of Irish Catholicism that led up to its undoing.
Fuller and Kenny both incorporate effectively the
'Question Box' feature of the paper the Messenger
of the Sacred Heart to cite how ordinary Irish
Catholics acted and thought, and what such men and
women worried about in their practice of the Faith,
or at least its outward signs of devotion. Both
authors evoke well the legalistic, overscrupulous,
and rule-bound nature of a Catholic practice rooted
in the ritual, the recital, and the repetition of
prayers, visits, or duties in precisely the same
manner, or else risk damnation.
Kenny
persuades effectively, however, that this emphasis
on "externals" rather than interior reformation
was balanced somewhat by the kindness many- contrary
to persistent stereotyping blaming the sins of a
few scandalous figures on the goodness of the self-effacing
majority- found so notable in Irish Catholicism
over most of the 20th c. She gives fair credit to
the thousands, if not millions, who sought to find
comfort and relieve injustice, and how Irish Catholicism,
for all its faults, drew many towards a more generous
spirit- again countering media distortion. By delving
into the anecdotes and asides of many, both clergy
and laity, Kenny strives towards a fair depiction
of what made Irish Catholicism both admirable and
reprehensible, and it his to her credit that you
close this book better aware of the intricacies
and the impacts of both qualities.
She,
born around WWII, also intersperses her own coming-of-age
into what used to be called "women's liberation"
as one of the pioneering Irish feminists, circa
1970, alongside such as Mary Bourke, later President
Robinson. On varied issues Mary Kenny has valuable
insights, such as the material abundance of the
North vs. the poverty of the 1950s South, on women's
roles within the Church and the power they exercised
and the marginalisation they faced, on the struggle
for personal liberty from rules and strictures vs.
rampant consumerism that has transformed Ireland,
and on the distortions of the film version of 'Angela's
Ashes' vs. the more complicated reality of Catholicism
and its then-inextricable ties with all of Irish
life. Kenny emphasises the freedom some women were
able to grasp within the limits of clerical dominance
as well as the restrictions with which we are lately
made more familiar by the media. She strives towards
balance, and lets all sides of the debate have their
say. Goodbye does jump about too much, although
chapters generally follow chronology. At times her
journalistic knack for summation overshadows a reader's
wish for more in-depth insights, but she does refer
to many more such sources in her narrative that
can provide these considerations. (As an aside,
may I recommend Kenny's excellent biography of 'Lord
Haw Haw' William Joyce, Germany Calling,
exploring deftly this complicated man's career and
delving deeply into his Irish roots; he was a one-time
Galway-based spy for the Crown against the IRA,
for example.[Dublin: New Island, 2003])) Goodbye,
as a popularized account, is not weighty but contains
a wealth of ideas, albeit in scattered form.
Kenny
blends her own experiences, her wide reading (everyone
from Camille Paglia to a lout in 'West Side Story'
joins the usual parade of scholars and the press),
and substantial attention to primary sources. She
has plumbed archives of the Irish Press and
the Independent to support her arguments.
Contrary to what I expected, this book takes its
title seriously, and does not skim over either the
failings or the successes of Ireland's brand of
faith. She reminds us that the missionary spirit
and the awareness of the international membership
of the Church joined many Irish- well before its
present emergence into a more ethnically diverse
society- to their fellow international communicants.
It may have been in the now-banished forms of saving
pennies for 'pagan babies' and slipping change into
a St Martin de Porres statue placed next to the
shop till, but Catholics in Ireland proudly identified
with the universalism of the 'catholic' Body of
Christ in its global, polyglot, and many-shaded
incarnations. This early multicultural thinking,
she demonstrates, prepared the way for an Irish
ethos geared towards- well before Trócaire
(Concern) and Bono- what used to be called 'corporal
works of mercy' for those needing rescue.
Kenny
also separates republicanism from Catholicism in
a thoughtful argument. Notwithstanding a few partisan
remarks of Cardinal Ó Fiach about 'the lads'
in Long Kesh, most of the hierarchy and clergy did
not let any residual sympathy for the old IRA taint
their opposition to its newer adherents. Fuller
discusses politics much less than education, for
instance, but she also contrasts the anti-physical
force position upheld by many clerics from the stereotype
of gunrunning padres perpetuated often by Catholics,
their Unionist opposition, and papist enemies. While
a few clerics aided the 'Ra (see Martin Dillon's
God and the Gun- references to this controversial
book oddly missing from Fuller and Kenny; both books
tend to skim the Six Counties), the majority kept
their sympathies in check- as they had in the War
for Independence, which at least the hierarchy largely
condemned even if many among 1916-21's rank and
file clergy tended more towards vicarious militancy.
The 60s appeal for making a better world may not
have led many Irish to hoist the grenade as a few
Latin American clergy had done. But the Irish episcopate,
many of whom initially resisted liberalisation,
pressed their post-1965 flocks towards the ideal
shepherd not of a vigilant pastor, but of their
own 'informed conscience'. As with liberation theology,
Marxist exegesis, and their applications to republicanism,
many priests and laity found that these sympathies
could be left more to one's private decisions. The
Irish, like all Catholics, found themselves ordered
to grow up. As they left behind 'childish things',
some grew confident, others dismayed. The Church
managed both to inspire independence in its younger
charges but too often to demand obedience from its
weakest and most vulnerable. Even as the faithful
were encouraged post-Vatican II to determine their
own spiritual direction, students, orphans, the
incarcerated teens, and single mothers, for example,
continued to belie the claims of care by a forgiving
Church. The offenses of its worst representatives
conjured up Jesus' haunting condemnation of those
corrupters of the young- deviants deserving to be
thrown, millstone-collared, into the sea. Kenny
points out that while the abuses that became exposed
in the 1990s did much to weaken the Church, that
its precarious position of power had begun to be
undermined much earlier.
1961
brought TV to Ireland, and from that year on, coincidence
or not, vocations declined. The high status, for
better and worse, given the clergy and those in
religious life, a feature that caught the attention
of any visitor to Ireland up until the 70s at least,
inevitably also declined, as laity were emboldened
by Vatican II and by relaxed mores. Kenny shows
how the language of rights hastened individualism;
how communal identity centered around faith precipitously
slipped as family rosaries were replaced by single
mothers, as daily Mass gave way to easy drugs. The
moral force of the Church could erode quickly; in
one incident she snappily shows how an old priest
opposed to a couple living out of wedlock was resisted
by them, and how his young successor chose simply
not to ever confront the couple. With this example,
she illustrates the rapid collapse of Catholic traditional
values and their regulation and enforcement by the
clergy in the space of a very short time. A slight
exaggeration, you may think, but Kenny shows the
cause and effect of the delayed impact of the late
1960s, which arguably in Ireland did not take full
momentum until the 80s. Historian Diarmaid Ferriter's
2005 The Transformation of Ireland (reviewed
by me recently in The Blanket) cites
approvingly Kenny's ledger of profits and debits
after the 20th century ended the clerisy that dominated
so many of its decades. If Fuller's 2002-published
book had been available when Ferriter wrote his
drafts, her more careful attention than that given
by Kenny's editors to her data's presentation would
have enlivened Ferriter's diagnosis on Catholic
Ireland's near-fatal fall, made fluently in his
own carefully compiled work.
I
clarify my reason for a lower rating of Kenny's
book than it could have earned: persistently poor
proofreading. Easily fifty errors mar this text.
Not only are many words misspelled, but many have
whole syllables missing. Either a spell-checker
was not used on the draft, or a fast typist failed
to edit the manuscript. Encyclical, on two pages,
appears four times. Twice it's spelled correctly,
twice incorrectly. This lack of attention to professionalism
does, unfortunately, diminish the impact that this
book aimed for, in my estimation.
This
is an American edition of the book (originally published
in Britain in 1997 in a version widely available
in Ireland), with footnotes and documentation missing
from this newer printing--in a bid for a wider audience
I assume--so as to give room to ten celebrities
from Irish life who offer brief and mixed recollections
of their own Irish Catholic formative years. I would
have rather read a better-proofread text, with citations
and endnotes instead of memories from Pierce Brosnan,
Maeve Binchy, or Tony O'Reilly, but then, I'm not
as star-struck but more book-addled than its probable
readership- note the subtitle's twist on Thomas
Cahill's facile bestseller- intended for this second
version of Kenny's eulogy, autopsy, and requiem.
Dr
Fuller, an historian fittingly at NUI Maynooth,
adapts what must have been quite a graduate thesis
into this book. In about 250 pages of main text,
she keeps a narrative flowing through an enormous
spread of research while never getting bogged down
in jargon, tangents, or polemic. Fuller keeps her
tone serious but not pedantic, no small feat given
the historical, theological, sociological, and educational
theories she must navigate along with hundreds of
primary and secondary sources to back up her arguments.
Having read Kenny's Goodbye to Catholic Ireland
immediately prior to Fuller, I recommend Kenny (despite
its plethora of typographical errors) for the beginner.
Fuller's coverage is understandably more in-depth
and analytical rather than conversational, although
both Kenny and Fuller investigate some of the same
sources.
Their
common and the best source being the 'Question Box'
where advice on accepted Catholic procedures was
sought and dispensed in the pages of the paper the
Irish Messenger of the Sacred Heart: chapter
3 of Fuller's book captures well the ethos and the
spirit of Irish Catholic mores circa mid 20-c, a
time nearly unimaginable by any observer fresh only
to today's Ireland.
Here
are representative examples from 'Question Box':
'Does a person who says the Rosary wearing gloves
gain the indulgences granted for the saying of the
Rosary on blessed beads?' (qtd. Kenny, 188) (Even
if satirist Myles na gCopaleen wrote this for his
1940s column 'Cruiskeen Lawn', it could not have
been bettered!) 'May one use powder to fix dentures
before going to Holy Communion?' (qtd. Kenny, 187)
'Is it right to say the Rosary in bed?' (qtd. Fuller,
32) Neither the authors nor myself are singling
these out as an easy target. These questions reflect
what even I in my post-conciliar (being born a year
before Vatican II convened) upbringing remember
very well: our scrupulous anxiety to follow rigid
rules if salvation was to be attained. While once
remarkable if only for its massive success in keeping
millions of Catholics under external conformity,
the distortions that over-emphases on such minutiae
led often in the popular mind to casuistry. The
ethical and the legal overlapped; the spirit of
the law was killed by the letter. Along with this
attitude, Fuller and Kenny agree, a childlike dependence
on authority followed often. This trapped power
in the clergy rather than compelled maturity within
the faithful in daily life. The training wheels
never came off the bike; the laity like the clergy
feared taking control of their own spiritual direction.
This disabled many Catholics; timidity bred subservience.
What
has been also been lost, both Kenny and Fuller concur,
is the good nature and the relative innocence of
that laity. Yet in a society where the arbiters
of proper conduct and approved thinking were the
clergy, many an ordinary Irish person was neither
encouraged nor much able to think at a sustained
level independently about moral judgements, interior
spirituality, or personal responsibility. Clergy
trained by rote in scholastic theology removed from
real life brought into their parishes and schools
an emphasis on managing to stay out of trouble,
manipulating the rules so as to earn redemption.
This mentality left both them and their charges
too childish, too trusting of authority, too dependent
on the 'Question Box'- or the strictures of the
confession box. Many could not function unless by
standards expected of a loyal Catholic - unless
as decisions enacted within the narrow framework
of a legalistic system that tended too often to
approve slavish adherence to actions and attitudes
that verged on the shamanistic if not superstitious.
Fuller
shows how this paternalistic, and parochial, culture
began to unravel as Vatican II encouraged the renewal
of an interior spirituality rather than a codified
adherence to 'externals'. Inevitably, this led Catholics
to begin questioning, since they were told to do
so, not only what needed repair in the Church, but
what served as the foundations and the props for
the Church in its dogma as well as its devotions.
Television, on New Year's 1961, arrived in Ireland,
and not coincidentally perhaps vocations from this
year on declined, slowly until 1967, then rapidly.
The loss of clergy meant lay control of schools,
and in turn lay control of how morality and catechism
were taught in an era that mandated less attention
to punishment of sinners and more on understanding
sin and expressing tolerance, ecumenism, and diversity
in a post-Vatican II progressive climate. (I believe
that the Messenger ceased publication around
1967, its Jesuit connection with the Apostolate
of Prayer having been severed. Neither Kenny nor
Fuller gives any date of its dissolution.). The
Society of Jesus, once stalwart troops sworn with
an extra vow to papal obedience, itself became riven
by the freedom that permeated every corner of not
only bedrooms and classrooms but convents and rectories.
I
may not be alone as a post-Vatican II youngster,
in recalling (contrary to the stereotype many have
inside and outside the Church) that I never had
a nun teach me, even in primary grades; the already
rather radical community known for their artistic
and progressive efforts that had once staffed my
parish had long battled our stodgy cardinal, and
by 1969 had discarded their habits and often their
vows. All but two elderly sisters decamped from
our local convent of fourteen to join Castro's sugar
harvests. Many of us born- like Houellebecq and
his narrators- into the West's later 20th century
inherited restless, alienated, perhaps foolish,
yet exuberant, spirits. Against seeds sown by the
fertile media no contraceptive barrier could be
inserted by the Church.
Fuller
captures this transition from submission to subversion
well. A representative passage not only demonstrates
her insights, but her skill at conveying them in
straightforward, readable prose:
Television
as a medium was impervious to power or position.
It was undaunted in the face of tradition. It became
the ultimate leveller- it could not be ignored,
and any criticisms were made at the critics' peril.
Whether its advances were welcome or not, it could
force itself on anybody. It demystified with ease
the kind of distance, aloofness and mystique which
had characterised the episcopal office in the past,
and its ultimate weapon was public ridicule, should
anyone choose to confront it. It would, in due course,
assume the role of taskmaster, and demand accountability
of bishops, politicians, public servants and private
persons alike. (132)
Most
of Fuller's main study focuses on the 1950-1979
period; the later decades are covered in less detail
in the last chapter and an epilogue. This period
could have earned far more in-depth analyses, but
perhaps data from 1980-2000 remain yet to be fully
studied. With Ferriter and Fuller now sketching
out the terrain of the past two decades, scholars
should better be able to move from the macro to
the microcosm to better chart the peaks and valleys
of Church influence. The author seems to hint as
much. Fuller admits on a vexing question of whether
modernization or scandals led to the deflation of
Church power in the 1990s that it's impossible to
disconnect one cause from the other and that the
answer cannot take only one side or the other, given
the complexity of causes involved that stretched
globally earlier and went far beyond Irish borders.
Still,
why it took until the early 1990s for the institutional
force of the Church to collapse may at first seem
puzzling. Even if TV appears above all to bear the
blame as the primary cause for the weakening of
Irish practice, this corrosive process still took
place slowly over decades. Fuller shows how the
erosion had begun by theologians who feared that
the Irish were too infantilised in their safe, nearly
medieval, and practically total Catholic lived environment
that flourished (at least on its outside) in the
50s. I recall John F. Keane's novel The Bodhrán
Makers, about the clash of Church and folk tradition.
Taking place fifty years ago, it seemed to me as
if it could have been five centuries ago, so permeated
were parishioners by the fear of failing to placate
the Orwellian PP. Half a century ago, Fuller reminds
us, nobody envisioned that Ireland would ever be
less than what Keane described: 90+% not only Catholic
by heritage but as regular communicants- at Mass
at least weekly. Confident in the loyalty of the
overwhelming majority, no one feared that secularization
seen in England or Western Europe would ever challenge
this Irish status quo. Clerical reformers, emboldened
by Vatican II, thought that they could liberalise
without alienating their parishioners. A few progressives
at first, then more clergy and laity emboldened:
they challenged Humanae Vitae, papal rigidity, sectarian
prejudice, and vestiges of devotional piety held
over from the post-Famine tamping down of the Church
into a sexually and intellectually repressive mold.
By the early 70s even a fearsome warden expecting
unwavering obedience, Dublin's prelate John Charles
McQuaid (see John Cooney's engrossing biography),
found his diocese under not only attack but subversion
that no canon law could silence. But these theologians
back in the 50s never predicted that a more flexible
liturgical and devotional practice would lead gradually
to a media and then popular assault four decades
later against the leaders of a cherished faith once
followed in its less fractious pieties by millions
of practitioners.
By
the 1960s, the liberalisation of mores through the
media had begun, and Ireland, although it took longer
due to its economic slump to be able to buy into
the consumer-driven suburban alternative to the
frugal and abstemious rural mentality, did so with
a vengeance by the 90s. The last opposition that
the Church could have mustered against licentiousness
crumbled in the wake of highly publicized sexual
scandals. The media, as Fuller shows with TV, refused
even in the 60s to kow-tow to the Church; the 1966
'bishop and the nightie' episode (also narrated
by Kenny in her book) early broadcast the power
of RTÉ, Gay Byrne, and his 'Late Late Show'
as the new arbiters of attitudes that owed nothing
to the once-feared and inescapably vigilant Church.
Ferriter includes a comment from Byrne that he did
not raise on the air what he did not think the maturing
Irish audience was already prepared for, prior to
his heated discussions. As with Oprah in the U.S.,
Gaybo has by now replaced the former apparatus of
private confession and penance with a televised
ritual of public debasement and collectively granted
reconciliation.
What
ultimately did the Irish Catholic church in was
its hypocrisy, Fuller insists. The austerity it
had so long and so forcefully demanded from the
laity at the same time had been flaunted in the
most deviant fashion possible by some of those who
castigated in others what they indulged in themselves.
True, only a few entered so deeply into such 'occasions
of sin', but their offences have tainted the many
more good deeds done by their clerical colleagues.
I have read elsewhere recently that the criminal
priests guilty for paedophilia totalled perhaps
one in 350 of the total clergy ministering in Ireland
over the past four decades. This is not to diminish
in any way the harm caused, only to stress how the
good clergy have been stained by the evildoers among
them.
A
quick personal aside. A few years ago I skimmed
a list of 350 accused (for adult molestation and
sexual issues more frequently than child abuse)
priests in my Archdiocese from the past few decades.
I had been acquainted with half a dozen. I shuddered
as I pondered the odds that I might have wound up
in the clutches of one- the most prominent of the
six clergy was a religion teacher of teenaged me
for four years, and later a very popular bishop.
My father thought, and many would have agreed, that
the bishop was one of the finest men he'd ever known.
The bishop was discharged for blackmailing a young
priest whom he had ordained despite the man's illegal
status in the country, his poor grasp of English,
and the priest's lack of seminary training. The
bishop blackmailed the priest into a sexual-power
relationship that resulted in the bishop (who had
been brought in to clear up the mess of a previous
bishop's sex-money scandal!) embezzling funds from
the diocesan coffers for his young and supposedly
compromised lover. The priest claimed none of it
was his own fault, but doubt persists about his
coercion among those who have studied the case.
Whether such predicaments can be blamed on outdated
celibacy, jittery strictures against gays in the
priesthood, or eternal temptations of money and
power leaves troubling causes, that may not all
be able to be heaped so smugly only at Catholic
parish gates.
Apropos,
Kenny shows what Fuller might have attended to with
her data: the Church of Ireland itself shrank per
capita 1950-2000 in membership due to modernisation
despite the fact its clergy married; Welsh sexual
abuses in schools and institutions were perpetrated
in and investigated over the same period, yet Welsh
schools were run by both clergy and laity able to
marry. The canard that if priests were not vowed
to celibacy, the Church would not have fallen into
this moral morass therefore remains suspect, given
the C of I and Welsh concurrent situations. Certainly
Kenny's comparisons merit extended academic investigation
in the near future.
Whatever
Church emerges from our rubble may be less populated
but more confident, as no one goes to church anymore
in today's Ireland for fear that their absence would
lead to one's persecution and ostracism. Those choosing
to be Catholic now select- as Americans do despite
papal admonitions- a cafeteria version of what they
agree and what they discard set before them. As
a convert once told me: 'we are all adult converts'-
that is, Western Catholics make up their minds about
how they will conduct their faith. Pope and magisterium
may fulminate. In what appears an irreversible manner
unimaginable to its 1950 adherents who packed its
churches not only on Sundays, Ireland has fulfilled
much of the 'worst case scenario' of the Church's
onetime nemesis 'pagan France', as secularism assaults
Catholicism. The Irish Catholic plurality seems
to largely share what their French counterparts
fifty years earlier had decided: Ireland has joined
a lax European Union of self-centred, leisure-craving,
better-educated, and affluent individualists.
Kenny
concludes that the Church never did conquer the
Irish soul, which still looks to the natural and
the transcendent for its nourishment. She accepts
that the Church, as with the government of the partitioned
Republic, could never have lived up to its lofty
ideals preached by its sacrificed founders. Fuller
holds no expectations for 'a Church brought to its
knees'. No 'mass appeal' will lure Catholics back
to disproved verities. The renewal Vatican II sought
to inspire in its faithful, ironically, now sustains
itself in a diminished core of adherents who must
look more to themselves, rather than a maligned
clergy, for spiritual and moral direction. The last
chance that the Irish church had in preserving its
integrity and rallying its congregations against
a permissive Western materialist ethos was squandered
by the deeds exposed of Bishop Casey, Frs Smyth
and Fortune, or the gay priest found dead in the
sauna whose Last Rites were given by two of his
colleagues present at the same Dublin bathhouse.
1985's visions at Melleray, Asdee or Ballinspittle,
many media pundits concurred, signalled the fading
burst of apocalyptic threat. Mary's appeals moved
few. John Paul's 1979 visit seemed a harbinger of
a future safe in 'the faith of our fathers'. Instead,
seminaries closed, communicants dwindled, and censures
shrivelled. This decline led to a fall. Scandals
were followed by the exposure of Magdalen laundries
and the CBS regimen. Decimated by recent referenda
over divorce, abortion, and birth control, the suspect
Church retreated from Irish allegiance. In Irish
as in Western culture, Catholic majorities may persist
awhile perhaps by tradition, custom, or attitude-
but not in practice, belief, or fidelity.
There
is no such thing as a dirty word. Nor is there a word
so powerful, that it's going to send the listener to
the lake of fire upon hearing it. - Frank Zappa
