by Mark Tully
*
There are some in the Catholic Church who are campaigning aggressively against the new form of secularism that has no time for religion. The Redemptorist order used to be renowned for fighting sin, with fiery sermons threatening hell fire and damnation for any breach of Catholic morality. Now in their Novenas (nine-day missionary campaigns), they preach charismatic Catholicism and attract large crowds, which create traffic jams in the part of Ireland where John Hayes lives.
A pugnacious new Catholic paper called Alive, edited by another Dominican, reaches over 3,000 homes. The edition I bought criticised the European Union for its ‘anti-religious direction’ and a non-believing professor of genetics for his ‘low view of human life’. There was an article praising the ‘huge role of the Catholic Church in Western civilisation’ and another attacking ‘anti-Catholicism’, saying it was rapidly becoming Ireland’s ‘ugly little secret’. All good strong stuff. But, although Father Bernard admitted that Alive was having an impact, he said, ‘I am unhappy about its aggressive tone, and I do wish some of the stances it adopts were more nuanced.’
However, in spite of these recent developments, there is still a chronic shortage of men entering the priesthood, not only at the Maynooth seminary, where parish priests are trained, but in all the other religious orders too. According to Father Bernard, four men had entered his order recently, but fifteen had died. Nevertheless, he felt that the morale of the Dominicans was holding up, and there was no doubt that he and his colleague Father Tom were in good spirits when I met them. On the other hand, Father Bernard feared that the parish clergy were ‘a dispirited lot’, distressed by the impact of the recent sex scandals and lacking confidence in the leadership of their bishops.
The morale of the parish clergy isn’t helped by a hostile media. In his book The End of Irish Catholicism?, Father Vincent Twomey writes: ‘It is incontestable that, from the point of view of the Catholic Church, the Irish media can be described as the most hostile media in the developed world.’ He describes an interview with a Catholic priest that had been broadcast on the Public Service Broadcaster RTE as like ‘an interrogation by the thought police’. Where most of the Irish press was once subservient to the Church – a subservience that enabled the cruelty and sexual abuse of some Church institutions to remain hidden for so long – now there is almost universal hostility towards it. It’s as though journalists are taking revenge on an institution that once imposed an unofficial censorship on them. But it’s also an example of my profession’s tendency to see things in black and white.
The Irish state, which once listened with reverence to the Church, now misses no opportunity to demonstrate its independence from it. It didn’t listen when the Church complained about the lack of public holidays marking religious festivals. And it even did its best to prevent a Catholic weekly advertising on the radio; then, when that decision was overturned in the courts, it still insisted that advertisers couldn’t claim the Church was doing good. Apparently, now in Ireland advertisements can claim anything from soap flakes to new cars, from chocolate to new homes to be ‘good for you’ – but not the Church.
Similar obstacles have been placed in the way of establishing a Christian radio station. A Catholic lay woman I talked to, whose husband edits a paper in rural Ireland, was incensed by what she saw as the anti-Catholic bias of the national media and the state. ‘Our government – whoever is in power – and all the media are very anti-Catholic in their outlook,’ she complained. ‘It seems that they can say whatever they like about us and our Church, but we must be tremendously tolerant of everybody else. The use of the word “pluralism” is fine – sure, to be inclusive of ethnic minorities and other religions is very desirable – but does that make “majority” a dirty word now?’
However, David McWilliams, an economist and popular Irish television presenter, has detected signs that the pendulum may be swinging back the other way. He believes that the rampant materialism of a country that has travelled in not much more than ten years from being the ‘poor man of Western Europe’ to the ‘Celtic Tiger’, outstripping the economic growth of everyone else, is producing a backlash. In his best-selling book The Pope’s Children, he claims that many committed secularists who fought against the influence of the Church in the 1980s are now so dismayed by the materialism that has taken its place that they are urging people to ‘tiptoe back to the Church’. There is also, according to McWilliams, already ‘a revival of religion in Ireland in various incarnations’. He argues that now to be religious is to be radical because ‘it involves a rejection of all that is mainstream’. Interestingly, the biggest exhibition on St Patrick’s Day in 2005 was the Irish International Mind, Body, Spirit and Healing Arts Exhibition.
Sister Geraldine Smyth is not surprised that people are coming back to religion, because she believes, as I do, that there is ‘an irreducible religious instinct in all of us’, and only a culture that takes account of this can be balanced. There is, I think, another reason as well.
McWilliams’ book The Pope’s Children is intended to be a celebration of the generation born either side of the visit of Pope John Paul the Second to Ireland in 1979. It is also a critique of the ‘Commentariat’ – the crusty critics who can see no good whatsoever in the materialism that has replaced Catholicism in recent years. Such a critique is obviously necessary. Those like me who criticise consumerism and materialism need to be reminded that poverty impoverishes the spirit and the mind as well as the body. We need to realise that our ideas about material prosperity might be very different if we ourselves had ever been poor. How people react to affluence has to be their own business. We can only seek to keep the dialogue going in order to present arguments against excessive materialism and to seek a balance between the material and the spiritual in the life of individuals and of communities.
But having accepted this much, a lot of what McWilliams celebrates in his book seems to be unsatisfying in the long run and unlikely to meet the needs of the Irish people’s religious instinct, if Sister Geraldine and I are right about that instinct. The materialistic benefits listed by McWilliams include ‘borrowing, spending, shopping, shagging, eating, drinking, and taking more drugs than any other nation’.
Ireland appears to have swung from being lean and hungry to wallowing in its own obesity. According to McWilliams, Ireland’s ‘hard men’ were once scrawny lads because of their poor diet, but these days double chins have apparently become de rigueur and in their faces ‘little piggy eyes are squeezed into sockets among the flab’. He also quotes figures that suggest that thirty per cent of Irish women are now overweight. But on the other hand, Ireland, once renowned for being laid-back, is now a nation of workaholics. Every other shop in Dublin seems to dispense fast food, because Dubliners no longer have time to do more than snatch a snack. Not so many years ago I spent the afternoon in a crowded bar near Cork. When I asked my drinking companions what the area’s main industry was, back came the reply with a roar of laughter: ‘Unemployment!’
For all their newfound enthusiasm for work, apparently the Irish still find the time and the energy to have sex 105 times a year. Released from Catholic strictures against anything but the straightest of straight sex, Irish people are also now remarkable for their adventurousness. However, McWilliams reveals that this new freedom is not proving much more satisfying than the old ways were, at least from the woman’s point of view. Perhaps the Commentariat may be forgiven for questioning how satisfying the new Irish secular ethos will prove to be, although that is no argument for a return to the dead hand of the Church.
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What has Ireland lost by throwing away so much of its religious culture? The most obvious loss is individuality. When I was recently in Dublin I came across a story in the papers about the decline in tourism. The board for promoting tourism put this down to the fact that tourists no longer regarded Ireland as different from any other western European country. It’s lost an aspect of the culture for which it was once celeb
rated.
For all that he was not a practising Catholic, the novelist John McGahern still missed the old ritual of the Church. In his autobiographical book Memoir he said, ‘The Church ceremonies always gave me great pleasure, and I miss them even now. In an impoverished time they were my first introduction to an indoor beauty of luxury and ornament, ceremony and sacrament and mystery.’ Mind you, the Church is in part responsible for this loss, because it has now swung too far from its tradition of awe-inspiring worship clothed in mystery and a sense of the transcendental to people-friendly worship that is thoroughly down-to-earth.
The moral philosopher Father Patrick Hannon discerns in Ireland a society made unhappy by ennui and greed; and he regards it as the Church’s challenge to point this out and to offer an alternative. A Roman Catholic writer, Dr Desmond Fennell, has analysed Irish society as suffering from ‘anomie’, that is to say an absence of social norms and values. In a response to Vincent Twomey’s The End of Irish Catholicism?, he writes:
Our people – amid the debris of their nation, with the inherited Christian rules declared invalid by the Power and no civic ethic to fall back on – are immersed in anomie. Life, appearing senseless, induces much anguish and depression. Attempts, especially by the young and sensitive, to quench these pains give the republic one of the highest rates of alcohol consumption and drug abuse in the European Union; drive many young men to suicide; drive many girls to reckless sex and guilty abortions. Talk of ‘dire need’; there is a famine of foods for the spirit and soul.
Some will immediately think, ‘Well, two Catholic writers would say that, wouldn’t they?’ But when I went to see one of the grand old men of Irish politics, Dr Garrett Fitzgerald, I found he too felt that his country was suffering from anomie after rejecting the Church’s rule book. And Garrett, as he is known to all Irishmen, is a Catholic who has by no means always supported the Church’s stand. During one of his two spells as Taoiseach, or Prime Minister, he attempted to legalise divorce in the teeth of ecclesiastical opposition. He added a clause to the constitution that gave a mother, as well as her unborn baby, the right to life – against opposition by the Church, which opposed the change as a weakening of its stand on abortion. He also undermined the Church’s stand on sex by liberalising contraception.
When I met him in his modest house in a residential area of Dublin, he was trying to work out how to arrange the tables for the party in celebration of his eightieth birthday without offending anyone. Always an advocate of a liberal Ireland and what he called ‘a non-sectarian nation’, he conceded that now he was concerned that Ireland was too liberal, that it had lost one moral code but not found a replacement. ‘The Church had such a profound impact on morality, and it wasn’t a rational morality,’ he said. ‘It was dictated by God, the Church claimed, so people didn’t think out their morality. Now people no longer accept that morality, what do they have? What are their guidelines?’
‘So does that mean you believe that morality has to have a Christian base?’ I wondered.
‘Oh no,’ he replied hurriedly. ‘You can have civic morality without the Church, but the domination of the Church and the colonial power meant we never developed it here.’
Garrett was particularly critical of the Church for teaching that morality was derived from God rather than the basic need for humans to live together. ‘Acknowledging that we have to live together,’ he explained, ‘gives you a rational basis for morality a basis which makes you – not God – responsible for it.’
‘But that basis is surely not the basis of the consumerism and individualism that have replaced the Church’s morality in Ireland?’ I asked. ‘Aren’t they based on the very opposite of the need to live together?’
‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘They’re based on pleasure – and pleasure is personal. It’s what pleases us as individuals. Happiness comes from our relationship with others. But, you know, the bishops and priests concentrated on personal issues too, particularly family law. They ignored issues of injustice. Why, for instance, did they never take up the issue of tax evasion?’ The Church, he felt, had suffered from ‘a deficit of morality’ and ‘an overemphasis on sex’ which led it to ignore or play down other issues. But, in spite of his criticism of the Church’s morality, Garrett regretted that its influence had declined so far and fast. He believed the Church had a part to play and this part was ‘the prophetic role, which it had abandoned for an institutional role’.
In the newspaper article that first inspired me to set out on my journey to Ireland, John O’Donohue called for ‘prophetic reflection’. He had also described his country as having ‘driven urgency but little sense of destination’. Those words rang true to me because I too had been through a period of life in which I had a driven urgency to become a successful and well known journalist; but within myself I had always known that this was not a destination in which I would ever be able to rest happily. This was because I couldn’t rid myself of what Sister Geraldine had called the ‘irreducible religious element’ in myself. Now, I felt that the lack of a sense of destination and a sense of meaning were the most profound losses Ireland had suffered – deeper than the anomie, the decline of the once almost universal familiarity with the Church ceremonies, which had left such a mark on McGarhern, and the disappearance of difference. Ireland seemed to me a land that was adrift because it had pulled up the anchor of its rich past and yet had no new course to guide it into the future. It had failed to find the middle way between tradition and change.
On my last evening in Dublin I had dinner with the poet Michael O’Siadhail and his wife Brid. During our conversation he described the role of poetry as ‘looking at the past in the present to prepare for the future’.
‘That’s what Ireland should be doing, that’s what we should all be doing,’ I said to myself as I scribbled his words in my notebook. ‘All three should be connected with each other – the past tradition and history, what they have taught us; the present we have to live in; the future, the changes we have to prepare for.’
The search for meaning in life is very much part of Michael’s Irish tradition, and so he was shocked when he first went to Norway and found that people there shrugged their shoulders if he raised the issue. But he believes that the Church has been mistaken in the past when it claimed that it alone knew what that meaning was. When I suggested that the Church’s position showed a lack of humility, he said, ‘Yes. There can never be only one point of view. No one has a monopoly on the truth. You must say, “I think I am right but I may be wrong. You think you’re right but you may be wrong.” Because I accept that there can never be one point of view, I wouldn’t want my poetry to be read through my lens. I would like readers to find their own meaning.’
Michael believes that today’s Ireland is a victim of certainties that have been ‘narrowed down’. This has led to the passion for measuring success and achievements, which he describes as ‘a mode of thinking that is appropriate in some places and totally inappropriate in others’. The current certainties he particularly disapproves of are those that can be summed up by the phrase ‘It doesn’t pay so don’t do it’ and ‘the adoration of money’. Although Michael is nervous of nostalgia, he said, ‘I may be wrong, but I sense a loss of that Irish sense of questioning; that sense of joy, in the world around us and all its riches. An appreciation that this richness reflects something bigger and greater than me – wonder and awe, huge humility, gratitude too. You’re part of it; you’re part of the work of it all.’
But the giant cranes looming over Dublin are tearing its heart out in the rush to create an ever busier hive of human activity. The construction sector, the financial sector, the leisure sector and all the rest of them are booming. Servicing these sectors, and simply keeping them going, leaves no time for anyone to wonder what it’s all for, or to feel wonder and awe for anything except the never-ending new technologies and the amount of money they generate. What awe there is, is reserved for us humans and our ingenuity; it isn’t an awe o
f the world around us with all its riches.
Ireland’s busyness leaves no time for the ‘tiny glances of infinity’ that first led Michael to ‘give in to the wonder of the world’ and emboldened him to write poetry. One of his poems, called ‘Freedom’, seems through my own lens to be warning Ireland against taking its new found liberalism too far:
Freedom.
Enough was enough. We flew
nets of old certainties,
All that crabbed grammar
of the predictable. Unentangled,
we’d soar to a language
of our own.
Freedom. We sang of freedom
(travel lightly, anything goes)
and somehow became strangers
to each other, like gabblers
at cross purposes, builders
of Babel.
Slowly I relearn a lingua,
shared overlays of rule,
lattice of memory and meaning,
our latent images, a tongue
at large in an endlessness
of sentences unsaid.
‘We flew nets of old certainties.’ But now Ireland seems enmeshed in new certainties. The Church has been humbled because it became too mighty. There are signs that the arrogance of the secularists is now producing a backlash; that there are the beginnings of a return to religion. But, to paraphrase the words of Karen Armstrong, the danger is that the religious may retreat into a fundamenalist fortress.
When returning from Ireland I thought of the great English twentieth-century poet Kathleen Raine. She was so concerned about what she called the ‘spiritual impoverishment’ of Western society that she founded the Temenos Review and the Temenos Academy. The journal gives space to artists, writers and others who subscribe to the belief that man is primarily a spiritual creature with spiritual needs which have to be nourished if we are to fulfil our potential and be happy. The Academy is a teaching organisation based on the same belief.
