Like every other western country, the Church has been declining here, with ever increasing rapidity, since the 1960s. The impact of the abuse scandals is easily overblown; I think more people are worried about their jobs.
Almost all priestly abuse is historic. Only 2 priests in Ireland have been convicted for sexual abuse offences committed within the last 20 years.
I am the first to argue that the bishops have been scapegoated to an alarming degree and that Cardinal Brady’s actions have been much misrepresented. But that does not account for the lethargic incompetence the Irish episcopacy displays in the discharge of their duties. In the old days, in a mostly rural Ireland, it was common for priests to be personally well-acquainted with all, or most, of their parishioners. The old communal tribal ties which knitted society together have since become untangled, and with them, the very nature of how priests relate to their parishioners. In the early-to-mid 60s Archbishop McQuaid got very hurt when newspaper columnists, in the liberal fervour of the times, suddenly took it upon themselves to criticize him in often venomous language. This was a new experience for him, and he didn’t know quite how to react [previously anti-Catholicism was most forcefully expressed in the Irish Times, then the newspaper of the Protestant minority]. Often he would stir in his room for many hours in sullen dismay. The confusion that set in during this time, on the relationship between the church and the media, has never been conclusively settled.
Mc Quaid’s replacement, Dermot Ryan, epitomized the class of ‘new priests’ appointed to bishoprics in the 70s. Perceived as revolutionary at the time, they are now the Church Establishment. Everywhere you look in the Irish Church, you see them. McQuaid had previously dismissed Ryan from teaching at Clonliffe seminary because he was allegedly teaching modernism to the seminarians. Ryan’s appointment to the see of Dublin was seen as a political statement by the Vatican. Ryan had a powerful friend in the papal nuncio Gaetano Alibrandi, and under the influence of the two, and by the careful appointment of preferred bishops to dioceses, the Irish Church was reconstructed into what it is today. The chair of the Dublin Council of Priests was on a TV discussion panel a few months ago to discuss the contents of the Murphy Report. He expressed amusement at the audience’s media-imbibed tendency to protray bishops like Donal Murray as paragons of reaction, remarking that when he in the seminary these prelates were seen as the ‘new priests’, whose cool outgoing ‘pastoral’ nature contrasted with the relics of obscurantism they were supplanting. This was supposed to be a new dawn for the church, but the church disintegrated in the interim because clergy kept changing what the church meant.
As a recent editorial in Church & State noted:So the Pope came [in 1979 - shane] and he was received with mindless adulation, lay and clerical, with only two noticeable expressions of dissent — this magazine and the Bishop of Cork, who is now taken to be a by-word for obscurantist reaction, Con Lucey.
The Taoiseach was Cork City politician Jack Lynch, who had won an overall majority in 1977 in an election campaign which was unusually Catholic clericalist for Fianna Fail. But, two years later, the Pope did not visit the second city in the state because the Bishop did not invite him. And, some time later, Lucey retired and went off to be a missionary in Africa. He did not ever explain his failure to invite the Pope to Cork, but it is not hard to see a reason for it.
Vatican 2 Catholicism undermined and trivialised the earnest Catholicism of Pius IX on which the Irish Church had formed itself, in association with the developing national movement, since the mid-19th century. That phase of development was not exhausted in Ireland when it was halted by Vatican 2. It was still filling itself out when it was ordered to stop. If the original impulse given by the triumph of Anti-Vetoism in the Veto Controversy was running out of momentum, there would have been evidence of this in the appearance of a sceptical intelligentsia to dispute certain areas of ground with the Hierarchy, and by so doing to provide for an evolutionary transition to a new relationship of Church and State.
What happened instead was that the new Church formed in Ireland in the mid-19th century—by O’Connell’s Roman colleague, Cardinal Cullen—was stopped in its tracks by the Vatican, while there was still no social development against it to take its place. The Vatican 2 changes had to be imposed on Ireland. And their imposition devalued the values to which the generations then in their prime had dedicated themselves.
Religious development in Ireland, with which social development was connected, was suddenly written off as an aberration. My Lord Bishop suddenly became Bishop Jack or Bishop Jim. Communion and Confirmation became occasions for display of fashion. Hell was abolished—and Heaven along with it, for all that was said to the contrary. And convents and monasteries were deprived of meaning.
The ersatz intelligentsia, which is now kicking the Church because it is down, did nothing to bring it down. It was the Vatican that undermined it. But that is an inadmissible thought in the fashion of the moment because the futile scepticism which is the outcome of Vatican 2 must have it that Vatican 2 was good thing. (The creature must love its creator.)
The Archbishop of Canterbury eats his words
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