Feisty new Ireland leaves the church panting to keep up: political muscle once abused by bishops results in a legacy of diminshed respect - Cover Story

National Catholic Reporter, July 29, 1994 by Michael J. Farrell

DUBLIN, Ireland - In a new, fermenting Europe that changes shape and structure before one has time to redefine or describe it, even Ireland is a moving target that eludes easy answers as it sheds old stereotypes and peers, now furtively, now feistily, toward the 21st century.

This national shudder is nowhere more profoundly felt than in the area religion.

The Eamonn Casey affair, although it shook the country to its Catholic foundations, was not so much a catalyst of the church's fall from grace as a sign of the times. When word broke in 1992, in sensational fashion, that the popular, high-profile bishop of Galway had, 17 years earlier, fathered a child, centuries of everything that was good and bad about Irish Catholicism boiled over in an orgy of glee or gloom, recrimination or exhilaration. Casey was just an excuse to shake hands with the devil.

While theologians may remind us that the church is the people of God, those same people of God tend to look at the institution when the church is mentioned. The institution, too, is a complex entity, but in Ireland more than most places it seems to mean the bishops.

A bishops'church

In a historically depressed island, where so many people's misery had so much to do with their faith, and where, most of the time, no other leadership was allowed, the bishops loomed larger than life. When the bishops spoke, they spoke for God. And the God they spoke for was a stern, relentless deity, even angry and vindictive if people did not toe the line.

Bishops representing such a God, while often personally kind and frequently courageous in war, famine or other misfortune, were collectively formidable and brooked no nonsense in the new Catholic Ireland that emerged earlier this century the British were finally removed from most of the island.

Thus, few hierarchies were as lukewarm about the reforms of Vatican II as Ireland's. The Irish bishops, after centuries of religious oppression, finally had just the church they wanted, fashioned in their image. They believed they knew what was best for the people and generally had the clout to enforce it.

And they had reason to distrust Vatican II, which taught Catholics to think for themselves. The do-as-we-say authority they had built up for centuries crumbled under the onslaught of new thinking, the flames fanned not only by the Casey matter but by other real or alleged scandals.

Side by side with this spiritual softening, a secular formation was happening in Ireland. In one generation, the European Economic Community, more recently called the European Union, caused the cultures, economies and politics of member countries to overflow their borders and create a maelstrom of new attitudes and initiatives, mostly decidedly secular and materialistic, that left no old stones unturned.

Ireland, despite continuing high unemployment, benefited greatly from this union and is presently enjoying a minor economic boom. The Irish population is extremely young. The thrust is outward and forward. The nostalgic "backward look" to Celtic twilight or faith of our fathers has vanished. The music on the radio is about the same as in New York or for that matter Berlin or Rio. The TV and movie fare is standard Hollywood. The young people who, a generation ago, might have opted for a religious vocation are now unabashedly in search of money and the good times and things it can buy.

What emerges from dozens of conversations and interviews is the decline in influence of the church in Ireland and the corresponding rise of a secular outlook and culture.

Media potshots

The legacy of bitterness left behind by an often authoritarian, arrogant, unkind, undiplomatic church establishment was evident in the frenzy with which the media gloated over the Casey affair. Two years later, the vitriol continues to flow. Sins of the Cloth" runs a big black headline in a Dublin paper. A Church Rocked by Gossip and Scandal" runs another.

"An Irishman's Diary" in the highly regarded Irish Times (June 2) introduces the alleged French rascal Rabelais, who managed to be a Franciscan friar, a Benedictine and a father of three; in other words, a perfectly average Catholic priest." This kind of cheap shot would have cost the writer a career change just a few years ago.

The new catechism took several hits in the press. "A Shepherd's Pie," one writer called it, noting that the cover drawing depicted someone playing the pan pipes to an attentive sheep, presumably your average Catholic. Worse, concludes the writer, "the sheep ... looks smug and self-satisfied. There are very few such Catholics around these days.-

And a columnist in the Sunday Press writes that the catechism offers "a hell, a full-blooded medieval one with eternal fire," and goes on: "Any organization that can say with a straight face that it was born from the pierced heart of Christ hanging dead on the cross ain't gonna take no messin': 2,000 years of tradition (a word that runs like a millepede through the book) did not melt away with the first twang of the first guitar at the first folk Mass."