The new Ireland: it's not Catholic, for one thing

National Review, May 9, 2005 by Anthony Daniels

THE death of the Pope presented the taoiseach (prime minister) of Ireland with a dilemma: Should he declare an official day of mourning or not? After all, Ireland is a country whose Catholicism, like that of Poland, has for centuries been intimately connected with its national identity and struggle for independence: and even the Jesuit-educated atheist of Cuba, Fidel Castro, decreed three official days of mourning for the Pope in his besieged tropical Communist redoubt.

But Ireland has a new secular religion, which one might call Multiculturalist Mammonism. The Mammonist wing of the new faith, represented by the head of an association of small businessmen, said that too much money would be lost by a day of mourning, hundreds of millions of dollars; while the taoiseach, the latest leader of Eamon de Valera's party of grim, bitter, Counter Reformationist Catholicism, said that Ireland was no longer a Catholic, but a multicultural, society.

Of course, it wasn't the reaction of the massed Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, and even Protestants of the Republic that the taoiseach feared: It was the rabidly secularist and anticlerical intelligentsia whom he wished not to offend (or dared not offend)--for hell hath no fury like a multiculturalist intellectual scorned.

How the whirligig of time brings in his revenges, and quickly too! No Catholic priest will now walk the streets of Dublin dressed in clerical garb, while across the water, in England, with its centuries-long tradition of anti-Catholicism, no Catholic priest would think of doing otherwise. It is true that, unlike in Mexico, there is as yet no law in Ireland confining priestly garb to the interiors of the churches themselves, but there might as well be. While the Church of England withers on the vine, the cardinal archbishop of Westminster has become a power in the land; but in Ireland, where once cabinet ministers bent the knee to bishops, no one takes much notice of what the Church thinks. Perhaps the moral of the story is that too close an identification of church with state always results in nemesis--for the church.

The anticlerical secularists in Ireland have managed to forge another identification of the Church, this time with pedophilia. Three percent of Ireland's convicted pedophiles are priests, and with the synthetic moral outrage that usually signifies a preconceived desire to destroy the power of an institution, the secularists have created an association in the public mind between clerical collars and the sexual abuse of children.

The destruction of ecclesiastical power in Ireland has not been instantaneous, of course. It started in the 1960s, with the arrival of television. Eighteen months after the first broadcast, a gadfly intellectual, Brian Trevaskis, appearing on the Late Late Show, called the new cathedral in Galway a monstrosity. It goes without saying that was right; it is a monstrosity. But to call so important a religious edifice anything other than splendid and magnificent was, at the time in Ireland, shocking; and worse still, Trevaskis went on to call the chairman of the building committee of the cathedral, none other than the bishop of Galway himself, a moron. As it happens, he was not a very popular man, known as "Cross" Brown, more because of his temper than because of his religious affiliation; but no bishop in Ireland could then be referred to in public in terms other than the deeply respectful.

The heavens, however, did not fall; not only did they not fall, but Trevaskis appeared on the television the following week, and the week after. It became possible openly to doubt the wisdom of Church prelates. (Incidentally, Brown's successor as bishop of Galway was the much-loved Eamonn Casey. He fathered a child--first denying that he had done so, then admitting it, and resigning in disgrace.)

A reform in the early Seventies, giving unmarried mothers a living allowance from the state, eventually resulted in profound transformation of the social mores of the country. It hardly needs pointing out that such an allowance was against the teachings of the Church. Hitherto, the birth of a child to an unmarried woman was a scandal and a shame, attaching mainly to her; either the child was removed from her, or she was bundled off to a none too comfortable home for such mothers and babies run by the Church. But Ireland, however inward-looking it might have been, was not an entirely closed society: Printed and broadcast material was always available from Britain and America, and the harshness of the treatment of illegitimacy in Ireland began to seem anachronistic.

Thirty years later, 40 percent of Irish births are illegitimate, just as they are in Britain. The men of Ireland may be said to have voted against the teachings of the Church with their sperm. That this development is likely to be disastrous, both socially and for the children as individuals, is now almost unsayable in Ireland, because to say it is to be taken as expressing a wish to return to the old, harsh treatment of unwed mothers and their illegitimate offspring, to the old priest-ridden days when poverty and suffering was regarded as the glorious lot of Holy Ireland. Hence there is a silence on a matter of the greatest social importance, perhaps even an internalized evasion of the whole question.