The Best Catholics in the World: The Irish, the Church and the End of a Special Relationship

The Best Catholics in the World: The Irish, the Church and the End of a Special Relationship

Author: Derek Scally

ISBN-13: 978-1844885268

Publisher: Sandycove

Guideline Price: £16.99

In 2010, Derek Scally was so infuriated with the papal letter sent to Irish Catholic bishops about clerical sexual abuse that he wrote to Pope Benedict XVI “in my best blunt German”, noting that neither Benedict nor the Holy See were taking any responsibility in relation to the matter. The pope had suggested the Irish bishops’ response to abuse had “obscured the Gospel to a degree that not even centuries of persecution had succeeded in doing”.

Scally was not expecting a reply. But a month later “a creamy white envelope arrived from the Holy See. Inside: papal rosary beads. The Holy See’s equivalent of a corporate form letter: ‘Your opinion is important to us’.”

Scally, The Irish Times correspondent in Berlin since 2001, cares about religion and the Irish Catholic Church to the extent that he has written a reflective, textured, insightful and original book. As was evident in his letter to the pope, he is especially interested in responsibility for what went wrong, how it happened, and coming to terms with the extent of the pain caused.

Navigating those questions involved a three-year journey, culminating in a book rich with history, interrogation and emotional intelligence. It is also commendably full of doubt and uncertainty; Scally describes himself as a “grappling Catholic”, not ready to fully let go, seeking to understand rather than just condemn, and the book is all the better for that. He respects Ireland’s “many empathetic, educated and energetic religious”, but he also confronts the scale of the betrayals and the seeming inability of both church and society to come to terms with troubling legacies.

Perpetrators of abuse

Do we own the responsibility and the shame collectively? Scally’s long residency in Berlin has given him a broader perspective on the duty to remember and taught him that understanding what made egregious abuses of power possible is his responsibility; that addressing “narrow guilt” in the legal sense does not obviate the need to confront “wider shame”, and he wonders what stories we will tell ourselves about Irish Catholicism when the abused and perpetrators of abuse are gone.

Born in 1977, Scally grew up in Raheny in Dublin, as “a member of the last generation to have a full Irish Catholic childhood”, but at the outset he acknowledges his “very shaky grasp” of Roman Catholicism. He therefore travelled widely around Ireland and beyond to educate himself. By talking to historians, older Catholic leaders, priests, devoted pilgrims and abuse victims, and absorbing various literature, he has built a layered picture of the evolution of the Irish Catholic Church as an institution and the society it sought to control, never losing sight of his dual mission: to educate himself and to be probing but fair.

For all those reticent about untangling knotted legacies, Scally finds numerous eloquent witnesses who powerfully articulate home truths.

He explores early Irish Christianity, the historic wealth and power alliances and the bogus holy tapestry that has been woven around accounts of religion in that era: “there is no uncontaminated past”. He also finds more nuance in relation to the penal law era than the traditional narrative of exclusive persecution suggests, and he excavates the “Cullenisation” of the church in the second half of the 19th century. This is when Cardinal Paul Cullen sought to build a disciplined, centralised, dominant church but which in too many respects was about outward devotion rather than deep thinking. (In 1895, Bishop John Healy of Clonfert boasted that St Patrick’s College in Maynooth was not a place for reflective education but “a machine for turning out . . . missionary men annually” with little emphasis on feelings about the faith.)

He also finds himself in the Catholic Central Library in Dublin looking at historic teaching manuals with their emphasis on instilling obedience, pondering the extent to which “our formative experiences of Catholicism have colonised the space where we might reflect on the role of spirituality in our lives”.

Choked by scandal

Scally’s four meetings with Cardinal Seán Brady result in a piercing and layered portrait of a man at the centre of a church choked by scandal and called to account for his own part arising out of his involvement, in 1975, in a secret canonical investigation into allegations of abuse against Brendan Smyth. Behind Brady’s easy manner, he senses “the moving cogs of a canon lawyer’s brain”. Brendan Boland, a victim of Smyth, was subjected to a canonical interrogation and this double victimisation, according to Brady, “is only dawning on me now”.

These interviews are somewhat tense; Brady asserts self-defensively that “the Lord didn’t entrust the Church to angels” but Scally does not let him away with such humbug, asking if the 1970s silence was also about protecting personal ambition.

Brady is accurate in maintaining that the Catholics of his generation “were saying prayers rather than praying”, and this illuminates a consistent theme: the emphasis on conformity rather than inner spirituality, and a concomitant compulsion to lock away and hide perceived transgressors. But Scally wonders “what kind of society, people, allowed – wanted – this?”

After all, it was washing machines rather than public outrage that closed the Magdalen Laundries. And if parents made quiet representations to gardaí to get a priest moved to another parish, was it the case that “even parents’ protective instincts were part of a culture of collusion”? A poem by Patrick Bolger is cited: “There is power in Silence/ And human agency.”

Have too many in recent decades been in the business of salving guilty consciences without addressing the collusion issue? Scally describes attending a party in Áras an Uachtaráin for former inmates of the Magdalen Laundries, at which they were feted by members of the Irish elite. Margaret McCrellis, who ended up in a Cork laundry, asked pointedly “who is this all for? Them or us?”

There is also the recurrent theme of the political rhetoric of openness being at odds with bureaucratic inertia; women once viewed as “fallen” are now characterised as “vulnerable”, which seems to have promoted a reluctance to meaningfully deliver transparency after the apologies.

‘Deference addiction’

Scally’s discussions with Marie Collins, a high-profile victim of clerical abuse (“you probably tempted the poor man”, another priest told her) are also revealing about the challenges of moving beyond revelation and exposure of cover-up in institutions to confronting the role of “us” in all of this. Collins believes Ireland retains its “deference addiction” and we continue to suffer from “self-afflicted blindness”.

Scally also spoke to the late Paddy Doyle, whose 1988 book The God Squad was one of the first to lift a lid on the dirty secrets of institutionalisation but who was also attacked in his native Wexford as a “traitor”. For Doyle, his book was not about going after “the bloody nuns” but “society’s abdication of responsibility to a child”. We are great at hearing people talk, he said, but that does not force people to “reflect on themselves”. He also castigated the redress scheme, the courtroom-like approach to victims and the fresh abuse of gagging orders.

Sr Mary Reynolds of the Sisters of Mercy sees her order and others as “unwitting colluders with a system in which many were helped but many were also hurt”. Scally, consistently, does not leave unsatisfactory answers unprobed, partly because of his distrust of “the equivocating influence of lawyers on all public utterances”. True, not all experiences were negative, many victims of institutions had been rejected before they entered those institutions, and the sisters themselves were in a “tightly controlled and authoritarian world”. But the issue of access to files remains unresolved as Sr Reynolds believes “the general air of hostility at present would prevent them being assessed fairly”.

Heidi Roseneck-O’Sullivan, who grew up in East Germany and came to Ireland in 1966, suggested “it was like coming home . . . its conformity . . . unquestioned acceptance of higher authority . . . treating their Truth like an invisible ceiling that marked the limit of all thinking”. Scally in turn elaborates on the German approach to dealing with the past; the opening of the Stasi archives and the related questions of conformity with a repressive regime, the hollowness of the “othering” approach and the contested idea of historical responsibility. Reference is also made to Canada’s National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation making the archives of its industrial schools available, which idirector Ry Moran regards as a “sacred obligation”.

Roads to Rome

In Rome, Scally ponders the historic relationship between the Holy See and the Irish State, identifying an approach by the State that was “devout, submissive, wounded, paranoid and reprimanding all at once”. He traces the thirst for status, reflected in the grandiose Irish embassy building, the 17th-century Villa Spada, and challenges the idea that the main problem was about the Irish taking orders from Rome: “though many roads lead to Rome, most lead back to ourselves”.

Perhaps, he suggests, we need something along the lines of the Citizens’ Assembly model to tackle ongoing silences; it is striking how the words of Nuala O’Faolain in 1996 still ring true today: “personal; testimony piled on personal testimony doesn’t amount to the revolution in social responsibility that we desperately need”.

In August 2018, the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin asked this question: “What was it in Irish Catholicism that led to such a level of harshness?” This book does not provide easy answers, but it engages with D iarmuidMartin’s and other questions with a sophistication we have rarely seen, as part of a plea for “a new phase of emotional comprehension”. This book provides an excellent start to that phase.

Diarmaid Ferriter is professor of modern Irish history at UCD. His book Between Two Hells: The Irish Civil War will be published in September by Profile Books