The Catholic Church in Ireland must be reborn and renewed, says the Pope, but the Church's property, money and educational functions interfere with its spiritual role. How hard would it be to dismantle the institution, and would we truly be better off without it, asks KATHY SHERIDAN
IN HIS ELEGANTLY arranged pastoral letter to the Catholics of Ireland, Pope Benedict composed a “special prayer” for the Church in Ireland: “God of our fathers, renew us in the faith which is our life and salvation, the hope which promises forgiveness and interior renewal . . .”
Hardly an inspiring piece of work, it reads like a recycled version of all the worthy prayers since Catholicism became the faith of our fathers. And right now, the renewal the Pope is looking for seems a long way off. In a homily this week, the Bishop of Killaloe, Willie Walsh, said plainly: “I do believe that our Irish Church at this time is experiencing a degree of death.”
In an interview with The Irish Times, Bishop Walsh's misgivings about the letter are clear. "I can understand the disappointment of many people," he says, "that the role of the Vatican in that culture of secrecy and what I would call undue deference, which contributed significantly in our disastrous handling of the issue of child sexual abuse."
So what happens now ?
Although the shape of a post-Catholic Ireland (not to mention how religion has managed to survive into the modern age) is a hot topic in sociology circles, there are bishops who “still obsess about numbers of priests, in the belief that the more priests there are, the more faithful we are”, in the words of a close observer. And some members of the faithful continue to pray for the return of the lavish glory days of the Eucharistic Congress, the Pope’s visit and 95 per cent Mass attendances, while obdurately remaining in denial of what lay beneath.
Bishop Walsh is not one of them. He was never a man who was comfortable with authoritarianism, or titles or episcopal robes. “I do believe that they’re a remnant of medieval times, out of keeping with a whole sense of democratisation and a recognition of the dignity and equality of all the baptised,” he says.
Nor is he keen on the mind-numbing wealth of the Vatican. “I certainly would not be comfortable about that. You can argue that the income from all those treasures goes to charities across the world. That’s probably the argument for their retention . . . but somehow, as followers of Christ, I don’t see all those treasures as fitting in with the example and teachings of Christ.”
He is familiar, of course, with the worthy promises from chastened high church figures to return to the ways of Jesus Christ and the message of the Gospels. How would that manifest itself ? “I think we would be invited to live a simpler life. I think we would have greater concern for the poor, for the marginalised. We probably would rid ourselves of titles. I think it would also take me out of this house,” Walsh says, gesturing around the living room of the bishop’s residence in Ennis, a rambling place that is neither cosy enough to be a home nor appropriate for the office building it has basically become.
Whether the bishop’s wish for simplicity is widespread among the episcopacy is a moot point. “Institutions can be oppressive,” he says mildly. “You follow what has always been done or, in some ways, you become an outsider.”
He is sure of one thing though: the Church in Ireland cannot survive in its present form – “by that I mean a church in which all the leadership roles are occupied by bishops, priests and religious”.
The institution, nonetheless, is clinging on. Eoin O’Mahony, social researcher for the Irish Bishops’ Conference’s research and development unit, notes that while recruitment was down to single figures in the early 1990s, the most recent intake of seminarians was as high as 40. However, the most recent 2006 figures show a total of 3,078 diocesan priests, down by around 900 from the 1970s heyday. And age is taking its toll: half of them are aged between 55 and 75, an age group which comprises about a quarter of Irish males generally.
Parish “clustering” is now taken for granted. O’Mahony estimates that diocesan priest numbers may fall to between 2,000 and 2,500 in the next 10 years, with probably half the number of dioceses.
The clerical and religious orders have some 3,278 priests, and those in brothers’ orders total around 700. Together, religious and clerical men add up to a little more than 7,000. But the striking fact is that there are more Irish nuns than all the priests and brothers combined, almost 9,000 of them.
WHAT IF THEY all walked away? If Catholic Church personnel were to step down from their roles in the Irish education and health systems, would they be missed? Dr James Kelly, of Trinity College Dublin’s School of Religions and Theology, says no, that it’s time for the Church to move on. “Civil society has come of age and will be able to take over the services,” he says, adding that this is not simply the view of an ivory-tower academic but of a man who gratefully acknowledges the role of Christian Brothers’ schools in his life. “They have rendered a great service. It was through education that I got scholarships and went on to study abroad. They liberated me to speak the way I am now. But the need is no longer there. They have given us those tools and should move on . . . It would be no bad thing if the Church divests itself of its power and maybe grasped this opportunity to be witness to the gospel. But there’s no chance whatever of that happening . . . They don’t get the message that the institutional church is part of the world and part of the problem.”
Bishop Walsh would like to see the Church running “a lot fewer schools”, just half of the current number, always subject to parental choice and, he stresses, “provided that those Catholic schools don’t become elitist as has happened elsewhere”. In the meantime, the work on the boards of management is the main voluntary input, although, he points out, the time given to these is “quite significant. We finance an education office in Limerick. And we have over the years invested a great deal of money in school buildings and, more recently, provision of sites for schools. Having said that, the schools are otherwise fully financed by the Government, so I’d have no hesitation in saying if all religious walked away, they would continue as normal.”
But Walsh clearly feels that Christian values bring something unique to education, “to the opening of the minds and hearts of children to the wonders of the world . . . although I’m not suggesting for a moment that if the Church withdrew, that children wouldn’t continue to be treated with respect, dignity and love”.
As for health, he believes there would be no “major difference” if the Church was not involved in hospitals, although “health isn’t only hospitals”. He points to Clarecare, an organisation founded by the local Catholic and Church of Ireland bishops with the county manager back in the 1960s, as an example of the best kind of church-generated activity. Decades on, it is flourishing, with 30 full-time staff and hundreds of part-timers and volunteers.
“Apart from the original building and a small contribution from us of about €20,000 a year, the rest is paid for by the health board,” he says. “And yes, I’d say if we were to step back tomorrow, the health board could take over Clarecare. But I think you can preserve a certain ethos in a smaller organisation which you can’t with a large bureaucratic one.”
For example, the current director, Fiachra Hensey, worked for a big oil company and took a huge salary drop to work for Clarecare. “I think it represents a whole ethos that might be difficult to find otherwise . . . Somehow, when government takes over, you sometimes lose the community aspect . . .”
Similar examples can be found here and all over the world. Trained counsellors donate thousands of hours to Accord, the voluntary Catholic marriage advisory service. Sr Stanislaus Kennedy has poured her considerable energy into the homeless through Focus. Nuns founded the Prisoners Overseas and Migrant Rights Centre organisations and are as likely to be found living in neglected estates in Limerick’s as running schools in Sudan. Irish missionaries, famously, are scattered all over the world as Mary Robinson found and any journalist who has ever covered a natural disaster.
Equally, no one can doubt the extraordinary contribution of men such as the genial Jesuit, Fr Peter McVerry, who lives and works in the most challenging conditions in Dublin’s inner city, or Fr Pat Hogan, a parish priest who bases himself at the heart of Limerick’s Southill. Would they be driven to this kind of work anyway, if the Catholic Church were to disband tomorrow? Or is it the inspirational figure of Jesus Christ that motivates them to devote their lives to the poorest of the poor?
IS THIS HOW the Catholic Church in Ireland will look in future? Is the age of Roman potentates and prescriptive pastors in its final days? Will renewal come in the form of humble men and women not merely speaking the words of Christ, but actually living in his simple image? And if they walk away in disgust, what are we left with in what is called “the public square”?
In a book of essays published this week, The Dublin/Murphy Report: A Watershed for Irish Catholicism?, editors Fr John Littleton and Eamon Maher quote poet Theo Dorgan: "The skeletal presence of the Catholic Church in our institutions and in our mores has begun to wither away, smoke in a gale, dust in the wind; there is a danger that with it will go the foundational ideals of justice, charity, compassion and mercy. We can already see the damage done in our country's short-lived flirtation with mammon. We have seen what happened when the post-Gorbachev USSR turned to gangster capitalism. We would do well to begin thinking clearly, and very soon, about what we will choose for the moral foundations of a post-Catholic Ireland."
