Fr Seán Sheehy’s Listowel sermon was an uncomfortable reminder of who we really were

Three days is all it took for Fr Seán Sheehy’s “rampant sin” sermon to reach Berlin.

When a friend here asked why Irish people were so annoyed, I suggested it was because the priest stuck to the letter of Catholic teaching while ignoring the spirit. By striking such a deeply wounding tone, the priest’s words reminded many Irish why they departed the Catholic Church long ago.

It’s not how Irish people see themselves, I said, at least not any more.

Fr Sheehy’s sermon, and the subsequent righteous indignation across the airwaves, are an unwelcome reminder to many in Ireland of who they were, or at least who they once tolerated and what they once went along with.

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According to the 2016 census, 76 per cent of Irish identify as Catholic. But the shock, horror and embarrassment of Catholic Ireland’s worst excesses is so complete that many – channelling their inner St Peter – deny ever being there in Catholic Ireland.

Others are playing Pilate: they concede being part of Catholic Ireland but wash their hands of it now. The Fr Sheehys were always the problem, they tell themselves, not the people like them who listened to them every Sunday, week in, week out.

[ I’m a gay Irish woman living in London. For me the Listowel sermon was a punch in the heart ]

Researching my book on Catholic Ireland’s rise and fall, I revisited my old Dublin parish, dwindling like so many, and was struck by how much pride – and deep faith – remained. But among ageing parishioners much old anger lingers, along with shame.

Anger and shame at – among the good priests – having had more than their fair share of bullies and abusers. Looking back, one Mass-goer told me: “Weren’t we very stupid to believe everything they told us?”

That is the awkward truth of our past, that is the source of anger far deeper than one loud priest in Listowel. Many Irish put people on pedestals who didn’t belong there and are angry at themselves now for doing so.

Everyone else who stayed in the pews back then – in Listowel and elsewhere – was in on it. For every parish with a Fr Sheehy, many others had enough lay denunciants and quiet conformists not to need one

A key finding of the 2009 Murphy report into clerical sexual abuse in the Dublin archdiocese was the term “undue deference”: the abuse happened because people – through fear, conditioning, opportunism or apathy – gave free rein to clerics which, in turn, opened the door to the abusing priests and obfuscating bishops.

Everyone had a different experience – complex and conflicting – and it is understandable how, in the recent rush to modernise and liberalise, many want to bury that old landscape of old pain.

The pain of hunger that saw post-Famine Ireland embrace a new, retooled, extra-holy version of Catholicism that, in part to protect middle-class land assets, framed sex as a snare and entrapped many.

The pain of post-independence Ireland, where defending an idealised dual Irish-Catholic identity meant destroying, or sacrificing, anyone who didn’t fit the new narrow definition of holy Irishness.

Walking out today on a priest who denounces homosexuals comes at no social cost. When homosexuals or unmarried mothers were denounced from the pulpit 30 years ago, when it actually counted for something, only the brave walked out.

Everyone else who stayed in the pews back then – in Listowel and elsewhere – was in on it. For every parish with a Fr Sheehy, many others had enough lay denunciants and quiet conformists not to need one.

Brinsley MacNamara’s 1918 novel The Valley of the Squinting Windows describes a fictional yet familiar village where locals thrive on the “singular and special persecution of each other”.

Visiting Tuam while researching my book, locals told me how the full story of the former Bon Secours mother and baby home – and the remains found underground – has yet to be told. The whole story, reaching far beyond one religious order, may never be told.

In the Tuam men’s shed behind a deserted school, men told me of local girls and women, their sisters and aunts, disappearing in the night.

[ Jennifer O’Connell: We owe Fr Seán Sheehy grudging thanks for his repugnant screed ]

One older man talked of how his sister, who was living with mental illness, was placed in a local home where she became pregnant – and not by a priest.

“There were men willing to have sex with her,” he said. “They got away with f***ing hell and there wasn’t a word about it, they disappeared.”

A well-known figure in town, when I asked about the fathers of the Tuam babies, said they came from “local, respectable families, but you’ll never get them to talk”.

The problem of old Catholic Ireland was not priests preaching rampant sin but ordinary people feeling – and making each other feel – rampant shame.

Explaining Catholic Ireland here in Germany, one friend, a therapist and committed secularist, asked me once if I could remember the greatest Christian commandment. Scouring my brain for traces of flimsy 1980s religious instruction, it eventually came to me: “You should love your God with all your heart and your neighbour as yourself.”

Nodding, she continued: “Now: what if the church in Ireland didn’t teach you to love yourself?”

That is the point: the Catholic Church in Ireland didn’t collapse in on itself simply because of the march of secularism and Sunday shopping, or because of a concerted media campaign against it. Irish Catholicism collapsed because it ignored its own, most important teaching.

Fr Seán Sheehy is a provocation to many because he reminds them of the love they struggled to show themselves – and the love they failed to show others.

Derek Scally is Berlin correspondent and author of The Best Catholics in the World