Diarmaid Ferriter: Church is overdoing the righteousness amid Communions row

The leadership of the Irish Catholic Church has been exhibiting a passive aggressiveness in recent years as it comes to grips with transition. It is aware of its dramatic loss of standing and the consequences of its historic arrogance and periodically uses the language of atonement, yet it also finds solace in the considerable bedrock of faith that endures and its ability to tap into strong public feeling about Communion days in particular.

But it is also now lining up with other representatives of aggrieved sectors, and seems to be well down the queue, its moral monopoly a distant memory. Like those other groups, it has legitimate complaints to make about inconsistent and contradictory public health guidelines, but it is also overdoing the righteousness, as whether the controversy about Communions is primarily about sacraments is highly debatable. The assertion this week by Catholic Archbishop of Dublin Dermot Farrell that the “only gathering that seems to cause risk is a parent taking their child to receive a sacrament” was disingenuous. It was clear last autumn, as outlined by Dr Anthony Breslin, the Health Service Executive’s director of public medicine for the northwest, that a surge in virus cases was linked to Communion and Confirmation parties.

In 2011, the government spent €3.4 million on Communion and Confirmation allowances for people who needed help

Communion days have long been undermined by crass materialism and the premium attached to the festivities rather than receiving the body of Christ for the first time. Those indulging – including those who had long stopped practising their religion in any meaningful sense – were occasionally lambasted during the Celtic Tiger era, including by the editor of the Catholic newspaper, Alive, Fr Brian McKevitt, who in 2005 decried the preponderance of stretch limos, lavish haircuts and dresses. This profligacy was also criticised in subsequent years by the former Catholic archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin: “I believe that there’s something wrong with the extravagance,” he said in 2012. “First Communion has to be something simple, and I think we have to try and keep to that. It’s up to every parish then to decide what way they go about that so there isn’t that sort of expense... Parishes should encourage people to celebrate the sacrament with the simplicity and authenticity which will help the child to fully understand the mystery of the Eucharist.”

His words were hardly heeded given that an Ulster Bank survey found the average cost of an Irish Communion climbed 8 per cent to more than €900 in 2019, reaching a level not seen in almost a decade, while cash windfalls for the children averaged more than €600, with one in four seven and eight year olds receiving more than €800 from friends and family. In 2011, the government spent €3.4 million on Communion and Confirmation allowances for people who needed help, which was lowered to €1.5 million in 2012, before the department of social protection scrapped the payment for religious services, a move much decried by the opposition. The State should not have been funding these religious services in the first place, which raises an interesting question about the extent of the separation of church and State, a theme we heard much about this week, as, according to Farrell, “there has been no engagement with church representatives regarding revision of public health guidelines”.

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Six out of seven of President Michael D Higgins's nominees to the Council of State questioned the appropriateness of such office holders having to take religious oaths

Yet the ties between State and religion have hardly been severed, so much so that we now have the farce of the same government of a supposedly secular republic mounting a rigorous defence at the European Court of Human Rights of the requirement of the president of Ireland and members of the Council of State to swear an oath “in the presence of Almighty God” to take up their roles. The religious oath issue is not an irrelevant, abstract question. In 2013, six out of seven of President Michael D Higgins’s nominees to the Council of State questioned the appropriateness of such office holders having to take religious oaths and their words were unambiguous and entirely reasonable: “to require a citizen to publicly profess a faith – any faith – as a precondition to enter and hold public office serves neither religion nor the ideal of a public space open to all who are willing to contribute to the common good in a republic”.

The recent death of Des O’Malley brings to mind the frustrated mission of the Progressive Democrats to take God out of their preferred new Irish constitution as decided at their annual conference in Cork in 1988. Within a few days, the same self-declared radicals, who in the words of O’Malley laid so much store on the need to “stand by the Republic”, had panicked and backtracked: God would remain.

Now, more than 30 years later, the young Minister for Agriculture, Charlie McConalogue, while backing the Government’s public health advice about First Communions, suggests “It’s a very important day in everyone’s lives.”

Should that not just be everyone who is a practising, committed Catholic in our supposedly diverse Republic?