Those paying attention to the daily life of the church, away from the horrific abuses, can find some signs of hope, writes BREDA O'BRIEN
THEY HAVEN’T gone away, you know, even if they cause some people a faint touch of nausea. I refer to what might be termed ordinary decent Catholics, (ODCs) with an ironic tip of the head to the noun that ordinarily follows those two adjectives. Yes, they are battered and reeling, and sickened by the failures of the church they love, but more than you would suspect are still finding real meaning in their faith.
This is despite the fact that so many of our agenda-setters act as if Christianity were at best a quaint relic from the past, and at worst a toxic sludge sucking at the legs of true progress.
Yesterday another token of respect to Christianity ended, when pubs opened in Limerick. The response of diocesan administrator Fr Tony Mullins was perfectly pitched. He welcomed the fans to Limerick, and invited them to join local communities for the Good Friday liturgies. He gently reminded them that the pub-opening was an opportunity for Christians to make their own decisions.
It is well-established that people receive most of their information about religion from the media, but the media is primarily interested in religion insofar as it resembles politics.
Therefore the media focus on scandals, resignations and personalities, and to a large extent, this is as it should be. How long would it have taken the church to admit to flaws without investigative journalism? It is also right that so much attention focuses on survivors. As Ian Elliott, director of the Catholic Church’s independent watchdog, the National Board for Safeguarding Children, has said, “The grim truth is that victims are experts in a way nobody else is expert and developing an effective safeguarding structure within the church can be greatly enhanced by listening to and drawing upon the wisdom of those who have been harmed.”
However, religion in itself receives little coverage as a subject of interest to thousands. Far more people attend church every week than attend the cinema in a month. (For example, there were a total of 1.7 million cinema admissions in January 2009, compared with 47 per cent of the population attending church on a weekly basis, approximately 2.1 million.)
While there are honourable exceptions, the coverage of religion has been compared to sports coverage that looks at fouls, sending-offs, disputes between players and managers, and spectacular mess-ups in players’ private lives, without ever covering a match, or having any understanding of what motivates interest in sport. It is, of course, a flawed analogy, given that sport has rarely been rocked by the same depth of scandal. However, as a means of expressing frustration at the “tone-deaf” or even hostile quality of some coverage, it works.
As an oddity among opinion columnists in writing from an openly Catholic perspective, I think I have some insight into the ODCs. On one level, they are shattered. The Murphy report caused disillusion on a wider scale than Ryan. When Seán Brady, a well-loved and humble leader, was in turn embroiled in the scandals, I saw elderly people put their heads in their hands, utterly desolate that the church they have loved for decades seemed to be disintegrating.
It seems premature to speak of the future of the church in Ireland, in particular since we are only about midway through the crisis. However, green shoots are to be found among the ODCs, and priests who support them. Invisible to the media, thousands of people are volunteering, not just in child protection, but in every aspect of parish life.
Those people are slowly realising that real change will only come from the laity. Vatican II is being realised in a most unlikely fashion, as lay people make their voices heard, demanding accountability from their bishops, but also support for what matters most to them – that the Christian message be really lived out, and not be sullied by a “misguided desire to protect the church” or mental reservation.
The next generation is a primary focus. ODCs want their children to experience the depth and richness of a lived faith. They want liturgies that speak to people’s lives.
Secularists (and not all secularists are like this) who think they are doing religious people a favour by allowing them to practise what they believe in the privacy of their homes and churches, but just don’t dare to bring it into the public square, are missing something of central importance. If faith means anything, it affects how you act in business, in farming, in leisure, in family life. It is at the centre of a person’s life, and can no more be privatised than gender can be.
ODCs want their children to have a chance of experiencing community, not some private devotion for a few hours a week. And increasingly, if church leaders will not provide this, they are taking matters into their own hands. Yes, it is a kind of Reformation, but one in the mould of Vatican II, which recognised the dignity of all the baptised, and their unique role in faith. Lay people, in quiet ways that will probably never emerge on the radar screen of the media, are saying: “Enough. We want better than this.” The numbers are lower, but that is no bad thing. People are there who want to be there, and many are willing to contribute as well as receive.
This Easter, let’s remember what Pope Benedict called “wounds in the body of Christ”, that is, crimes against children, but also the hope of resurrection.