Thursday, June 14, 2012

A church in need of renewal

THIS week’s Eucharistic Congress in Ireland aims to provide renewal for the Catholic Church here – something that it badly needs, given the huge reduction in vocations and in numbers attending religious services in recent decades, not to mention all the bad publicity it has received because of the reprehensible clerical child sex abuse perpetrated on innocents and then covered up. 

The 80 years since the last Eucharistic Congress was held here in 1932 have seen a sea change in people’s attitudes to the church, which has led to a major diminution of its influence.

The timing of the last congress here – to mark the 1,500th anniversary of St Patrick coming to Ireland – came ten years into the new Irish Free State and in the wake of a bloody and divisive civil war when wounds were still raw. Joined by the common bond of a deep faith, people from both the pro- and anti-Treaty sides put aside their differences to participate in the 1932 Eucharistic Congress, which emphasised that Ireland was very much a Catholic country and proud of it.

Our political leaders, under Taoiseach Eamon de Valera, were subservient to the church leaders with both government ministers and opposition leaders acting as canopy bearers for papal legate Cardinal Lauri who presided over the congress. 

This sent out a message internationally that Rome ruled the Irish Free State and the church’s influence permeated – mostly benevolently – into all areas of society, especially education and healthcare.

There were so many vocations in Ireland then that the church was able to send up to a third of religious abroad on missions, doing great work in far-flung countries in Africa and Asia. Back at home, the church was so dominant in people’s lives that they were afraid to contradict or cross the clergy for fear of excommunication, followed by hell fire and damnation!

In towns and villages throughout the country, the most prominent citizens tended to be the local doctor, school principal and garda, lorded over by the parish priest. Local politicians would have been afraid also to do or say anything that would offend the church, such was its influence, especially in rural areas.

The 1932 Eucharistic Congress took place also in the throes of economic recession, just three years after the Wall Street crash, which our recent near collapse of the banking system was compared with. 

However, while people nowadays might feel they are badly off, the extent of poverty and destitution that existed in Ireland in the 1930s was truly frightening, with so many people living in awful tenements in Dublin and so many others out the country with, literally, nothing.

The scale of the pomp and ceremony of the Eucharistic Congress – which was all-inclusive – got a million people out on the streets of Dublin in a mass display of devotion to a church that seemed to offer great hope for the future of this new Irish state, free at last from the shackles of hundreds of years of oppressive British rule. 

However, their hopes were put on hold for another three decades as so many were forced to emigrate because the country had nothing to offer them through the isolationist 1930s, the war years of the ’40s and its hungry aftermath in the ’50s.

As world economies eventually recovered after the Second World War, Ireland first began to taste some prosperity in the 1960s as Taoiseach Seán Lemass stepped up the process of modernisation. 

All the while, the church’s influence was still strong here, dictating strict Lenten observances and reinforcing fear through parish missions.

However, even back then, the Catholic Church knew it had to modernise and the Second Vatican Council recommended many changes – which seemed radical at the time – but they worked, with the mass in Latin being abolished in favour of the vernacular, the priest turning around to face his congregation and more involvement of lay people.

This era also coincided with television being introduced to Ireland on a wider scale and greater exposure to foreign cultures and mores led to people becoming more broad-minded. Many were better off materially and unqualified devotion to the church began to diminish here.

As Irish society became less morally-inhibited from the 1970s onwards, the church’s teachings on sexuality became less relevant to the way people were living their lives and when contraceptives became more widely available, there was more promiscuity, couples tended to cohabit rather than marry and more children were born outside of wedlock. 

A survey of Irish Catholics earlier this year found that the church’s teachings on sexuality had no relevance for 75% of them and their families.

In 1979, when the hugely popular Pope John Paul II visited Ireland, millions turned out to greet him at various locations around the country and the enthusiastic youth gathering in Galway gave the church great grounds for optimism. 

It emerged subsequently that the two high-profile clerics who led the celebrations that day – Bishop Eamonn Casey and since deceased Fr Michael Cleary – had both broken their vows of celibacy and fathered children.

However, it was the reports of the various commissions of investigation into clerical child sex abuse, published in recent years, that did most damage to the church’s reputation. People who steadfastly trusted the institution had difficulty coming to terms, not only with the scale of the abuse, but the culture of secrecy involved in trying to cover it up. 

Even Taoiseach Enda Kenny had unprecedented harsh words for the church last year after the Cloyne Report was published.

With current Irish church leader Cardinal Seán Brady’s reputation somewhat tarnished by his role, albeit peripheral, in the notorious child molester Fr Brendan Smyth’s case, it will be difficult for it to get the kind of traction towards the renewal it needs, notwithstanding the temporary uplifting effect of the 50th Eurcharistic Congress.