Life

Dr Diarmuid Martin: The challenge for the Church in the 21st century - charting the slow collapse of mass Catholicism

In the first of a series examining the challenges for the Catholic Church in the 21st century, Dr Diarmuid Martin sets out the context in which the Church came to assume a dominant position in the politics and social policy of the Irish State after 1916

The 1916 Proclamation emphasised freedom of religion, but after independence in the 1920s the new Irish Free State became more Catholic than had been intended.
The 1916 Proclamation emphasised freedom of religion, but after independence in the 1920s the new Irish Free State became more Catholic than had been intended. The 1916 Proclamation emphasised freedom of religion, but after independence in the 1920s the new Irish Free State became more Catholic than had been intended.

UNDERSTANDING the religious culture of Ireland and its political impact today is not an easy task.

It is not an easy task for those of us who were born and live in Ireland; it is not easy for people living in a different cultural background.

I wish to reflect on changes in Irish religious culture today, changes that are not irrelevant to the situation in other parts of Europe.

The Irish have every right to be proud of what was achieved by the Irish Church in history.

Ireland is proud of the cultural contribution of the early Irish monasteries and there were many great missionary monks who brought renewal in the faith from Ireland right across Europe.

In more recent times, Irish missionaries were pillars in the foundation and renewal of the Church across the English-speaking world, in Britain, in the United States and in Australia and New Zealand and indeed in many parts of Africa and Asia.

I do not know how many St Patrick's cathedrals or St Patrick's high schools there are around the world, but they each indicate something of the extraordinary missionary activity of Irish priests and religious and indeed lay people.

Such a distinguished history is something to be proud of, but paying too much attention to the past can be misleading in trying to assess the present. The religious culture of Ireland has changed greatly.

How is the Irish Church responding to change and how effective has that response been and where should we be looking towards for tomorrow?

Changes are taking place and the Church is responding in various ways: the more fundamental question, however, is whether or not in its responses the Irish Church is responding to the true challenges.

The Irish situation has its own peculiarities and differences and paradoxes.

Regular religious practice in Ireland has dramatically decreased in recent years but by European standards, religious practice in Ireland is still high.

Secularisation is well advanced in Irish society and yet there are many residual elements of faith and religiosity present in daily life.

Irish national radio and television both transmit the Angelus bells twice a day.

The cultural influence of the Church in Irish society is difficult to define.

The Ireland which many looked on as a bastion of Catholic influence was the same one which in 2015 approved same-sex marriage by an overwhelming popular vote.

There is no such thing, for example, as the Catholic vote in the sense that it exists in the United States.

While the main political parties in Ireland would traditionally have espoused Christian principles in a general way, there has never been an officially designated Christian Democrat political party in Ireland.

The authoritarian Church seemed to flourish right up to the moment of the Second Vatican Council

In Ireland it has long since moved from being politically risky to get into a battle with the Church, to a situation in which there are few votes to be won through being too closely linked with Church issues.

The religious culture of Ireland and especially that of Catholic Ireland is unique because it is in large part the fruit of isolation.

I am not speaking of Ireland just being an island. The religious history of Catholic Ireland was affected in a very different way to what may have been the case in mainland Europe by the various socio-cultural movements of modern history.

Before Catholic Emancipation, which came in 1829, the level of religious practice in Ireland was particularly low.

The appointment in the mid-19th century of Paul Cullen, Ireland's first Cardinal, as Archbishop of Dublin changed that situation and in more or less one generation an extraordinary renewal of Catholic practice took place.

It came through spiritual renewal, the stronger discipline of the clergy and the introduction of new forms of piety.

Cullen had lived much of his life in Rome where he was Rector of the Irish College and of the College of Propaganda Fide and he brought with him an Italianate and very much an ultramontane religious culture.

The effects of the Enlightenment, for example, were marginal to the emerging post-emancipation Catholic religious culture.

Cullen favoured the establishment of a closed Catholic culture. Catholic schools, a Catholic university, Catholic health care and a monolithic Catholic presence in society guided by the bishops were all aimed at protecting Catholics from the influence of the secular, the Enlightenment, continental republicanism, socialism and Protestantism.

It is interesting that the only Irish bishop who had been open to the idea of Catholics attending secular schools and civil universities was Cullen's predecessor in Dublin, Archbishop Daniel Murray. He faced strong opposition from his fellow bishops and from the Holy See.

Cullen's idea of a Catholic University of Ireland, to be modelled on the Catholic University at Louvain, failed due to tensions between Cullen and Newman but also because its degrees received no civil recognition.

The sole powerhouse of Catholic intellectual formation passed on to the National Seminary of Maynooth, then a purely clerical institution.

The political process which led finally to Irish independence is linked with the Home Rule movement of the early twentieth century and the uprising of 1916.

The religious culture of Ireland and especially that of Catholic Ireland is unique because it is in large part the fruit of isolation

Men and women, who were for the most part Catholic, inspired the 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic, the foundational document of the twentieth century move to Irish independence.

It was however the proclamation of a Republic and not a theocracy.

The 1916 Proclamation had emphasised freedom of religion. After independence in the 1920s the new Irish Free State became more Catholic than the Proclamation had intended.

The protectionist Catholic closed culture took roots in broader society and assumed a dominant position in the politics and social policy of the new Irish State.

There is still a great deal of historical research and analysis of social history to be done on Ireland in the first decades after independence.

Michael D. Higgins, the current President of Ireland, has noted that the dominance of a sectarian ethos had negative effects on the realisation of the ideas of the Proclamation.

That cannot be denied. The evolution was, however, a complex one.

Catholics began for first time to have access to public office and to important positions in the public administration from which until then they had been largely excluded.

The mainstream of Irish society at the time was innately socially conservative and such social conservatism took root in society.

In this situation, Catholic institutions that at their original foundation aimed at providing necessary help for the poor, began to assume a monopoly of services in education and health care and social provision.

The Church dominated the educational situation of the country. Priests and religious were in sufficient number to provide the personnel necessary and did so generously and often with minimal financial recompense.

The Catholic Church become increasingly clerical and the influence of that clerical Church became a prevailing dimension of the Irish State. That closeness produced, inevitably, some very unhealthy results.

Ireland did not experience the cultural tensions that occurred in Europe as the continent moved towards World War II.

Ireland remained neutral in the war not for ideological reasons but for nationalist reasons. It was felt impossible for Ireland to fight alongside Britain until the partition of Ireland was resolved.

The authoritarian Church seemed to flourish right up to the moment of the Second Vatican Council.

In 1961 a massive series of Church and State events celebrated the 1,500th anniversary of the coming of St Patrick.

Things then began to change dramatically, a sign that in fact that what appeared as the solid edifice of mass Catholicism was already creaking and waiting for some event to decree its slow collapse.

  • Dr Diarmuid Martin is Archbishop of Dublin. Abridged from a major address on The Challenge for the Church in the 21st Century given in the Diocese of Wurzburg in Germany.
  • Next week: the referendum on same-sex marriage, declining Mass attendance and the effects of Vatican II.