Earlier this year, the Irish bishops launched a Year of Vocations to the Diocesan Priesthood, a hopeful endeavour given the collapse in vocations in the last couple of decades. As Fr Michael Collins points out in this issue, the national seminary at Maynooth, once home to 500 seminarians, now has 20: men whose vocations have something heroic about them. The Irish church, once the most self-confidently buoyant in Christendom, is demoralised. The bid to attract vocations is being made in an environment in which indifference to the Faith in much of society jostles with outright anti-clericalism in the opinion-forming classes.
This is, of course, a familiar situation for the church across Europe but in Ireland, reflexive criticism of Catholicism is itself a backlash against a culture, which many young people do not remember, in which clergy enjoyed great and sometimes disproportionate influence and enormous social esteem. The Church was deployed by the independent Irish state – deprived of the corrective influence of Northern Protestants because of partition – to run schools and hospitals, and, more problematically, the institutions to which young pregnant women were sent, so that this problem could be hidden and controlled.
Much of the work of the clergy in the first eight decades of Irish independence was enormously valuable, indeed, indispensable. Irish hospitals would not have functioned as well as they did without Irish nuns; Irish schools relied on low-paid religious orders. The state got good value, yet the Faith paid a price for the status of the Church.
As Lord Acton, that great Catholic historian, once observed, all power tends to corrupt, and in the case of the Irish Church the consequence of corruption was revealed in a devastating series of state-commissioned reports from the start of this century into clerical child abuse – abuse which was known about but not addressed by diocesan bishops. Those reports were shocking enough, but they were followed by further reports into Church-run industrial schools and the Magdalene laundries to which pregnant young women were sent in disgrace and where their babies were, almost always, taken from them for adoption. The popular and political backlash that followed was inevitable, but itself disproportionate. There was no attempt at an audit to set these appalling abuses of power against the real good that priests, nuns and religious did in their communities and parishes over time. We can get an idea of that positive contribution from the work of the Franciscan friary in Athlone, which closed before Christmas. It is, in its way, a metaphor for the humble Church in Ireland, the Church whose friars ministered to the poor. Its closure is a loss not just to the Church but for the people of Athlone. Similarly, the Capuchin friar Brother Kevin Crowley, who founded and ran a centre for the homeless in central Dublin until his retirement last year at the age of 87, represented a Church that served those in need. The departure of such men and of these institutions diminishes Ireland.
And yet, as Fr Collins points out, Catholicism still runs deep. For most children, Baptism, Communion and Confirmation are important rites of passage and of coming of age. There are more civil than church marriages in the diocese of Dublin now, but many people still assume that the clergy will be there for them to administer the sacraments and bury the dead. The most recent census published this year suggested that 69 per cent of Irish people would call themselves Catholic – admittedly a steep drop on the 2016 total of 78 per cent, but still a significant number. (It was notable, incidentally, that the census question was, in contrast to previous years, “What is your religion, if any?”) When the future of state schools is debated locally, it often turns out that many people want their schools to remain Catholic.
These things constitute a real opportunity for the Church. If children often regard First Holy Communion and Confirmation as a right (if only as a means to accumulate large sums of money from their relatives) then it is also a chance of catechesis for the Church, and it should be undertaken with the same commitment with which generations of nuns did that work. If people want Catholic schools and sacraments, then they must accept the religious instruction that comes with them.
Granted, Catholicism is changing and may not now imply conformity with the social teaching of the Church – the number of people who voted for abortion in the referendum included many Mass-going Catholics – but it is still an important component of Irish culture and of Irish life. Let us hope that the year for vocations yields a harvest, however small. Much depends on it.
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