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Perspective Irish churchs dark night of the
soul
By MICHAEL J. FARRELL
No less a Catholic than the pope has
said Irish Catholics are as good as Catholics get. So its a depressing
sign of the times to find the Irish church a basket case of low morale adrift
on a sea of simmering anger and woeful cynicism.
The island is still full of good people, including prosperous
people, called collectively the Celtic Tiger now, proud of Seamus
Heaney and Riverdance and pop stars whose names I dont
recall. Its the church thats having trouble.
As far back as 1997, The Irish Times was reporting,
there can hardly be a more battered group on the island these days than
the 26 men who make up the current Irish ... hierarchy. The point was
that the bishops had become scapegoats for all kinds of old ills bitterly
remembered.
The predominant ill, people seem to agree with hindsight, was
fear. Such fear, the past hints, invariably comes home to roost. The
Times Patsy McGarry recalls, the terrors of Satan that froze
their innocent hearts and the many casual cruelties of a church triumphant, so
sure of its absolute truth.
Some say this is just the media letting off steam and settling old
scores. But then theres a new book, From the Inside: A Priests
View of the Catholic Church, by Tony Flannery (Mercier Press, Cork;
e-mail address: books@mercier.ie), part biography and part history of
the recent Irish church, which, he writes, I have known to be
authoritarian, dogmatic, devious, self-serving and even on occasion
corrupt. But, he goes on, It has also opened up for me a world of
great depth and beauty. It has been a gateway to mystery and to the realm of
the spirit. I have experienced kindness, support and encouragement.
The book has become a bestseller, a minor phenomenon, a catalyst,
it seems, for a confused people wrestling with what to think of their church.
Fr. Flannery writes: The last few years have seen much anger and
resentment against the clergy, and we are often pilloried and derided. ...
Maybe the underlying source of much of the anger coming out today is not so
much the scandals that we have experienced in the last few years but the whole
residue of hurt that has accumulated over generations in which the church
exercised power over the people.
That power was pervasive, from national politics to the marriage
bed. The people were only middling sinners, as a local poet said,
but a well-organized church, with centuries of practice, quoted chapter and
verse to control the lives of Catholics who, in Ireland and elsewhere, toed the
line to stay out of awful hell. Then education blew the old cobwebs away.
Flannery describes a symbolic moment that sums up the
disintegration. Not surprisingly, it had to do with sex, a national referendum
on abortion. The author was conducting a novena -- yes, novena, so this is no
wild and crazy guy -- in a southern town. On the Saturday night he discussed
with the pastor, a man of great learning and culture, the raging
abortion debate. He was impressed by the parish priests wide knowledge
and objectivity.
But at Mass time next morning a 20-year-old girl was handing out
leaflets that opposed writing the illegality of abortion, already thoroughly
enforced, into the national constitution. Flannery observed the pastor getting
gradually upset with the girl. Then he began to try to stand between the
young girl and the cars and to jostle her out of the way. But she was the
more nimble and easily did an end run around him. It was a sad and
pathetic sight, writes Flannery -- a church floundering when the old fear
went out the window.
The Irish church of Flannerys early years was in many ways
beautiful and innocent. Most priests, and bishops, too, were decent men and
frequently heroic, as many still are. Famed for being conservative, many, for
the sheer good of people, would vault above the law in a manner that would give
liberals goose bumps and give curial cardinals cardiac arrests.
But they belong to an institution that, with the best of
intentions, time and again, bit off more than it could chew, assumed more power
than God or anyone had ever given it. An average example, closer to home, is
the way the Vatican just silenced Sr. Jeannine Gramick and Fr. Robert Nugent
(NCR, July 30). Its easy to see the Vaticans Cardinal Joseph
Ratzinger playing the futile role of that Irish parish priest. Anyone who lives
long enough will see how this pontificate failed to notice the changing times
and abused power and brought the church into disrepute.
This could have a tragic outcome. While in some countries, such as
France, the faithful just walked away from a perceived irrelevance, in other
places, and not just Ireland, people who had invested so much in this
particular route to personal and communal fulfillment and salvation may react
with the anger and contempt so palpable just now in Ireland.
Flannery is no church basher. My own religious congregation,
the Redemptorists, has experienced enormous decay and disintegration, he
writes, which must be hard to say while he is still one of them. He tells of
his joy at hearing of a new Polish pope and the subsequent letdown. We
failed to question the role of the papacy, he interjects.
He tells of all Ireland coming to a standstill for the popes
1979 visit. He notes an irony of that trip, a harbinger of what was to come. As
the papal extravaganza moved across the country, the two big performers,
apart from the pope, were [Galway Bishop] Eamonn Casey and [Fr.] Michael
Cleary. Not many years would pass until the scandal of Caseys
fathering a child would bring home to the people that their church was flawed
after all, and would give the media its chance to explore the can of worms that
had just been opened.
Soon after that, Cleary, a charismatic, singing, guitar-playing
priest revered by Irelands young people, died. It then emerged that
Cleary, too, had had, for many years, a clandestine domestic relationship.
Both of these popular churchmen, notes Flannery, had long been
publicly moralistic and hard-line. Cleary wrote a column for one of the
national papers. I was constantly irritated, writes Flannery,
by the way he insistently churned out a hard, unbending line on all moral
issues and seemed to make no effort to reach out to people who were struggling
in their own lives.
To the climate of fear, add a pinch of hypocrisy. Time and again,
outside the church and in it, these come home to roost.
Michael Farrell is editor of NCR
National Catholic Reporter, August 27,
1999
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