Eroding Catholic Culture
For those who have always considered Ireland a bastion of Catholicism, this accusation is as shocking as the facts that Kenny marshals to support her argument.
Kenny, who was a columnist for London’s Sunday Telegraph for 20 years, knows whereof she speaks. Although she has now, in her mid-50s, returned to the Catholic faith of her childhood, she was once a renegade who participated in the famous “Pill Train” of 1976. In this successful publicity stunt protesting Ireland’s supposedly puritanical attitudes toward sex, young Irish feminists, including Kenny, ostentatiously carried contraceptives via rail from Belfast to Dublin, where they declared their “illegal booty” at customs — highlighting what they believed were Ireland’s backward ideas and the Church’s repressive teachings about sex.
Now, Kenny regards such actions as having contributed to a devastating weakening of Ireland’s Catholic culture. “Between 1965 and the end of the 1980s, vocations [to the religious life] in Ireland fell by seventy-five percent — and Mass-going dropped by a third,” she points out.
More alarming still, in just the last ten years, the percentage of Irish who attend Mass at least once a week has declined even further — plummeting to 60 percent today. As Kenny shows, changes in the law and a general decline in moral standards among the clergy as well as the laity have steadily eroded the Catholic Church’s influence in Ireland. In 1972, a national referendum negated the “special position” that the Irish constitution originally accorded the Church. In 1979, a law dating from the 1930s that prohibited barrier methods of contraception was overturned, thanks in part to such maneuvers as the Pill Train. In 1993, a “law forbidding homosexual relations between men was rescinded.” In 1995, by a tiny margin — 0.5 percent — the Irish voted to allow divorce for the first time. That same year, Ireland’s ban on Playboy magazine was lifted.
Embarrassment, Distrust and Dislike
By American standards, these legal changes might not seem devastating, and certainly a far larger percentage of Irish Catholics than American Catholics continue to attend weekly Mass. But Kenny points to other disturbing signs of social decay in Ireland.
In recent decades rates of crime and illegitimacy have mushroomed. Five times as many people are in jail today as in 1950, when only 469 men and 68 women were imprisoned in the entire Irish Republic. In 1969, only one Irish child out of every 100 was illegitimate, whereas today nearly one in three is born out of wedlock. In 1983, a pro-life amendment to the Irish constitution passed by a 2-to-1 margin, but since then, restrictions on abortion in that law have been gradually whittled away by the courts, and another referendum on the subject looms on the horizon.
The question Kenny asks is this: How did Ireland, whose people remained steadfastly loyal to the Catholic faith through centuries of British persecution, and which until recently was a world-class exporter of nuns, priests, and missionaries, arrive at such a state?
In sections called “The Way We Were” and “The Way We Changed,” Kenny chronicles the transition of Ireland from a country in which Catholic culture permeated every aspect of life and ecclesial authority was virtually absolute to one in which many regard the Church with embarrassment, distrust, and dislike.
In a final section, “In Their Own Words,” ten of Ireland’s best-known and best-loved figures recall with fondness the intensely Catholic Ireland of their youth. This diverse group ranges from Tony O’Reilly, former CEO of the Heinz Co. and one of the richest men in Ireland, to movie star Pierce Brosnan, novelist Maeve Binchy, and Frank Pakenham (seventh Earl of Longford), the head of one of Ireland’s most distinguished Catholic families and the father of the historian Lady Antonia Fraser.
Kenny focuses her narrative on the way in which major historical events, national developments, and international currents of thought in the 19th and 20th centuries have influenced the Church in Ireland. She examines the effect on the Church of Irish nationalism, especially the Easter Rising of 1916, and the Irish literary renaissance that produced such figures as Yeats and Joyce. Kenny also analyzes the Irish Church’s relationship with Fenianism, feminism, communism, socialism, censorship, civil rights, Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encylical Humanae Vitae rejecting artificial birth control, and liberation theology.
Preserver of the Faith
According to Kenny, the severest decline in Ireland’s Catholic culture has occurred over the past three decades. As she puts it, the “spirit of the age” began colonizing “the Catholic Church’s territory…. Instead of Confession…counselling; instead of stoicism, the culture of rights and litigation; instead of fasting, eating disorders; instead of the Rosary and the drama of the Stations of the Cross, the soap operas and heroin needle.”
The worst blow to the Irish Church, Kenny contends, was “the Jacobean tragedy of clerical scandals which rolled out unstoppingly in the last decade of the twentieth century.” Throughout the 1990s, a series of horrifying revelations of priestly misdeeds, often involving pederasty, have caused the Church to lose much of its moral authority.
Despite “all the indicators which show the decline of ‘Catholic Ireland,’” Kenny believes “that there will be a resurrection of the values it represented, and a continuity of the faith itself.” It remains to be seen how the current “Celtic Tiger” economic boom will affect Irish religious practice, but there is reason to hope that in the long run secularism and materialism will be no match for Ireland’s resilient Catholic character and heritage. After all, the Irish constitution still begins with a reference to the Trinity. Irish radio and television still toll the Angelus daily at noon and 6 p.m., and the national airline, Aer Lingus, still christens each of its planes after a Celtic saint.
Ireland’s history has been inextricably tied to its role as a preserver of the faith. More than a millennium ago, Celtic saints and scholars preserved Catholic culture from encroaching barbarism. So perhaps today the extraordinary courage of the Irish, their missionary spirit, and their headstrong attachment to causes that appear to be losing may once again make them the Church’s greatest defenders against the darkness of a secular age.
(Goodbye to Catholic Ireland: How the Irish Lost the Civilization They Created, by Mary Kenny, Templegate Publishers, 2000, 376 pages, $19.95. This article courtesy of CRISIS, America's fastest growing Catholic magazine.)
