Ireland and the Church, by David Warren, Ottawa Citizen, July 31, 2011

Ireland and the Church

By David Warren
Ottawa Citizen
July 31, 2011

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/life/Ireland+Church/5185317/story.html

David Warren

As the Irish taoiseach or prime minister put it this week, relations between church and state in Ireland will never be the same.

Actually, they will continue to be the same, for from the beginning the Irish constitution separated them, and while it invokes the Trinity and so forth, the Catholic Church there has never enjoyed the established status of, say the Church of England in England, except once upon a time in the hearts of the people.

Enda Kenny (the taoiseach in question) was building on the impact of the Cloyne Report, the latest and biggest in a series of official inquiries into sexual scandal in the diocese of Cloyne. It goes beyond allegations that (at current count) 11 of the many hundred priests were guilty of molesting children, to allege that, even quite recently, members of the hierarchy were trying to downplay and cover it up, to protect the Church's reputation. It also found police responses sometimes inadequate.

Priestly scandals of this sort have been in the news for some time; any allegation will be widely and prominently reported. Benedict XVI, who played a courageous role in launching internal investigations even before he was elevated to Pope, has since repeatedly and publicly lashed himself, on behalf of the whole Church, for its past failures, and refused, in principle, to offer extenuations. He gets little or no credit for this. As visible symbol of the Church, he continues to be the personal target of the most visceral critics, including especially her worst enemies within.

Kenny has been generally celebrated for crossing a taboo line in Irish politics, with an incendiary speech that went beyond condemning specific Church failures, to damning the Vatican tout court. Using expressions like, "the rape and torture of children," and naming the Pope personally, he was able to raise a huge cheer from every anti-clerical soul in the whole Irish diaspora.

Heretofore, given her historical prestige in Ireland, and what was once great loyalty to her, no Irish politician dared attack the entire Church in such a frontal way, and indeed, a certain obsequiousness towards bishops and priests was believed necessary to get oneself elected in Ireland. Those days are now gone, as the critics correctly observe, while gloating over the damage that the Church has sustained.

A letter-writer to one of the Irish papers provided a succinct history of the Irish governing class, since independence: "Blame the British. Blame the EU. Blame the Vatican." We are now in phase three.

Kenny is a career politician, who spent ages on the backbenches before smelling the main chance. In the short months since he became Lord of the Dail, he has been otherwise noted for botching a tax proposal: a scheme that would raid private pension savings, to finance government job-creation programs. (Under fire, he then amended it to exempt the truly wealthy.) Against the impending bankruptcy of the Irish state, he has taken two bold, widely-publicized strokes. He has made reductions in the government motor pool; and he has claimed to be good friends with Angela Merkel (the German chancellor who just bailed out Greece). Perhaps we should give him time for other measures.

He is no more contemptible than most politicians, who tend to get worse the higher they slither up "the greasy pole," as Disraeli called it. Having smelled sulphureous anti-clericalism in the Irish air, he now turns it to political advantage.

The truth is sometimes more complex than what is presented in the mass media, or for that matter, than what is believed by howling mobs. Irish anti-clericalism was itself not exactly born yesterday. Nothing deeply loved fails to be occasionally hated; and anyone who has ever met a devout Irish person, will know that his sword has two edges: one glinting towards the world, and the other at the throat of his bishop.

But those are the devout. As progressive critics note, with gleeful approval, the proportion of them within the overall Irish population has fallen considerably.

Now look at Ireland. Outwardly, this country appears to have become a very prosperous place, with evidence everywhere of the buying power of paper money and credit cards. Disposable income has moreover swelled with the sharp decline of the famous Irish birthrate, though it remains high for Europe. (Now look at Europe.)

A little more inwardly, an aging, increasingly childless population has piled extraordinary personal debt on top of a state debt that is astronomical, and the entire country awaits the arrival of the European bailout machinery.

More deeply, much more deeply, Ireland has bought into secular post-modern consumerism in a huge and apparently sudden way, rather as Quebec did in an earlier generation. The comparison is instructive: the almost overnight disintegration of the Catholic Church, after decades of mostly invisible foundational weakening; the inundation, like a dam bursting, of centuries of cultural life profoundly guided by Church teachings.

This had approximately nothing to do with child-molesting priests. They are just a pretext for the angry. The real story is to be found buried in a single Gospel line: "What will it profit them, if they gain the whole world but lose their own souls?"