18 minute read
EDITORIAL
UP FRONT
GERARD MOLONEY CSsR
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THE COVID CHALLENGE
It's hard to believe a year has passed since COVID-19 first shut down the country and the world. It's been a long 12 months.
In those first frightening days last March, the spirit of national solidarity was striking. Few complained about the closure of schools, pubs and restaurants, or the need to wear face masks. Few complained when the money-spinning St Patrick's Day festivities were called off. We were all in this together. United, resolute, determined, we would confront and defeat this existential threat to our lives and livelihoods, as we had done with Foot and Mouth more than once in the past.
The sense of common purpose was palpable and galvanising. The surreal quiet of cities and towns suddenly devoid of traffic; streets and footpaths without pedestrians; shop fronts shuttered; traffic lights signalling forlornly to themselves. Only the tumbleweed was lacking. It was a scene eerie but reassuring, apocalyptic but calm. The virus would not defeat us.
And our efforts seemed successful. The number of casualties and fatalities were relatively low, at least when compared with our neighbours. The economy had taken a major hit, and the rhythm and routine of life had been severely disrupted, but we had survived, or so we thought.
Then the second wave came, and the third. This third time around, as schools and pubs, restaurants and shops once again locked up and shut down, the spirit of defiance and resolution of last spring began to waver. Weariness and frustration grew. Morale dimmed. Tempers frayed. Solidarity loosened. It was harder to keep our chins up and our jaws firm, even as we shielded them behind the obligatory face masks.
And while most people here and abroad heeded expert advice and observed the restrictions, often at significant cost, others grew more resistant, reckless, recalcitrant, heedless of regulations, determined to do their own thing.
The past year has been a study in contrasts. We have witnessed the extraordinary selflessness and dedication of care providers and essential workers, many of them poorly paid, working long hours and long weeks, at risk to themselves and their loved ones, routinely going beyond the call of duty— heroes and heroines at their best.
But also over the past year, and especially during the third wave, we have witnessed extraordinary acts of selfishness and recklessness, people heedless of their responsibility towards others, disdainful of guidelines and official advice, casual and contemptuous in their behaviour, showcasing rugged individualism at its worst.
Media have reported on how some well-off people are finding nefarious ways to skip to the front of the coronavirus vaccine line. In early March, a story broke about a wealthy Canadian casino executive Rod Baker and his wife who broke quarantine and flew to a remote Indigenous community where they posed as local motel employees to get their jabs. They displayed utter contempt for those less fortunate and more vulnerable than themselves.
Well-off countries are behaving in a similar selfish fashion. According to a group of charities including Oxfam International, huge inequalities have emerged in the worldwide rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine. "Wealthier nations have bought up enough doses to vaccinate their entire populations nearly three times over by the end of 2021," the group says. "Rich nations representing just 14 percent of the world's population have bought up 53 percent of all the most promising vaccines so far." Ireland, of course, ranks among the rich nations.
And within the wealthier nations, poorer people and minorities – the ones most likely to contract the virus - are also the ones most likely to be at the back of the queue to be vaccinated.
There is no hope of eliminating or containing the COVID-19 virus unless and until peoples and nations everywhere have access to vaccines and act responsibly. Unless and until they do, any talk about all of us being in this together is as empty and hollow as it sounds.
This health crisis, like every crisis, has brought out the best and the worst in us. Thank God, there are far more good people than bad, far more selfless people than selfish, far more rational people than those deluded by wild conspiracy theories. We must not be afraid to call out selfish, racist, reckless behaviour when we see it. But we must also celebrate the selfless love and generosity of those whose goodness always shines brightest when we need it the most.
A CRUEL PAST EXPOSED
AN OPPRESSIVE AND NARROW STATE DESERVES MOST OF THE BLAME FOR THE MOTHER AND BABY HOMES SCANDAL.
BY MICHAEL O'REGAN
On a rainy day in 1967, young Michael Clemenger, who had recently left St Joseph's Industrial School in Tralee, Co Kerry, where he had been physically and sexually abused, decided he would tell a senior cleric at first hand about the hell-hole that had been his home.
After Mass in St John's Church in the town, he approached Dean John Lane, who invited him to talk in the nearby presbytery. Lane was uncomfortable with what Clemenger had to say, not least that the chaplain to the home had told him he could never be a priest because he was a 'bastard', given his mother was unmarried when she gave birth. "You should forget about all those things that happened to you," said Lane.
In his searing autobiography, Holy Terrors, Clemenger observed that the monsignor was anxious to end the conversation. "With that, he ushered me to the front door," he recalled.
That year was a busy one for the monsignor, as he led the clerical campaign to have the Mount Brandon Hotel in Tralee cancel a cabaret act by an American actress, Jayne Mansfield. She was denounced in a statement read from the altar at Sunday Masses, and parishioners were urged to boycott the event. Lane noted Mansfield boasted she sold sex better than any other actress in the world.
The hotel management caved in, and the cabaret was cancelled.
When Monsignor John Lane died, he was hailed as a compassionate man. President de Valera, a friend, attended the funeral. Church and State were one.
They were not to be challenged.
POST-INDEPENDENCE UNDERCLASS
In that Ireland, there were no opportunities for the victims of the mother and baby homes scandal to have their voices heard. They were part of a post-independence underclass who were expected to know their silent place.
The church must bear its share of the blame, but most responsibility rests with the State. The State was the overseer, as it left education and health to the church's foot soldiers, many of whom were idealists and very different to the forbidding and judgemental caricature.
Rank and file religious were subject to strict discipline, and the questioning of authority was not welcomed.
An oppressive and narrow State was moulded over the decades. It was an environment ripe for cover-up and scandal.
Episcopal letters show a lamentable obsession with sexual morality and the danger of 'dirty' books and films.
In the early 1970s, the then Archbishop of Dublin, Dr John Charles McQuaid, warned that the availability of condoms would be a curse on the country.
The tone defining the underclass was set early by the State. In 1924, Minister Patrick McGilligan said people might have to die to ensure economic solvency. "People may have to die in this country and may have to die from starvation," he said.
The message was clear: the underclass could take a running jump and do without food, if necessary. Historian Joe Lee would later observe that McGilligan was "the lawyer son of a comfortable Ulster businessman" .
BIG UNDERCLASS
The underclass spread well beyond the unfortunate women and children in the mother and baby homes. It included our emigrants, fleeing a moribund country in search of work.
Between 1951 and 61 alone, some 400,000 took the emigrant boat. They were mostly ill-prepared and poorly educated. Some were pregnant single women. "They were a silent generation and they left in silence," observed the novelist, John McGahern, many years later.
Against this background, it is nonsense to blame Irish society for the mother and baby homes scandal, much as it might suit the State to do so.
Education was considered a ministerial backwater until the dynamic Sean Lemass appointed Dr Patrick Hillery and Donogh O'Malley to the portfolio in the 1960s.
When O'Malley announced free secondary education in September 1966, almost one in three children leaving national school received no further education.
This was happening on the 50th anniversary of the 1916 Rising.
O'Malley referred to it as "a dark stain on the Irish conscience".
A BELT OF A CROZIER
The Taoiseach Micheál Martin failed to adequately lay the blame for the mother and baby scandal at the State's door in his apology. President Higgins got it right when he said the State was mainly to blame.
Successive governments made a political calculation when befriending the church.
A belt of a crozier from an episcopal palace could lose votes at a time when the word of a bishop carried more sway than that of a minister.
When John A. Costello was made Taoiseach in an inter-party government in 1948, he sent a fawning telegram to Rome promising loyalty, ignoring the reservations of a senior civil servant.
Seán McBride sent an equally fawning letter to McQuaid when he became a TD.
Charlie Haughey, a young minister for justice, pledged he would deal with dirty books and offered McQuaid a gift of wine!
The morale of many well-meaning religious must have been shattered in this stifling environment.
In the 1950s, an exasperated Fr John Hayes, founder of Muintir na Tíre, observed that Ireland was too busy being Catholic to be Christian.
Priests who graduated from seminaries in the 1960s recall the sense of optimism that change was in the air following the Second Vatican Council.
McQuaid did his best to put an end to that on his return from Rome. "You might have been worried by much talk of changes to come. Allow me to reassure you," he said. "No change will worry the tranquillity of your Christian lives."
An opportunity to fashion a Catholic ethos, based on Christian principles and genuine empathy, was lost. Successive popes rolled back on the reforming work done by Pope John XXIII.
Such an ethos might have rescued the victims of the mother and baby homes scandal.
FUTURE SCANDALS?
All that is history now. The dam has burst. The church is battered, and the political establishment is looked on with suspicion by a better-educated electorate.
Time will tell if our political leaders will learn from the mother and baby homes and other scandals.
Will some government, in the future, find itself apologising for direct provision and the failure to deal with homelessness and a dysfunctional health service?
If it happens, the blame will be firmly with the State. There will be no escape.
And the heroes will be people like Fr Peter McVerry and Sister Stan who have stood up to successive governments in highlighting the plight of our current underclass.
The President of Ireland, Éamon de Valera, kneels to Dr John Charles McQuaid
A proud Kerryman, Michael O'Regan is a former parliamentary correspondent for The Irish Times. He is well worth a follow on Twitter @Michael_O_Regan
CHOICE AND UNCERTAINTY: THE FUTURE OF CHURCHES IN IRELAND -
WHY SECULARISATION IS GOOD FOR THE CHURCHES
BY GLADYS GANIEL
The future of Ireland's churches is uncertain. With church buildings closed for public worship for most of the last year, religious practice has undergone considerable change. Many of us are accessing services online or on television, but some church leaders fear that the pandemic will only hasten our island's steady decline in churchgoing.
Even before the pandemic, it was common to assert that Ireland's churches – especially the Catholic Church – were in crisis. I have even written a book with the title Transforming Post-Catholic Ireland, emphasising that the days of a so-called 'holy, Catholic Ireland' are well and truly over.
The term 'post-Catholic' may conjure up feelings of sadness, loss, or even despair. It conveys the sense that churches have lost their social importance and political influence. It indicates that people no longer trust church institutions, especially after wave after wave of revelations of abuse.
But as both an academic sociologist of religion and a Christian (Presbyterian by trade), I see 'post-Catholic' Ireland as ripe with opportunities for the churches to contribute to the common good in ways that were not possible in generations past.
MEASURES OF SECULARISATION
Sociologists of religion measure secularisation in three main ways: 1) Declines in measures of 'religiosity', such as church attendance, vocations to ministry, or belief in God, hell, the afterlife, etc. 2) Declines in political influence, including the formal separation of church and state and reduced impact on state laws. 3) Declines in social influence, including a lessening of the extent to which social values are informed by religious teaching.
According to these measures Ireland is secularising, although not as much as other parts of Europe.
For me, the main sociological reason why secularisation is good for the churches lies in the separation of church and state, or put another way, the separation of religious and political power. When churches are bound up with political power, they lose their ability to critique abuses of power. They may become too closely associated with national or ethnic identity to truly seek the common good, or to take up the cause of the marginalised.
Many of the past sins of the Irish churches are rooted in their close relationships with political power. The churches' loss of political power presents them with a new freedom to pursue causes neglected by the powerful: age-old causes like reconciliation between Catholics and Protestants; and new causes like welcoming strangers to our shores.
But many Christians mourn their loss of power. A 2008 study of the Presbyterian Church by Sandra Baillie asked people about their views on the future – and they were almost universally pessimistic. One minister said: "In the immediate future, the Church will decline in numbers. … Humanly speaking, the future looks bleak. Society is now totally shaped by anti-Christian thinking and teaching." Another said: "It will be downhill all the way."
I have found similar sentiments in my own research – with notable exceptions being some Catholics who are relieved that their church has lost power because they think this will prevent the abuses of the past.
American theologian Stanley Hauerwas once said: "The churches in the West aren't dying – God is killing them." The point he was making was that all the churches of the West had become too closely bound up with political power, too keen to collude in military and economic violence, and vulnerable to the temptations of corruption and abuse. So, before we mourn the loss of church 'influence', we should pause to reflect on Hauerwas' words. Hauerwas does not think that God's 'killing' of the church means its disappearance from public life. Rather, it is God's way of opening up new ways for churches to contribute to the common good.
CHURCHES HAVE CHOICES
Churches have choices in how they respond to secularisation. If their choices are rooted in defensiveness and fear, they will destroy their witness and become largely irrelevant. A 2016 book by Andrew Brown and Linda Woodhead, That was the Church that was:
How the Church of England Lost the English People, describes how the Church of England has become largely irrelevant, at least in their view.
A majority of adults in England, Scotland and Wales now describe their affiliation as 'no religion' rather than 'Christian'. This makes the UK one of an estimated seven countries worldwide where people of 'no religion' outnumber those who identify with a religion.
According to Brown and Woodhead, when the Church of England was confronted with changing social values, it turned in on itself and became a more 'sectarian' church concerned with preserving purity around matters of gender and sexual morality – rather than promoting the common good.
But in Ireland, the churches still have the opportunity to make choices rooted in openness and love, in the process helping to transform Ireland in ways we have yet to imagine. One advantage of the churches' now marginal position is that they have more freedom and flexibility to critique abuses of power, to form diverse networks for activism for the common good, and to articulate alternative visions of the future – including robust alternatives to unbridled individualism and consumerism.
But this won't happen without listening to young Christians and trusting them to make the changes they want to see in our churches. Millennials and Generation Z are unlikely to want to preserve all aspects of our church institutions in their current form. Ireland's young Christians should be encouraged to offer the churches their creative ideas about what the Spirit is saying about changing our churches.
THE PANDEMIC: OPPORTUNITY AMID TRAGEDY
The coronavirus pandemic has been a tragedy. The death and mourning it has brought can only be lamented. But Ireland's churches have responded energetically to it. A survey I carried out in partnership with the Irish Council of Churches/Irish Inter-Church Meeting found that during the pandemic, 75 per cent of Catholic, Church of Ireland, Presbyterian and Methodist churches had maintained or increased their social services to the wider community. In addition, clergy have been designated as 'key workers' in recognition of their important roles in burying the dead and ministering to the grieving.
Churches of all denominations moved quickly to put their services online. Before the pandemic, 56 per cent of parishes/ congregations on the island provided online worship opportunities. By May 2020, that figure had increased to 87 per cent. Some faith communities began offering more opportunities for online worship than they had for in-person worship, starting new bible studies, youth group meetings, rosaries, compline, and other prayer meetings. Seventy per cent of clergy said they would retain at least some aspects of their online ministries when restrictions on gatherings were lifted.
Clergy also reported that people were praying more and that numbers far in excess of those who would attend services in person were accessing services online. Some clergy were sceptical that this could be explained as a religious revival among the general population, interpreting it as an intensification of faith among those already relatively committed.
Increases in lay activism have accompanied this intensification. More laity are offering pastoral care, helping in food banks and other such initiatives, providing technical expertise/IT support, and – when church buildings are open – stewarding sociallydistanced services. There were some denominational differences in volunteerism. Protestants were much more likely to assist their clergy with pastoral care matters than Catholics.
On the other hand, there are indications that the pandemic is hastening the decline of religious practice. An Iona Institute survey found that one in five Catholics who attended Mass prior to the pandemic 'don't know' if they will return when all restrictions are lifted.
Churches also face daunting financial challenges. Almost all parishes and congregations have had declines (or delays) in financial giving, and clergy in some dioceses and denominations have had pay cuts. Some lay staff have been furloughed, meaning that not all ministries can operate at full capacity.
These countervailing trends present churches with more choices. Churches can become demoralised if attendance falters, finances are strained, and some church buildings are closed. Or churches can choose to continue with online ministries, developing 'blended' online/in-person approaches that may enhance people's spiritual growth and bolster evangelisation. They can choose to continue to serve the most vulnerable and marginalised in their communities. They can choose to encourage and empower the laity to become more involved in church life.
Writing in his personal diary in 2002, the late Fr Gerry Reynolds CSsR reflected on the importance of listening to how the spirit is leading. Facing into an uncertain future, we might find guidance and inspiration in his words: "The future does not arrive. It is created and depends on our ability to listen. The Spirit communicates himself to each one for the good of the whole community. … The charism of shared spirituality with laity must be institutionalised to grow and survive.'"
Gladys Ganiel is a sociologist at Queen's University Belfast. Her books include Unity Pilgrim: The Life of Fr Gerry Reynolds CSsR and Transforming Post-Catholic Ireland: Religious Practice in Late Modernity. She has written two reports on religion during the pandemic, both published by the Irish Council of Churches/ Irish Inter-Church Meeting: 'People Still Need Us: A Report on a Survey of Faith Leaders on the Island of Ireland during the Covid-19 Pandemic' (May 2020) and 'Something Other than a Building: A Report on Churches on the Island of Ireland during the Covid-19 Pandemic' (January 2021).
