The Church’s social contribution

Last August, in the This Week RTÉ radio programme, Fr Michael Drumm, chairperson of the Catholic Schools Partnership, was quizzed repeatedly by Richard Crowley, one of RTÉ’s best interviewers, as to why more progress had not been made in the ‘divestment’ of patronage by Catholic schools – that is, in the reduction in the number of Catholic schools in the context of the decline in the number of practising Catholics in Ireland.

Beyond passing references to ‘fear of the unknown’, Crowley did not pursue the arguably more interesting question of why, in spite of all the recent controversy and criticism surrounding the Catholic Church in this country, and an undeniable decline in religious practice, so many  communities around Ireland remain deeply attached to their local Catholic schools. What is it about Catholic schools that continues to attract so many Irish parents in 2015?

Without wishing to idealize all such schools, the attachment to Catholic schools must be related to the sense of respect for persons, rooted in faith, which they communicate, the quality of education they offer and their attention to the individual pupil. UK Labour Party leadership candidate Andy Burnham MP, though not now a practising Catholic himself, sends his children to a Catholic school, he recently told the Huffington Post UK, because ‘I still believe in the values and the grounding it gives you.’

As the RTÉ interview suggests, the Catholic contribution to Irish society is insufficiently emphasised today. This is partly because of the grave abuse scandals that have happened and that should not be forgotten or downplayed. It’s partly because the media and some politicians have focused to a great extent on those scandals and have devoted much less attention to the many positive Catholic contributions to the common good. Another factor is a simplistic and negative understanding of subsidiarity, which is influenced by the current preference for socialist frameworks in Irish academic reflection.

Healthcare contribution

Some voices from academia have nevertheless been raised to remind us of the Catholic social contribution to the nation. Last August, in a letter to the Irish Catholic, Professor Ray Kinsella highlighted the huge contribution of the Catholic Church, and particularly of the religious nursing orders, from the 19^th century on, to the care of the sick and to the training of Irish healthcare professionals. His letter brought to my mind a plaque in St Teresa’s Church in Dublin’s Clarendon Street, which honours the first thirteen Sisters of Mercy who are buried in the Church’s crypt and who died between 1831 and 1840, often at a relatively young age, while serving the poor of Dublin during a period of cholera and other epidemics. The work of these early Sisters of Mercy is covered in Mary C Sullivan’s excellent biography of their founder, Catherine McAuley: The Path of Mercy, Four Courts Press, 2012.

In areas such as acute hospital services, disability and care of the elderly, Catholic religious contributed hugely to service provision at a time when statutory provision was often patchy. Many became active here in the decades following Catholic Emancipation in 1829. In 2012, an Irish Church publication listed as follows the congregations consulted about a healthcare document: the Brothers of Charity, Sisters of Mercy,  Daughters of Charity, Little Company of Mary, Little Sisters of the Poor, Medical Missionaries of Mary, Religious Sisters of Charity, Sisters of Bon Secours, Sisters of St John of God and St John of God Services. While the list does not cover all congregations past and present engaged in healthcare, it nevertheless gives some sense of the sheer dimensions of the Catholic contribution to Irish healthcare.

An important factor preventing proper understanding of the Catholic contribution to the common good in Ireland is the defective understanding of subsidiarity here. Subsidiarity provides an important justification for charitable or voluntary effort but is too often seen through a socialist prism as a narrowly conservative principle, which over-emphasises the family and voluntary organisations and offers a very negative perspective on state involvement or the promotion of equality.

In August, for example, a letter to the Irish Times from an Irish educationalist offered a negative view of subsidiarity while championing the equality principle. The letter suggested that subsidiarity is ‘the practice of the State devolving delivery of services (especially health and education) to non-statutory bodies’ and was an ‘ideological hallmark’ of the new Irish State. Moreover, our State had recently allowed subsidiarity to ‘spiral’ to a point where there were at least fourteen patrons vying for the education space in Ireland. There was now a need for the State to take ‘full control’ of the nation’s schools. Other writers have argued that there is no place for sacramental preparation during school hours in ‘publicly funded’ schools – implying in effect that fully Catholic schools should not  receive public funding, even though that funding ultimately comes from Catholic as well as other citizens.

In defence of subsidiarity

In response to such arguments, it should be acknowledged that grave problems did arise historically in Ireland in some services run by Catholic religious, particularly in institutional childcare. Church leaders have also signalled their support for some degree of ‘divestment’ of Catholic schools in the changed Ireland of today. Nevertheless, arguments critical of subsidiarity are open to question on several grounds.

First, subsidiarity-based arguments today do not deny the legitimate stewardship role of the State in social provision or its duty to guarantee basic services and standards for its citizens.

Second, the implication that the State itself should monopolise the delivery of education or other public services – as distinct from funding them or monitoring their quality – is arguably quite dated in 2015 after many decades of extensive reflection across the world about problems and issues associated with State delivery.

Third, the argument that charitable bodies got involved in welfare because the State ‘devolved’ services to them is historically flawed. On the contrary, across Europe and over many centuries, Church bodies pioneered social responses to the care of the sick and the poor and the education of the young. In more recent times, in areas such as disability, Catholic charities pioneered service delivery and it was only quite gradually that the Irish State began to provide some financial support to such services. Hospice care is another recent example of a vitally important religious contribution to service development.

It was not so much a question of the State ‘devolving’ services to charitable bodies, including the religious orders, but of such groups or charities organising themselves in response to need at local level and of receiving, in time, support from the State.

Moreover, while some argue that only State bodies have a public purpose, subsidiarity theorists today point out that Church-run and other non-profit bodies carry out significant tasks in the public interest and thus merit public funding.

Arguments critical of subsidiarity also fail to take account of the positive philosophical arguments underpinning this concept. These arguments stress the dignity of the human person and his or her capacity to give something to others, see human freedom as necessary for self-fulfilment and suggest that that freedom is expressed particularly in the voluntary associations or charitable endeavours which human persons set up together in response to need – and which can themselves be seen as a ‘gift’ to the whole community.

Current ‘one-size-fits-all’ arguments for full State control of education or other key sectors and against a plurality of providers seem depressingly dated. By contrast, there is something dynamic and positive about the support in Catholic social thought, through the principle of subsidiarity, for a plurality of social groups between the individual and the State, a plurality that safeguards the freedom of such groups to act and to take initiatives in the service of the community and in accordance with their own ethos.

In conclusion, as Archbishop Eamon Martin put it in August 2015 at Knock, we should not forget the ‘immense contribution’ of Irish religious to this country and the wider world. More specifically, we need to re-develop an appreciation in Ireland of what religious, and the Church in general, have contributed to the common good here. This doesn’t mean dismissing the role of the State or ignoring the contribution of charitable bodies with a different ethos. But, in a context where there has been an excessive focus on the negative, it surely does mean re-acquainting ourselves with a precious heritage of Catholic service, self-sacrifice and dynamism.