This month marks the beginning of the centenary of Ireland’s Easter Rising, an event which was the start of an intense political and military struggle for Irish independence culminating in the 1922 Anglo-Irish treaty and, tragically, the subsequent Irish Civil War in 1923.
No doubt over the coming months there will be much retrospective analysis of this fateful event in our history, including debate as to the merits and morality of the Rising. Already 1916 has been the subject of a large number of recently published books, articles and documentaries: the Irish Catholic newspaper dedicating a splendid issue in December to the matter, RTE starting a five part serial drama entitled Rebellion, with documentaries to follow, and the religious affairs correspondent of the Irish Times producing, true to form, a cynical piece on the Catholicism of the leaders of the Rising. Michael Kirke has dedicated two In Passing columns to the Rising, and I hope to carry a follow up piece closer to Easter itself.
Re-reading the famous text of the 1916 Proclamation of Independence I surmised that had the text been the work of Ireland’s current political leaders there would be some notable omissions: the invocations of God in the text would certainly be dumped and perhaps even the Proclamation’s guarantee of religious liberty might follow suit – being incompatible with the State’s current efforts to push Catholicism out of schools. Even the Proclamation’s guarantee of civil liberty might generate some unease among those seeking to repeal the Eighth Amendment and so remove from the unborn the guarantee of the most fundamental of civil liberties: that of the right to life.
And yet, whatever of the merits or otherwise of the Easter Rising itself, it strikes me that the repeated invocation of God in the Proclamation is no accident; it constitutes an implicit recognition that all human freedom comes ultimately from God, and that God is the ultimate guarantor of human dignity. A state which explicitly or implicitly rejects God is one which eventually ends up oppressing its citizens.
This came to mind when I recently read a 1976 Epiphany homily preached in Krakow by its then Archbishop, Saint John Paul II, in which he spoke forthrightly of the atheistic Polish State’s harassment of believers. Some sections struck me as quite applicable here in Ireland:
The vast majority of the population of Poland is made up of believers, and they have every reason to be afraid that atheism might become, either directly or indirectly, the basis of the existence of the state, suppressing our right to define ourselves and act in accordance with our convictions.
Particularly relevant in the light of the government’s increasing hostility to Catholic schools is a passage on the education of children:
We do not interfere in the families of atheists since this concerns their own conscience; however, we cannot help but wish that Christian families in this country might send their children to school without the fear that a materialistic view of the world and an atheistic ideology will be forced on them.
In the Ireland of 2016 Catholic parents can no longer be certain that the bizarre doctrines of gender ideology will not be forced on their children at school. It might not be an exaggeration to say that an increasingly materialistic view of man – foreign to the view of man espoused by the 1916 leaders – now informs the policies of the modern Irish State regarding the unborn, the education of children and the nature of marriage.
Whatever about political revolutions against oppressive regimes, Christians are called to be in a permanent state of rebellion against the regime of evil in the world. They are called to be a sign of contradiction in a world which without the salt and light of Christian witness, would irreparably decay and darken. In the words of that great advocate of the rebellion of religion, St Josemaría Escrivá, “religion is the greatest rebellion of men, who refuse to live like animals, who are dissatisfied and restless until they know their Creator and are on intimate terms with him” (Homily “Freedom, a gift from God” in Friends of God, 38). And the founder of Opus Dei urges Christians to hang on to the freedom won for them by Christ in the face of the pressures of a paganised society:
This is the glorious freedom of the children of God. Christians who let themselves be browbeaten or become inhibited or envious in the face of the licentious behaviour of those who have not accepted the Word of God, show that they have a very poor idea of the faith (Friends of God, “Freedom, a gift from God”, Number 38).
(Incidentally, when St Josemaría visited Ireland in August of 1959 he spoke of how he fervently prayed for Ireland as a teenager, when in 1916 news reached his native Spain of the Irish insurrection).
This is the rebellion (of love and not hatred) which really matters in the final analysis, and which is really transformative of a nation; and this is the task of Irish Catholics in 2016: armed with their prayer, courage and genuine love of country to proclaim and fight tirelessly to defend “the glorious freedom of the children of God”.