Irish Catholics, where are you?

Irish Catholicism has gone underground, leaving the public square and the forum of public argument and amusement to whoever may wish to have it. Many observers on both sides of the vote on changing the definition of marriage last year agreed that there was an abdication of argument; the killer blows were mere slogans such as ‘equality’, which needed an unpacking they never really got, which the Catholic tradition (source of ideas such as ‘equality’) was well qualified to do, but was not listened to. The majority of the citizens of Ireland identify as Catholics, and many of them sign up to the teaching of the Church.  So why the silence?

Where we are today has a lot of different sources and influences, which go to make up the ‘Irish Catholic Experience’. Professor Vincent Twomey, in The End of Irish Catholicism? (Veritas, 2003), has offered an interesting tour of these developments. During the penal times, from 1697 to 1793, the Catholic Church was forced to live underground. After the Great Famine, from 1845 to 1849, we effectively lost our native language and so lost the last cultural link with the ancient and medieval Catholic tradition.

A rootless faith

Irish Catholics find it hard to access their roots, compared to Catholic cultures such as Germany, Spain or the Tyrol, where people celebrate the saints of their forefathers, indeed praying much more to Irish saints (Killian, Ita, Columbanus, Gall) than we do in Ireland. The ancient Christian heritage here at home has become a hobby of historians and a museum piece: the Book of Kells, Ardagh Chalice, etc. and their artistic genius, fired by Christianity, seems very distant and antiquarian; our history has taught us to ‘forget’ it. But this forgetfulness has a price. Alasdair MacIntyre points out that we need ‘narratives’ in order to have an identity:

the history of each of our own lives is … made intelligible in terms of the larger and longer histories of a number of traditions (After Virtue, 222).

No wonder the Irish bishops have been encouraging the cherishing and liturgical celebration in their dioceses of many of our Irish saints in recent decades.

‘We don’t do God’: Catholicism and the Public Square

This lack of roots and identity makes us slow to identify with our faith in daily life. The awkwardness which Irish Catholics today feel in speaking about their faith and expressing it openly forms part of the ‘Irish Catholic Experience’ today. Think, for example, of the uneasy way we celebrate St Patrick’s Day here in Ireland, unable or at least reluctant to link Irish modernity with the tradition of Christianity which St Patrick represents; and so we reduce him to a pantomime-like figure. The same awkwardness may have something to do with the silence of many Catholics on issues which we actually feel strongly about, with the recent referendum an example of this, but you could also refer to the unspoken materialism with which we are served up all the time: it is a soft dictatorship of consumerism and we feel powerless to say anything about it.

In many other countries the Catholic Church is precisely the one doing the boring intellectual spadework on such social, moral and religious matters, and encouraging others to do so: think of the Linacre Institute in England, Catholic Voices (which, thankfully, is spawning Catholic Comment over here) Joseph Ratzinger’s mutually respectful debates with prominent atheist philosophers (Jürgen Habermas, Marcello Pera) on the future of Europe and religion, etc., to mention only some recent examples.

A ‘respectable’ faith

Blessed John Henry Newman was struck by the contrast between Catholicism he found in Italy and the Protestantism in which he was formed: Catholics were natural, unaffected, easy, and cheerful around sacred things, mixing fireworks with feastdays, while Protestants needed to be solemn: public respectability was all. That ‘respectable’ approach was part of our colonial/provincial experience too; Puritanism, that ‘haunting fear that somone, somewhere, may be happy’ rubbed off even on our nineteenth century Catholic emancipation, and taught us to keep church, chapel and conscience for God, leaving the great outdoors for Caesar.

The Second Vatican Council has severe words for this faith-life split: ‘One of the gravest errors of our times is the dichotomy between the faith which many profess and the practice of their daily lives.’ (Gaudium et Spes, 43).

Loving the world

We can’t turn the clock back and resurrect a pre-Famine, less ‘respectable’ and more rowdy Catholicism, with pattern days, pilgrimages and celebrations (though pilgrimages seem to be ringing our bell a bit more). I believe we need to go to a deeper solution, a short cut to a more spontaneous and outgoing faith, a deeper sense of God’s presence in the world. After all, God is the Creator, in whom I have the foundation of my being; ‘in Whom I am more myself, than in myself alone’ (Romano Guardini). St Josemaría Escrivá makes a similar claim in one of his later works:

The Lord wants his children, those of us who have received the gift of faith, to proclaim the original optimistic view of creation, the love for the world which is at the heart of the Christian message (The Forge, 703).

Irish Catholicism, to break out of its somewhat concealed state, needs to see God as the Creator, who ‘saw that it was good’ and gave it (the world) to us to perfect by our efforts. Pope Francis, in Laudato Si, asks us to read into this ‘Gospel of Creation’: ‘the best way to restore men and women to their rightful place … is to speak once more of the figure of a Father who creates’ (75).

‘Without the Creator, the creature would disappear’, as Gaudium et Spes puts it (36). It is not a matter of laboriously making human freedom and values ‘compatible’ with God, in a puritanical and zero-sum way, but of seeing our world of work, progress and culture emerge precisely from an un-grudging and un-jealous Creator and Father, proud rather than suspicious of his children’s spontaneity and freedom. It is surely right to base our faith’s engagement with Irish modernity on the bountiful and creative Fatherhood of God; could this awaken the sleeping giant and bring the values of Catholicism out of the catacombs, to contribute to the reasonableness, joy and goodness of Irish public life?