Celebration – the Key to the Renewal of Irish Catholicism?

Maynooth, Corpus Christi 2016. In most of the Catholic World, this great feast is marked by Processions of the Blessed Sacrament through the bunting-strewn streets of cities and villages. But not in Maynooth, or, as far as I can tell, in any of the towns in the neighbourhood, where three dioceses converge.

When I was growing up, the Corpus Christi public Procession was a feature of many a town and village, at least in Co. Cork. But Cork city’s own Corpus Christi Procession was in a league of its own. Bishop Daniel Coholan started the tradition in 1926 in response to a request by businessmen. It was a truly great occasion. The Procession was that of the men, who, dressed in their Sunday best, proudly walked from the surrounding parishes into city centre. Brass bands played lustily as we headed for Daunt’s Square at the confluence of Pana (Patrick’s Street) and the Grand Parade. There a huge outdoor altar was erected, at the centre of which was an oval picture of the Sacred Heart.

The Bishop of Cork carried the Monstrance from the North Chapel (then the Pro-Cathedral) – under a gleaming canopy (or baldachin) of white silk and gold thread, accompanied by four smart cadets with raised swords – down to St Mary’s Quay,  over Patrick’s Bridge, down the length of Patrick’s Street (Pana to the natives) right up to Daunt’s Square, at the centre of the city. Before the bishop were the serried ranks of the city’s secular clergy and Religious, after him, uniformed platoons of the Gardai, the army and the navy, the Lord Mayor and aldermen of the city. as well as professors from UCC, all in their colourful robes and uniforms. As in the houses in the suburbs and back streets, so too were the main streets strewn with bunting and papal flags hung from private homes and public buildings. Images of Our Lord and Our Lady surrounded by a vast array of flowers replaced the usual fashion displays in the big shop windows, while young girls in their First Communion dresses strew rose petals to create a carpet for the magnificently coped Bishop to walk on, carrying the monstrance with bare and bowed head.

The women and children had already made their leisurely way into the city. They lined the pavements of Patrick Street and the other streets, where they watched with wonder at their marching men folk – not always renowned for their piety – pass by. All knelt in awe-some adoration, as the golden Monstrance passed them, sweet incense from swinging thuribles wafting through the Summer breeze.

Cork’s annual Procession was always held on the Sunday after Corpus Christi, though the actual Feast was on a Thursday. A decade or so ago, I happened to be in Cork for Corpus Christi and decided to join my own parish for the Procession. I was shocked. It was a sad sight. Some time previously, the Bishop had decreed that women could also walk in the Procession. A small straggly crowd gathered at the church gates to be led by the PP into the city. It was made up mainly of older women and some younger women with children in prams,

The men mostly stayed at home.

We wended our weary way into the city. Gone were the Papal Flags and bunting that used to be strewn from the houses in the parish. The secularisation of Ireland cannot be entirely blamed, since it is still celebrated with great colour in other secular states of Europe (e.g. the Catholic States of Federal Germany). The day is even marked with a public holiday in some countries. One or other brass band was to be heard, but their plaintive sound of half-forgotten hymns was more mournful than robust. In the Grand Parade the full crowd amounted to a few thousand at the most – compared to the some 50,000, if my memory serves me right, that in my youth filled the length and breadth of Patrick Street, and the Grand Parade, not to mention the broad expanse of Washington Street.

The altar seemed to be more or less the same as fifty years ago, though in need of a lick of fresh paint. The Rosary was loudly recited over a brash loudspeaker in English and Irish, the response a muffled murmur. The bedraggled clergy looked anything but smart. There was a sermon – eminently forgettable – followed by the traditional Benediction (the woeful singing accompanied by a dull harmonium).

Since then, the shape of things have changed somewhat. According to a press release for the 2014 Procession:

This year, as in previous years, the numbers in the procession were greatly enhanced by members of the Asian, African and Eastern European Communities in the city. A particular welcome was afforded by the large crowd in Daunt’s Square to greet the arrival of the Polish and Indian communities, accompanied by their chaplains. Father Piotr Gallus, the Polish Chaplain, led the Rosary from the Altar in Daunt’s Square. Special places were reserved for the sick and those in wheelchairs adjacent to the altar in Daunt’s Square.

It would seem that the Corpus Christi Procession in Cork has in one sense become more Catholic by reason of the presence of the migrant communities in the city. Perhaps the migrants in their colourful costumes might help transform the “Annual Eucharistic Procession” (the new name is so anaemic) into something truly Catholic, more universal and more resembling the joyous festivities that shape the whole year in other Catholic counties – and in earlier times in Ireland, such as the Pattern Days, May Processions, etc.

Summer is the festive season in secular Ireland, though these, essentially secular, festivals occur throughout the year. In the past few decades, Ireland, it seems to me, has been slowly recovering from the dark anti-Christian – and so anti-human – shadow cast over our ancient Catholic tradition by 19th-century cultural developments marked by Victorian Protestant respectability (the dominant essentially puritan Christianity) and Catholic legalistic moral theology. Both of these cultural factors were anything but life-affirming.  They are often identified with so-called “traditional Irish Catholicism”, which is in its death throes.

It will not be missed.

Today, Ireland is in a sense more Catholic than then, as reflected in the thousands of festivals of every hue and cry that are held up and down the country, especially during the Summer season: people rejoicing in music, dance, poetry reading, and wide-ranging debates in the Summer Schools. The recent 1916 celebrations have shown how we Irish too can do pageantry well, indeed we do it in such a way as to make us proud to be Irish.

Today the Catholic Church is most of the time rarely little more than an empty building (often interiorly vandalized by progressive clerics). At most, the local Catholic church is simply part of the backdrop to all the festivities – a dark silhouette on the hill, while in the bright, bunting-bedecked squares and streets below people of all ages, but especially our amazingly talented youth, enjoy themselves. More power to them! And yet, all these festivals around the country, which are to be heartily welcomed, cannot replace a truly religious celebration. Indeed, they can easily become forms of escapism, while some often end in a sea of alcohol.

Today’s festivals, though they help alleviate the underlying loneliness and inner emptiness of secular society, cannot fill the void at the heart of contemporary Irish society.

As Josef Pieper, echoing Nietzsche, put it, you cannot truly celebrate  unless you can say “Yes” to life, to reality as it is. And this affirmation of life is only possible ultimately when we know that God says Yes to us and to our broken world – which is the essence of our faith. “All the promises of God find their Yes in him [Jesus Christ]” (2 Cor 1:20). All that the human heart yearns for, all that promise which God built into our DNA, all that God promised the Chosen People, all our longing of happiness is fulfilled in Jesus Christ, who says Yes to us personally and collectively: “how good that you are!” To be a Christian is to share in His victory over sin and death, which victory alone enables us to be life-affirming. “That is why we utter the Amen through him to the glory of God” (2 Cor 22).

The first task of the Irish Church today, it seems to me, is to discover once again how to celebrate, how to organize our own public festivals, which, like the old Pattern days and May Processions, are life-affirming, that express and engender joy in the participants. Music. By means of authentic art and dance, good food and drink, all God’s good creation must experienced as beautiful;  it is to be enjoyed. This can only happen, if our festivities are ultimately rooted in an experience of the sublime – in and through the liturgy. That is the subject of another article.

Suffice it is to say here that, in order for the faithful to be able to “lift up their hearts” in joyful worship in company of the angels and saints (and afterwards enjoy a street party), we celebrants  must overcome the legalistic minimalism, which we clerics (liberal and traditional alike) inherited from the pre-Conciliar culture. Good though it is to fulfil one’s Sunday obligation and stick to the (few but important) rubrics that are left in the reformed liturgy, it is not enough. We must recover “the Spirit of the liturgy” (J. Ratzinger) though the excitement of discovering the Truth through communal study and reflection in our parish communities.

After that, we might be in a position to create an new Irish Catholic public culture. Our hugely talented  youth need to be welcomed in (even if they are not practicing at present) to offer their creativity, not only for the liturgy but for what is celebrated outside, in the what I call the overflow of the liturgy onto the streets and squares. Then all the world can sing and dance and give thanks to God. People must taste and see that the Lord is good, that it is worth living, that is it is good to be alive, to be here on God’s good earth redeemed by the blood of the innocent Lamb so that we can once again experience that “The world is charged with the splendour of God” (G.M. Hopkins). Now, in the here and now, we can learn to enjoy the good things of God’s creation – and to learn again what it is to be truly Catholic in modern Ireland where the Irish Church is in the process of becoming multicultural – and more Catholic.

© D. Vincent Twomey SVD