On the Saturday of his Apostolic Visit to Ireland, Pope Francis had a brief meeting with a group of Irish Jesuits. During the course of the reunion he good humouredly remarked that: “The provincial told me that I am making the faith joyful. Really? As long as it is not a circus!” While the remark was light-hearted it contains an important lesson: we need to take the Pope’s visit to Ireland seriously; it would be a pity if were nothing more than a circus, a species of Catholic jamboree. Individually and as a Church it should have practical consequences, “action-points” points if you will. It strikes me that the Pope himself suggested two such action-points: one for the Church at large in Ireland and the second one for each Catholic individually.
The practical thing suggested by the Pope for the Church at large was that it engage in a profound examination of the role played by clericalism in the crisis of Irish Church. In fact the Pope suggested this at twice in the course of his visit: firstly and explicitly to his fellow Jesuits and later in a more passing way to the bishops of Ireland. To his confrères in that meeting he said the following:
There is something I have understood with great clarity: this drama of abuse, especially when it is widespread and gives great scandal – think of Chile, here in Ireland or in the United States – has behind it a Church that is elitist and clericalist, an inability to be near to the people of God. Elitism, clericalism fosters every form of abuse. And sexual abuse is not the first. The first abuse is of power and conscience.
And then the following day, in his farewell address to the Irish bishops, he made mention of the clericalism which has been a feature of the Church in Ireland:
I ask you, please, to be close – this is the word, “closeness” – to the Lord and to God’s people. Closeness. Do not repeat the attitudes of aloofness and clericalism that at times in your history have given the real image of an authoritarian, harsh and autocratic Church.
It would be a missed opportunity if were to overlook this insight of the Pope, indeed something which he says has “understood with great clarity”. Francis clearly sees that the problem of clericalism lies at the root of the clerical sexual abuse scandals and it seems to me that his insight is spot on. Again and again he has spoken of a clericalism as a “perversion of the Church”. In his recent Letter to the People of God of August 20, in response to the abuse crisis in the USA, he wrote that clericalism is:
…an approach that “not only nullifies the character of Christians, but also tends to diminish and undervalue the baptismal grace that the Holy Spirit has placed in the heart of our people” (Letter to Cardinal Marc Ouellet, President of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America (19 March 2016)).
Clericalism, whether fostered by priests themselves or by lay persons, leads to an excision in the ecclesial body that supports and helps to perpetuate many of the evils that we are condemning today.
It would be wonderful to see the Church in Ireland taking this suggestion by the Pope seriously and undertake some kind of deep examination into the nature of clericalism and ways to remedy it in the Church. In reality this is a study which should have been undertaken eight years ago in response to Pope Benedict’s 2010 Pastoral Letter to Ireland, in which he asked the Irish Church for a careful examination of “the many elements” which had facilitated abuse by Irish ecclesiastics and Church institutions, saying that such an examination was a precondition for remedying the crisis. (I’m not aware that any such examination was ever instigated by the Irish Episcopal Conference). Among elements Pope Benedict identified as contributing to the crisis in the Irish Church were some clearly “clericalist” in nature:
“… inadequate procedures for determining the suitability of candidates for the priesthood and the religious life; insufficient human, moral, intellectual and spiritual formation in seminaries and novitiates; a tendency in society to favour the clergy and other authority figures; and a misplaced concern for the reputation of the Church and the avoidance of scandal…”.
Incidentally, while the crisis in the Church, in Ireland and elsewhere, is more a crisis of clericalism than of Catholicism, there are some who rather simplistically equate clericalism with the pre-conciliar model of priesthood. It does not appear that Pope Francis makes any such identification, especially since the crisis of clerical sexual abuse is a predominantly post-conciliar phenomenon. It can be argued that indeed clericalism was even given a new lease of life by the Council through clericalist interpretations of the reforms, especially in liturgical matters. This is certainly the opinion of Joseph Ratzinger, who argues that “an unprecedented clericalisation” followed the Council, in particular in a new centrality given the priest in liturgical action (in misapplications of the tenets of the Council’s 1963 Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium). In the pre-conciliar liturgy says Ratzinger “the priest himself was not regarded as so important” but this has now changed:
Now the priest – the “presider”, as they now prefer to call him – becomes the real point of reference for the whole liturgy. Everything depends on him. We have to see him, to respond to him, to be involved in what he is doing. His creativity sustains the whole thing. Not surprisingly, people try to reduce this new created role by assigning all kinds of liturgical functions to different individuals and entrusting the “creative” planning of the liturgy to groups of people who like to, and are supposed to, “make a contribution of their own.” Less and less is God in the picture (The Spirit of the Liturgy).
If clericalism is a Catholicism unduly focussed on the priest, this “presider-priest” model appears to be the embodiment of clericalism, and of course this post-conciliar neo-clericalism will have ramifications far beyond liturgical action.
The second “action-point” for individual Catholics to come from the Pope’s visit is a very simple one: to be “encouragers” of one another! In his homily in the Phoenix Park the Holy Father asked that this would be one of the fruits of the World Meeting of Families: “As one of the fruits of this celebration of family life, may you go back to your homes and become a source of encouragement to others, to share with them Jesus’ ‘words of eternal life’.” This may appear a little vague to us, and yet it appears to me to be of crucial importance, especially when we Irish Catholics might feel that, looking at the state of our Church, anything short of grim pessimism would be tantamount to naivety. However such pessimism would not only reveal a lack of faith, but also a lack of objectivity. The upheavals of recent years have, as the Pope pointed out to the Irish bishops, “offered the opportunity for an interior renewal of the Church in this country and pointed to new ways of envisioning its life and mission.” I sense that this renewal is already happening at a “grassroots” level of the Faith in Ireland. As a priest I come across it everyday: faithful who have come begun the practice of frequent confession and spiritual direction; parents who have begun saying the family rosary at home; young Dublin schoolboys whose fidelity to Christ remains unshaken although nobody else in their class practices; university students who don’t hide their Catholicism despite the almost daily derision it receives on campus. These are the seeds of the Church in Ireland in the decades to come.