Editorial – January 2021

I would like to begin by wishing all readers of Position Papers a very Happy New Year. I won’t say “good riddance” to 2020 because I’m sure all the hardships caused by Covid-19 were blessings in disguise. That said, it certainly would be nice if these vaccines manage to bring this pandemic to a close. (On the subject of the vaccines, we are carrying a very useful article by Dr Angelo Bottone on the morality of the different vaccines, and in particular those whose production have – sadly – involved the use of material from aborted human beings. I would recommend you to read it.) Let us hope and pray that individuals, businesses and the Church itself can bounce back from the damage caused by the pandemic and the consequent lockdowns. 

One feature of the Covid period that I personally have found slightly disturbing is  the degree of social alienation of some Catholics that it has revealed. By “social alienation” I’m referring to way in which some Catholics appear to be disengaging from social life and are becoming increasingly suspicious of, and even hostile to, national institutions and to politics in particular. This has become particularly apparent in the great suspicion of political decisions with regard to Covid, and of the upcoming vaccination programme. Policies coming from the HSE and Dáil Éireann and promoted by national media tend to be met by them with a high degree of suspicion and at times resistance.

Of course it is easy to understand this sense of alienation. It is hard not to feel left out in the cold by our politicians when religious ceremonies appear to have been targeted for closure (as against retail for example). As for our media institutions, many years ago I gave up buying the Irish Times (and of writing letters to the editor). I simply began feeling foolish paying an institution €1.80 daily (as it was then) for a paper that would simply trample on my most cherished beliefs and views. Of course the Irish Times has every right to promote their editorial line and I’m only sorry that practising Catholics in this country never managed to do the same with anything approaching the same professionalism. I also gave up listening to RTE news programmes for much the same reason – though unlike the Irish Times they have no right to promote a worldview so at odds with the views of a significant number of those who have no option but to finance them. 

This sense of alienation from the values predominant in the national legal, political and media institutions was of course greatly heightened for Catholics during the referenda to legalise same-sex marriage (2015) and abortion (2018). The institutions of the State came out with a stunning degree of unanimity in favour of these changes to Irish law, leaving a large sector of the country feeling disenfranchised. 

At the same time Catholics must reject this temptation to grow embittered with the society in which they live. A retreat into a Catholic ghetto is not the proper response to perceived social and political hostility towards the Christian vision of life. There would be nothing worse than that Catholics would disengage from public life, from social and political institutions, and even friendships with non-Catholics and retreat into a hermetically sealed Catholic bubble in which they feel secure and reaffirmed. Both those Catholics and society itself would be the worse off: society because it would be deprived of the salt and light of Catholic witness, and those Catholics because they would become increasingly rarefied – in a word: odd. In clerical circles there is a saying: “There’s nothing odder than an odd priest” referring presumably to the well known fact that priests who shun social interaction can end up becoming very idiosyncratic. But the same applies to Catholics at large. Of late I have heard increasingly strange things being said by self-ghettoised Catholics – ranging from Covid being a plot, to the belief that the end of the world is imminent. Admittedly Covid could be a plot and the end of the world might well be nigh, but both scenarios are extremely improbable and we cannot live our lives in the domain on the extremely improbable – because in that strange twilight world virtually anything is possible. 

Catholics who allow themselves to be alienated from society run the danger of sliding into many of the classic features of fundamentalism. Scholars have identified the key features of fundamentalism (most clearly exhibited in certain fundamentalist Protestant and Islamic sects). Most salient among these features are: a strident rejection of secularised modernity and a retreat into social and psychological enclaves, moral puritanism, a polarised view of the good (the elect) and the bad (the reprobate), the politicising of religion (or sacralising of politics), and lastly millennialism – ie. the view that the world is coming to an end, or at least to an apocalyptic moment. 

Unfortunately these very features of fundamentalism end up sealing closed the possible escape routes: voices from outside are automatically suspect and are easily anathematised; the only acceptable opinions expressed form part of an echo chamber, simply confirming and radicalising existing perceptions. Furthermore – and perhaps dangerously – politics gets drawn into the mix, and certain political positions and persons become invested with an aura of religious orthodoxy. 

And so it is important not to give in to a feeling of social alienation. An expression of this is not to receive our news and opinions from media sources that one finds amenable. Nor should we be blind to the fact that there are many noble people working in our political, social, and media institutions.

That said, is Position Papers not just one more voice in the echo chamber? I hope not! We do try to embrace a broad range of opinions within overall fidelity to the teaching of the Catholic Church. We steer clear of politics proper, as there is simply no Catholic “line” on matters that are purely political. And hopefully with our increased use of book reviews we are encouraging our readers to read more deeply for themselves on the kinds of matters we touch on in our articles. And please do feel free to take issue with what you read here – feedback is always very helpful for us, and please let us know also if there are any books in particular which you would like to see reviewed in the course of 2021.