Two Papal Visits

In 2020, we celebrated the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Pope St John Paul II and the previous year was the fortieth anniversary of his historic visit to Ireland in 1979, the first by a reigning Pope. One undoubted highlight was John Paul’s powerful plea for peace in Drogheda. It went unheeded at the time by those committed to the “armed struggle” against British rule in Northern Ireland but arguably did bear fruit in the longer term. 

The Pope issued a strong “Ireland must choose” challenge in Limerick on the last day of his visit: 

The Irish people have to choose today their way forward. Will it be the transformation of all strata of humanity into a new creation, or the way that many nations have gone, giving excessive importance to economic growth and material possessions while neglecting the things of the spirit? … Ireland must choose…. Let the voice of your forefathers, who suffered so much to maintain their faith in Christ and thus to preserve Ireland’s soul, resound today in your ears through the voice of the Pope when he repeats the words of Christ: “What will it profit a man, if he gains the whole world, and forfeits his life?” (Mt 16 :26).

It would be hard to argue today that this Papal appeal was heard in the following decades but perhaps, in the long term, it may have planted seeds for the future. 

Pope John Paul’s challenge to French Catholics in Paris in 1980 certainly still resonates there many years later: “France, eldest daughter of the Church, are you faithful to the promises of your baptism?”

At the time of Pope Francis’s visit in 2018, many comparisons between the two Irish Papal visits highlighted the smaller scale of the second visit and the enormous social changes in Ireland in the intervening years. 

In the summer 2019 issue of Studies, (“‘New’ Ireland and Pope Francis”), Fr Andrew McMahon subjected media coverage of both the visit of Pope Francis, and the World Meeting of Families which he was attending, to detailed scrutiny and was strongly critical of media “groupthink”: “Day in, day out, report after report cast the event against the backdrop of Pope John Paul’s 1979 visit and a commentary on how Catholicism’s influence in Ireland had since declined.” The Church’s declining influence was invariably linked, he added, to developments such as contraceptive access, divorce, same-sex marriage and abortion but “none dared question the worth of these developments, nor scrutinize their impact upon Ireland to date” (p. 139). 

A similar framing of the Papal visits can be found in academic publications such as the 2018 article by Barry Sheppard on a history website, theirishstory.com (“The Papal Visit of 1979: Context and Legacy”). His focus was on lay Catholic “activism” in Ireland since the 1930s. Since the Eucharistic Congress in 1932, Mr Sheppard contended, Irish society had been “held together in the grip of Catholicism from above and below.” At the top, the Church was “rigid and authoritarian” in its governance while, at the bottom, lay groups carried out “their own missions” in line with Papal teaching.

The author argued that the “evangelical zeal of the Catholic Action movement which exploded in the 1930s still loomed large in Irish life and was in fact reinvigorated in the aftermath of the 1979 Papal visit, “targeting the familiar old foes of popular entertainment and cinema as agents of the decline of Irish morals”. However, the battle to “stem the tide of liberalism” was slowly being lost and it was “highly doubtful”, Mr Sheppard concluded, that Pope Francis’s visit would change that.

Mr Sheppard’s article exemplifies the presentation of Ireland’s recent past in many academic publications. An implicit “philosophy of progress” underlies  such analyses. We now live, it is argued or implied, in an age of enlightenment relative to the “dark ages” of the 1950s, or even the 1970s and 1980s – though one wonders what future generations will make, for example, of our abandonment of legal protection for the unborn. 

Mr Sheppard’s interpretation also has common ground with media analyses. For example, journalists opposed to the pro-life amendment in 1983 frequently described it as a Catholic “backlash” while Mr Sheppard wrote of the Catholic “counter-attack” that followed on Pope John Paul’s visit, and led, among other initiatives, to the pro-life amendment campaign, which was mounted by the forces of “inward-looking” Catholicism and “spiritual protectionism”. 

In reality, far from being “inward-looking”, many of those who campaigned for the pro-life amendment in the 1980s had either lived abroad and experienced abortion regimes elsewhere directly or had carefully studied those regimes and their very harmful consequences. My own reaction to the monolithic coverage of the 1983 abortion debate in the Irish media was partly shaped by my experience of having lived abroad and my knowledge of abortion and media elsewhere. 

Mr Sheppard included two quotations from Fair and Accurate?, my 1984 booklet on the pro-life amendment and the press, which he curiously described as a “Catholic lay report” on the subject. In fact, my booklet carried no imprimatur of any kind from the Church, though it was published by Veritas, and was a piece of individual research. Far from echoing previous censorship campaigns, as he claimed, it actually took issue with the censorship of pro-amendment views in 1983 in much of the national media. Readers looking for a nuanced and substantive reflection on the pro-life amendment campaign should consult Thomas Hesketh’s book, The Second Partitioning of Ireland? (Brandsma Books, 1990).

Mr Sheppard’s analysis offers an unduly negative account of “Catholic activism” in Ireland. A strong aim of Catholic activism post-independence, after all, was to build a community-oriented society from the bottom up, to keep people on the land, to build social housing, or to develop alternatives to top-down State monopolies in areas such as healthcare. Bodies like Muintir na Tíre or, later, Fr Harry Bohan’s rural housing organization were example of campaigning bodies in these areas. 

Few of the academic critiques of our recent history take sufficient account either of the huge contribution of the Church to health and education in Ireland in the years before and after independence or of Ireland’s colonial past. However, as Fr McMahon put it in his recent Studies article, that colonial past helped determine the heavily institutionalized character of Irish Catholicism, with its attendant defects: “Well before independence, indeed, the Church was effectively developing a state within a state, with sorely limited resources and, in the background, haunting memories of famine” (p. 143) . 

Few would deny that the Church in Ireland, and indeed the country as a whole, have entered a period of great uncertainty or that huge social change occurred between 1979 and 2018. There are many aspects of Ireland’s past to which we would not wish to return, even if we need to offer fair judgements on that past. And while unrealistic expectations cannot be set for any short Papal visit, the long-term impact of the visit of Pope Francis is surely in God’s hands and no-one can fully predict the possible grace-filled consequences of such an event. 

Some moments of joy during the visit certainly give me grounds for hope for the future. I recall, for example, the wonderful World Meeting of Families celebration in Croke Park and the welcome Pope Francis received as he arrived in the stadium. As an usher at the Phoenix Park Mass, I also had a very strong sense of the people of God on the move as the crowd began to arrive from all over Ireland and further afield to the various entrance points to the Park. That crowd was certainly much smaller than in 1979 but it was still substantial and those whom I saw arriving were full of joy and excitement and no little expectation.