Recently a person living in the North of Ireland described a conversation he had on the 27th September just passed, a conversation with some Southerners who were co-workers of his in the well-known and respected St Vincent de Paul charity. “Do you know what day it is today?” he asked them. “St Swithin’s Day?” one hazarded. “International Women’s Day?” suggested another. It was of course the feast of St Vincent de Paul. He, along with other Northern members of the SVP, would be attending the annual Mass of St Vincent de Paul that evening in Belfast. Unfortunately few of the Northerners were surprised by the religious ignorance of their Southern counterparts.
In our lead article this month James Bradshaw asks the simple question: what happens to a country when it loses the very thing on which built its whole identity? In this case the country is Ireland, and that “thing” is Catholicism.
It is hard for those of us living here in the Republic of Ireland to appreciate that this country might be, as someone living in Australia put it to me, “the Wuhan of global secularisation”. It does appear that the world’s once “best Catholics” are seeking to become the world’s best exponents of Wokeness. British commentator Douglas Murray is quoted by Bradshaw as describing how Ireland has “become a rapaciously advancing second type of liberalism society … worshipping every imaginable newly arrived god.”
As Bradshaw puts it: “Every European country has secularised, but it is hard to find any example of a country where the Church’s collapse has been so complete, where the nation has become so enthralled with Woke ideology and where the widespread religiosity of the past is looked upon with much contempt and little nostalgia.”
And Ireland is in a slightly unique position in that Catholicism and Irishness became virtually synonymous. The Catholic Faith was the one thing that distinguished Ireland and also motivated its desire to forge and maintain an identity distinct from that of its English rulers. And so Bradshaw asks what happens to a national identity when its core distinguishing feature has been lost. It seems that it is doomed to become, in a phrase coined by Desmond Fennell, a “ghost nation”.
At the same time, Bradshaw points out, there was something about Irish Catholicism that made it “hard to love” and easy to shed, in a way that does not seem to be true of other parts of secularised Europe which still cling devotedly to at least their Catholic traditions. Perhaps, as Prof Vincent Twomey suggested, traditional Irish Catholicism was “neither fully Catholic nor fully Irish” and that as a result it was both “intellectually suffocating” and not “life affirming”. (See “The End of Irish Catholicism?: Fifteen Years On”, D Vincent Twomey in Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, Vol. 106, No. 42.) Perhaps in a funny way this might be good news for Catholicism in Ireland. If Catholicism in Ireland never really failed because it was never really tried, then there is great hope for the future. I am continually surprised by the wonderful virtues of my fellow Irishmen and women, and in particular a deep humanity. Perhaps this country is really only waiting for its evangelisation to take place?