If I asked you to imagine the nice side of the Catholic Ireland that is waiting for Pope Francis, you just might summon up a picture of a sweet nine-year-old girl in a voluminous, blindingly white First Holy Communion dress and with that special solemnity that children alone can project. Her arms in lace-wrapped sleeves hold a frilly white umbrella, tilted at just the right angle to allow the sun to illuminate her twinkly tiara. Behind her is a pale statute of the Virgin Mary, mother of Christ, in her most beautiful, almost pantheistic, role as Queen of the May: fresh purple flowers – buddleia, most likely – cradled in her arms, daffodils and snowdrops bursting out in their yellow and white glory towards her feet.
Even if you are an ex-Catholic or were never a Catholic at all, even if you have very mixed feelings about the visit of Pope Francis, you would surely find something pleasantly sentimental and touchingly innocent in this image. The femininity it celebrates may be old fashioned – the demure child, the paradoxical virgin mother who is also an icon of springtime fertility – but it is not brash, or vulgar or sexualised.
The little girl is not in the princess mode of relentless commercial exploitation. She is regal in a different, graver way. Her gaze is towards something out of the frame, as if she is involved mostly in her own thoughts and does not have to bother with ours. She is, at least at this frozen moment, special and we cannot deny that the aura surrounding her is specifically Catholic.
Provocative
And yet this very image, when it was discovered on social media, was provocative, disgusting, infuriating. The problem is that the little girl is called Rebecca Cash. Her mother Margaret Cash and her six brothers – Johnny, Tommy, Miley, Jim, Rocky and Andy – have been in the news because they were homeless and had to sleep overnight in Tallaght Garda station and eventually got an apartment from Dublin City Council. So the Communion dress was a white lace rag to the bull of outraged opinion. How could the homeless mother afford it? Didn’t it prove that she is just gaming the system?
In itself this reaction, however deplorable, is not surprising. Margaret Cash is a perfect lightning rod for rage and prejudice – a single mother, a Traveller, a welfare recipient. What is much harder to understand is the silence of official Catholic Ireland. Here we had a mother and her child being attacked for fulfilling a religious obligation. First Holy Communion is a sacrament, a sacred duty. In effect, for little girls, honouring that obligation means dressing up in precisely the kind of ceremonial gear that Rebecca Cash wears in the picture. She and her mother were doing exactly what the church says they are supposed to do. So why was the church not out defending them?
Embarrassment
Of course, we all know the answer: embarrassment. Margaret Cash and her family are very real people, but they are also ghosts haunting Irish Catholicism. As Bishop of Elphin Kevin Doran recently reminded us, the USP of Catholic orthodoxy is opposition to the “contraceptive mentality” and the insistence that “the sexual act is never separated from the openness to the act of giving life”. And the Cash family are what the non-contraceptive mentality looks like in the flesh. Margaret was married when she was 15 and she is now 28. The teaching of the church is that every time she has had sex over those 13 years, she must have been open to conceiving a child. She has seven but if she had a dozen that would be no more than her duty. And since she seems healthy and is still so young, why should that not be 20?
To object that she should not have so many children if she cannot provide a home for them is, from the church’s point of view, entirely irrelevant. Economic circumstance simply don’t count. And this is not an abstract position. In the Ireland I grew up in, there were always mothers-of-seven and mothers-of-12 and mothers-of-20 and it didn’t matter whether they were brutally poor or not. Margaret is a revenant from that recent past.
Saintly
If the church were vaguely serious about its own defining teaching, it would surely have embraced Margaret as a heroine, a living emblem of the non-contraceptive mentality. That her life has been hard, that she had lived in caravans for most of her childhood, left school at the age of 12 and got married at 15, that she’s been homeless for years, would not tell against her – on the contrary, the harder the circumstances, the more saintly she must be.
And yet, silence: if she controlled her fertility she would have been a grave sinner; but if she does not she is an embarrassment. Could it be that the church does not really, truly believe what it holds up as orthodoxy? Does even Pope Francis really think that Margaret Cash and every woman in her position must have a child every year? I would guess that, in his heart, he doesn’t. Is the pope by this definition a Catholic? Most probably not.