Not long ago, it seemed possible that Pope Francis might land in Ireland, delight the faithful, charm a few John Pauls off the fence then vanish again, leaving few ripples in a great lake of indifference.
Because, who cared?
Opening any serious international newspaper carried the risk of a massive shot of the Papal cross and the words “Ireland”, “Catholic” and “collapse” . The Financial Times gave its entire magazine cover to a spectacular image of the cross with the line, “How Ireland lost its Religion”. The referendum was the “big event” in the church’s long decline, author, former seminarian and rural dweller Michael Harding told the FT’s Arthur Beesley; it’s no longer about “‘those people up in Dublin are all liberals and they’re trying to undermine our church and we will not be broken’”.
Up in Dublin, a Ballymun resident had written a slim volume called Why the Irish Church Deserves to Die, describing a “dysfunctional” leadership as “tired, predictable, cosy and bland”. The author happened to be the parish priest, Fr Joe McDonald. Would the pope’s visit make a difference, asked the FT? The definition of family would be crucial for this week’s congress, said the priest.
“Please tell me I am not going to a world meeting of families to hear elderly male celibates dressed in lovely red talking about family. Where’s the mother, the single mother, the two men around the corner rearing two children, the granny who’s bringing up her children’s children because she’s buried half her own?” Doubtless, Fr McDonald is already well into his second volume.
‘Right-wing rally’
For outsiders, it no longer requires physical or mental courage to rail against the Church; rage is the default position and for good reason. For those hanging on inside, struggling to protect their church and its gospel from right-wing zealots and the power-crazed little Borgias of the Vatican court, it’s a whole other battlefield.
But it’s still possible to be pole-axed. As Mary McAleese deftly drew the corrupt global connections together and wound them all the way back to the Vatican in a powerful RTÉ interview last Saturday; dropping in a potted history of the World Meeting of Families and calling it a “right-wing rally” en route. I stopped the car to listen.
Is it surprising that the curia has been described as 'the leprosy of the papacy'?
The last time I did that was when the IRA announced its August 1994 ceasefire. I wanted my small daughters to hear it and remember an extraordinary moment in history.
Already that year, some 65 people had died violently, including three RUC officers as well as six Catholics gunned down watching a World Cup game in Loughinisland.
Yet to some, the air still carried an intangible sense of possibility, of subterranean shifts that might lead somewhere. Pivotal in the shift were bona fide heroes such as Fr Alec Reid and John Hume (the former a priest, the latter a former seminarian who couldn’t hack celibacy). To choose the doves over the hawks in such circumstances and to act on that choice required extraordinary physical and mental courage. Yet the talks with Fr Reid, as Gerry Adams admitted this year, had begun as long ago as 1977.
As Mary McAleese spoke her mind on Saturday, the parallels were striking. How many innocents’ lives have been destroyed in the reckoning? How much of society’s fabric has been coarsened, torn, destroyed?
Scandalous role
We heard the cold anger of an accomplished woman too long patronised and denigrated by the princes of her own beloved church. Remember, they knew her well. She had served on a several important Catholic Church delegations, the last in 1996. A year later, she was elected President of Ireland and that same year, Cardinal Desmond Connell saw fit to damn her Communion in Christ Church Cathedral as a “sham” and a “deception”.
On an official visit to the US in 1998, she met the powerful Archbishop of Boston, Cardinal Bernard Law, who told her he was “sorry for Catholic Ireland to have you as President”.
Four years later, Law had to resign in disgrace following the Boston Globe’s exposure (recounted in the film Spotlight) of his central, scandalous role in moving around paedophile priests. And here’s the stinger: following his flight to Rome, he continued to serve on several influential policymaking committees, including the Congregation for Bishops, which recommends appointments to the pope.
Is it surprising that the curia has been described as “the leprosy of the papacy”, “narcissistic” and “self-referential”? No, that’s not some libtard abuse but the words of Pope Francis himself.
Even Mary McAleese, a canon lawyer and former head of State, cannot elicit an acknowledgment of a complaint couched in canon law to that body. What lies beneath? That’s the question.
In closing this week’s anguished letter, Pope Francis offered Mary the mother of Christ, as a role model, “standing firmly by Jesus’ side”.
Is there any chance that Mary, were she to revisit in 2018AD and seeing her son tortured and in agony, might adopt a rather different position? Think about it. What would Mary do?