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	The Tragedy of Irish Catholicism By Ross Douthat The New York Times December 1, 2009 http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/the-tragedy-of-irish-catholicism/ Of the horrifying report detailing the Irish hierarchy’s decades-long cover-up of priestly sexual abuse, the Telegraph’s Damian Thompson writes: The greatest scandal, of course, lies in the acts perpetrated by wicked clergy against the innocent. But it’s the secrecy and deceit of the Church authorities that resonates most with me. For, although I was educated by Irish brothers, I can honestly say that I’ve never experienced clerical paedophilia, or even met a priest or brother who was to my knowledge a classic paedophile. But I have encountered, many times, the arrogance of senior clergy who believe that almost anything can be kept secret from the laity if it might “damage the good name of the Church” (ie, inconvenience or embarrass them). And I associate the worst abuses of power with the mean-spirited Jansenism of the Irish Church and the Irish clerical diaspora. I was struck by this last line because recently I’ve been reading American Catholic, Charles Morris’s history of Catholicism in the United States. His account emphasizes the extent to which the modern Irish Church — which, because of the extraordinary influence of Irish clergy in this country, is in many respects the American Church as well — was the invention of a small group of strong-willed Victorian clerics, led by Dublin’s Cardinal Paul Cullen. Pre-Cullen, Irish Catholicism was “one of the most ragtag national churches in Europe,” Morris writes; post-Cullen, it was one of the most unified, rigorous, enthusiastic and militant branches of Catholicism in the world. At the same time, it was one of the most hierarchical and clericalist, with priests and bishops who were invested with nearly-unchallengeable authority, and who became accustomed to extraordinary deference from civil authorities. And on sexual matters, it was a far more puritanical Catholicism than, say, the Mediterranean or Latin American varieties, or for that matter than the Gaelic Catholicism it had superseded.** This combination was the source of enormous strength for a very long time, especially in the New World. A Cullen-esque Catholicism was ideally suited to the task of building a thriving immigrant church in a hostile Protestant society. The remarkable prestige, power and cultural cachet of mid-20th century American Catholicism almost certainly wouldn’t have been possible without the extraordinary exertions and self-sacrifice that the Irish Church inspired from priests and laity alike — and without its hierarchy’s ability to be power brokers and politicians as well as shepherds, and to bend the civil authorities, when necessary, to their will. But you can see how it could all go bad — how a culture so intense clerical, so politically high-handed, and so embarrassed (beyond the requirements of Christian doctrine) by human sexuality could magnify the horror of priestly pedophilia, and expand the pool of victims, by producing bishops inclined to strong-arm the problem out of public sight instead of dealing with it as Christian leaders should. (In The Faithful Departed, his account of the scandal, Philip Lawler claims that while less than five percent of priests were involved in actual abuse, over two-thirds of bishops were involved in covering it up.) I suspect it isn’t a coincidence that the worst of the priest-abuse scandals have been concentrated in Ireland and America — and indeed, in Boston, the most Irish of American cities — rather than, say, in Italy or Poland or Latin America or Asia. There will always be priests who become predators; the question is how the Church as an institution deals with it. It hasn’t been handled all that well anywhere, I’m afraid. But the particular qualities of Irish Catholicism — qualities which were once a source of immense vitality — seem to have led to a particularly horrifying outcome. **Here’s Morris, describing 18th-century Ireland: The Irish village enforced powerful sanctions against premarital sex and illegitimacy, even compared with other European peasant cultures, and the chastity of Irish maidens was the wonder, or frustration, of travelers. But at the same time, rural Ireland was a highly sexual society, with sexual tensions resolved by very early marriages. Nudity or seminudity were not uncommon, and visitors were surprised to see Irish men and women bathing within sight of each other. Gaelic songs and folkdances were notoriously bawdy, while games at the weeklong wakes, like “Mock Marriage,” were full of sly double entendres. Cross-road dancing — nightlong outdoor gatherings of several villages for sexually charged dancing, raucous drinking, and usually a rousing fight — was the despair of reforming clergy. The legendary prudery of Irish Catholicism, once again, is a post-Cullen phenomenon.
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