IRELAND
Association of Catholic Priests
+Diarmuid Martin surveys the Irish Church in the wake of the sexual abuse crisis and the economic downturn. This article, first published in America on 20 May 2013, is adapted from an address at the Fordham Center on Religion and Culture in New York. Read the original article and comments here
I entered the seminary in Dublin in October 1962, just one week before the opening of the Second Vatican Council. The winter of 1962-63 was one of the bleakest in decades, and our seminary was a very cold place in more ways than one. My memory of the seminary is of a building and a routine, a discipline and a way of life that seemed to have been like that for decades. Even to someone who was not a revolutionary, it all seemed very out of touch with the world from which I had just come, and in which my friends were thriving. But one was not supposed to think that way. Things were to be done as they had always been done. The Catholic Church was unchanging, but that was about to change.
For decades Ireland was looked on as one of the world’s most deeply and stably Catholic countries. Today Ireland finds itself, along with other parts of Europe, being classified as “post-Catholic.” Everyone has his or her own definition of the term. You can fully define post-Catholic only in terms of the Catholicism that has been displaced. Irish Catholicism has its own unique history and culture. Renewal in the Irish church will not come from imported plans and programs; it must be home-grown.
Ireland does, of course, share the same currents of secularization with other countries of the Western world and thus shares many of the same challenges. There are specific challenges within Europe; there are specific challenges common to the English-speaking world. Yet the fact that Ireland is an English-speaking country does not mean it can be put into the same category as the United States and Great Britain. …
The effects of the child abuse scandals have had a demoralizing effect on the entire church in Ireland and continue to do so. In one sense the scandal crisis could not have come at a worse time, in that confidence in the church was well on the wane; and when the scandals broke, their effects were devastating. Today Ireland has strong child protection measures in place, and the Irish church is a much safer place for children than in the past. I would like to pay tribute to the National Board for Safeguarding Children in the Catholic Church, and in particular Ian Elliot, for their extraordinary contribution to helping make the church a safer place for children. One still has to ask, however, where the roots of this scandal and its mismanagement were to be found within the church. Was the issue simply the action of a few deviant priests who did not represent the church, or was there something deeper?
Certainly the overwhelming majority of priests in Ireland led and lead an exemplary moral life; they carry out their ministry with great dedication and enjoy great support and affection from their people and contribute and support the new ethos of child safeguarding.
What is extraordinarily high is the number of children who were abused. We are talking about thousands. There is no way you can simply explain away the huge number of those who were abused and the fact that this took place undetected and unrecognized within the church of Jesus Christ. Today we are in a safer place, but it took decades to attain this.
One of the great challenges the Irish Catholic Church still has to face is that of strong remnants of inherited clericalism. The days of the dominant or at times domineering role of clergy within what people call the “institutional church” have changed, but part of the culture still remains and from time to time reappears in new forms. We often overlook the fact that the very term “institutional church” has meaning only in a context of clericalism.
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