IRELAND
U.S. Catholic
When Bishop Diarmuid Martin was asked by Pope John Paul II in 2003 to leave his post at the Vatican and return to Dublin to eventually become its archbishop, the pope also lobbed this question at him: “How is it that secularization came to Ireland so quickly?” Martin has said that his unvarnished answer to that question would have been, “Your Holiness is wrong,” although of course he didn’t say that exactly. But he did tell the pope that secularization had been on the Irish radar for many years, even if few had realized it.
Martin is currently the Vice Chair of the Irish Bishops’ Conference; during his years in Rome he served as Secretary for the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace and as the Permanent Observer of the Holy See in Geneva and at the United Nations. He has been a steadfast advocate for victims of clerical sexual abuse.
How would you describe the state of Catholicism in Ireland today?
I believe the roots of Irish secularization have been there a long, long time, and they weren’t recognized in time. There are people who don’t recognize them still.
I think there’s a feeling that everything is all right—Mass attendance may be down, but people are really still Catholic. That may have been the case a few years ago, but I think more and more young people are losing familiarity with what faith is all about. They’re finding a way of life in which faith doesn’t really seem to hit them.
Just look at statistics today: Slightly over 60 percent of people in Ireland get married in church. Those that get married in civil marriages—it doesn’t mean that they necessarily do this as an ideological thing. They don’t walk in with a banner saying, “We’re coming here because we don’t like the church.” There may be other reasons. …
What can be done to rebuild the confidence of the young in the church?
A lot of people didn’t quite understand how much the sex abuse scandal affected young people. People have said to me, “The young people, they’re not really interested in that.” They were, though. They were quite upset about it, actually. Their confidence in the institution was seriously affected.
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