by Mark Tully
But what had survived was the friendliness and humour of the Irish clergy. When organising my visit to Ireland, I had sent an e-mail to Father Bernard Treacy, a Dominican priest, asking whether he would be willing to meet me. It was a tentative request because I also had to explain that I intended to write about the decline in the influence of the Irish Church, a subject he might well have been reluctant to talk about to a journalist. I had met Father Bernard once at a conference in Northern Ireland, after which I had subscribed to the journal he edits, Doctrine and Life, but I had no other claim on his friendship. Nevertheless, he sent back a wonderfully warm message, not only offering to meet me but also suggesting other people for me to meet.
Having spent two terms in an Anglican Theological College in Lincoln, I was particularly pleased to see that Father Bernard had arranged for me to visit the great seminary at Maynooth, the only remaining seminary in Ireland. Maynooth College was founded as the Roman Catholic College of St Patrick by an Act of the Parliament of Ireland in 1795. It was to provide clergy for the Irish Church, with the aim that priests would no longer have to go to the continent for training and would therefore not be affected by the revolutionary spirit of the times in Europe. It was crucial in establishing the ethos of the Irish Church, because it trained so many of the parish clergy and those who went on to become bishops.
Some years ago I read a novel by Gerald O’Donovan, a radical Irish priest who eventually left the priesthood. First published in the early twentieth century, the novel, Father Ralph, is clearly autobiographical. The novel paints a picture from an insider’s perspective of a smug, self-serving Church in its triumphant days, an institution with a conspicuous lack of humility. According to Father Ralph, at the end of the nineteenth century Maynooth was a factory ‘fettered by medieval ecclesiasticism’ for churning out priests. The students had to dress as though they were already priests, never wearing anything but black, yet seem to have behaved more like schoolboys. O’Donovan writes that it was so obvious that one of the lecturers was suffering from the tortures of the rougher students that the soft-hearted Father Ralph felt as if his own mother was being jeered at. Most of the lecturers appear to have been uninspiring and to have positively discouraged independence of mind by dictating notes that they expected the students to memorise. The Church history taught was ‘unconvincing’ and moral theology was ‘crude legalism’.
According to O’Donovan, the leadership of the Irish Church was equally uninspiring. In his book, a radical Catholic comments on one of the portraits of bishops in full episcopal regalia lining a wall of the cloisters in Maynooth. He says to Father Ralph:
Smugness and self-satisfaction in every line of it. That is the Irish Church all out … if not the whole Church. Nothing short of a spiritual earthquake would make them even question their belief in themselves. They don’t know that anything is wrong and they are unteachable. They prefer to be what they are – autocrats, domineering over a sycophantic clergy, holding an ignorant laity in check through fear of eternal damnation.
Sadly for the Irish Church, it didn’t heed this sharp criticism of Maynooth. The institution remained autocratic and domineered over Ireland, refusing to allow its teachings to be questioned. In his article in the Irish Times, John O’Donohue observed that ‘no theological consciousness was allowed to develop in Ireland; consequently, when faith in the system was shattered there was no ground to fall back upon’. To make matters worse, the Church remained influenced by the theology that the first priests in Maynooth had already brought back with them from France. They were Jansenists, which meant that they believed in a particularly rigid morality and were deeply suspicious of sex.
The heavy Victorian Gothic architecture of Maynooth symbolises an authoritarian Church. Sister Geraldine Smyth, a Dominican theologian whom I met in Dublin, told me she found the stolid stone buildings of Maynooth so oppressive she almost lost her faith when studying there.
Fortunately, Maynooth itself is now a much more open place. Those portraits of the dour, undoubting bishops still hang on the walls of the cloisters, but, facing them, the photographs of the annual ordination groups tell the story of the change that has come over the college. In its heyday, as many as one hundred priests would have been ordained each year; now, the more recent photographs show much smaller groups. While there are still about as many students of theology at Maynooth as there were when it was churning out priests, these days the majority of them are lay men and women, and the college has become part of the National University of Ireland.
Nor do I think that Father Brendan McConvery, the Professor of Old Testament Studies who showed me round the college, would have fitted into the old Maynooth. He was not wearing black, was very open-minded about the faults in the Church and was clearly at ease with the students we met, bursting into laughter when one of them confessed that he was only studying theology because he didn’t get the grades he needed for another university course.
In its heyday, there were enough seminarians at Maynooth to fill the massive and magnificent chapel, which can seat more than 600 people. The building of the chapel was started in 1875 by J.J. McCarthy, who was a pupil of Augustus Pugin, and completed in 1905 by McCarthy’s successor, William Hague. A convert to Roman Catholicism himself, Pugin is regarded as the high priest of Victorian Gothic. He believed that Gothic was the only moral style of architecture and once said, ‘I feel perfectly convinced the Roman Catholic religion is the only one in which the grand and sublime style of Church architecture can ever be restored.’
In the grandeur and sublimity of Maynooth’s chapel, Pugin’s pupil outdid his master. Tall pointed arches support the painted roof, soaring high above the rows of mock-medieval choir stalls, which flow down to the nave on both sides. These features, the ornate High Altar and the dim light filtering through the rose window at the west end of the chapel, truly inspire awe – awe of a mighty, majestic, magisterial Church. Maynooth chapel was a fitting place of worship for young men training to become priests who would uphold the authority of the Church. But now the seminarians usually worship in a much smaller, brightly lit chapel, with an altar which is not set apart from the congregation and where the emphasis is not on the authority of the priest but on the unity between priest and people.
Outside the chapel, Father Brendan introduced me to a forbidding, steely-grey-haired priest clothed in clerical black, who was clearly conscious of his presence and prestige as a former pupil of Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI. This was none other than Father Vincent Twomey, the author of The End of Irish Catholicism?, whom I mentioned at the opening of this chapter. When Father Brendan explained that I had come to Ireland to write about the state of the Church, he simply said, ‘Read my book’, and walked off. When I did read his book, I was perhaps not surprised to discover that Vincent Twomey was critical of the liturgical reforms designed to make worship more people-friendly that had been introduced in Ireland after the Second Vatican Council.
The refectory, or dining room, represents the old Maynooth in the grandeur of its architecture. It also houses one of Maynooth’s oddest treasures: a silver statue of St George of England presented by the Empress of Austria in gratitude for the treatment she received at Maynooth after a hunting accident. This was perhaps not the most tactful present to send to a seminary dedicated to St Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland. However, when she learnt of her mistake, the Empress made amends by sending the seminary a set of cloth of gold vestments embroidered in Ireland’s shamrock green.
Unlike the refectory building, none of the priests with whom I had lunch reminded me of the old Maynooth. None of them wore clerical black and all of them openly acknowledged that the Church needed to change.
After lunch, Father Patrick Hannan, the Professor of Moral Theology, invited me to his room to discuss my contention that one reason the Church had lost its influence was its unbalanced emphasis on its authority to pronounce on matters of morality, and in particular on sexual morality. The experienc
e of sitting in a book-lined room overlooking Pugin’s quadrangle, and listening to a man with a mind as well stocked as Father Patrick Hannan’s, reminded me strongly of my tutorials as a student in Cambridge. Small and somewhat Pickwickian in nature, Father Patrick combined the forensic skills of the lawyer he had trained to be with the humanity of a pastoral priest. He admitted that the Church did sometimes get stuck in untenable positions and that it had given the impression that Christianity was all about morality. But he added, ‘It seems increasingly that people want to be told what to do. After a certain sense of freedom, humans become afraid of it. And morality, well – it’s the thing that people ask most questions about. They want to know what to do. And of course that’s bound to be particularly true of sexuality. It has to loom large in anyone’s personality.’ He paused before adding with a chuckle, ‘Concern with sex isn’t confined to the Catholic Church, you know!’
According to Father Patrick, the real problem lay in the fact that, for many, the identity of the Irish Church had become tangled up in the moral authority that it claimed and the form of moral absolutism it preached. Father Patrick thought the Church had given the wrong impression of itself by emphasising a specific Catholic morality or ‘God-given law’, which was neither discernable by reason nor open to any challenge; whereas – according to its own traditional teachings – morality should be regarded as a feature of common human experience that can be discerned by reason.
Father Patrick explained that ‘subjective appropriation’ was very much a part of the Catholic tradition and taught as a matter of course in first year divinity classes all over the world. When I asked what he meant by subjective appropriation, he replied, ‘Perhaps you could say “conscience”. Principles have to be applied and that is where the primacy of conscience comes in. Furthermore, truly moral decisions cannot be based on fear, and the Church has often laid too much stress on fear, such as the fear of punishment in the after-life. According to our own teaching, the prime motive in determining our actions should be love.’
The apparent inflexibility of the Church with regard to its moral authority had made it an easy target for its critics, when it should have been seen to be attacking the very things it often stood accused of. Father Patrick suggested that these were: ‘Harshness, a god who is a human law-giver and authoritarianism.’ However, he conceded that many priests and bishops still found it easier to talk to people about rules and authority than to discuss their issues with them at a personal and pastoral level.
Even so, the difficulties currently faced by the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland do not spring from an excess of authoritarianism and moral absolutism alone. Over the years, its relationship with the state had become increasing unbalanced, with the state permitting the Church to exercise too much authority for its own good. An Indian Jesuit once said to me, ‘When the Church marries the state in one generation it becomes a widow in the next.’ This is very true of Ireland.
It would not be going too far to describe the Church I first knew in Ireland as a theocracy, because it had long been allowed to maintain that its law was superior to civil law – the law on divorce being one example. The Church fought hard and, until the 1980s, successfully to prevent divorce being legalised, yet at the same time it was generous in granting annulments of marriage under its own laws. One result was that people who got an annulment and then remarried were committing bigamy under the civil law and thereby breaking the very laws the Church itself purported to uphold. But these bigamous marriages were nevertheless not challenged in the civil courts.
Sister Geraldine Smyth, a theologian of the Dominican order, told me the Church had wielded ‘a tyranny over people’s sexuality’ and created ‘a high culture of repression’. When I met Dr Garrett Fitzgerald, the former Taoiseach, or Prime Minister, he complained that the Church had thought the state had no right to interfere in family law.
To make matters worse, while imposing its rigid morality on Ireland, the Church was careless about its own morality. It wasn’t merely that bishops concealed individual cases of sexual abuse by clergy. Some of the institutions belonging to the Church were run in such a way that abuse became almost inevitable in them. Investigations into orders such as the Christian Brothers, who ran industrial schools for boys, have shown that they sent scouts to schools to look out for promising recruits and then brought those recruits into the order sometimes when they were as young as fourteen. Being chosen was considered a great honour by boys and their parents, so there was no shortage of boys willing to join the Christian Brothers. But they were often whisked away, never to see their parents again.
At an impressionable age, the new recruits were taught that celibacy was the highest state, that the body was the temple of the Holy Ghost and that the sexual urge was sinful. All sexual acts except those intended to lead to procreation were sins, and even those acts, it was pointed out, would not be open to them because they were not allowed to marry. These young boys, who usually had no professional training in childcare, were then put in charge of other boys in the schools who were often older and bigger than they were. Not only were they denied any outlet for their sexuality but they were even denied the comfort of companionship with their colleagues or the boys of whom they were in charge. They were told that ‘particular friendships’ would come in between them and their friendship with God. This had unintended consequences. One brother, who had confessed to masturbating with boys, saw nothing wrong in it because he had deliberately avoided making friends with them. It’s perhaps small wonder that in this culture of repression some of the brothers’ sexuality became warped and they abused boys in their care.
For girls recruited into religious orders caring for children and women, the situation was in some ways even worse. Their rules also forbade ‘particular friendships’, and they were strictly enforced. Their maternal instincts became distorted, and all too often cruelty, as well as repression, pervaded the institutions that these women ran.
The most notorious institution was the Magdalene Laundries, named after Mary Magdalene, the sinner or ‘fallen woman’ who became a disciple of Jesus. It is believed that as many as 30,000 women may have been confined in these laundries over the institution’s 150 years of existence. The women were sent there by the courts or by their families for offences against the harsh code of sexual morality then endemic in Irish society, offences that could be as mild as merely flirting. But the men who were their partners in these so-called sins were usually not punished.
The laundries were run by nuns who tyrannised the women, forcing them to work long hours scrubbing clothes in order, they were told, to wash away their sins. There was no escape, as they were not allowed to go outside the grim walls of the convent.
When news of the sexual abuse scandals broke and the treatment of women in the Magdalene Laundries was revealed, the reports did enormous damage to the Church’s standing. The Church now paid the price for putting itself above the law and for insisting that there could be no interference in the institutions it ran. The Church in Ireland has now learnt the hard way that becoming too powerful and misjudging the balance of its delicate relationship with the state leads inevitably from its having too large a role in society to its losing much of its influence.
It would, however, be wrong to suggest that the Church in Ireland is down and out. This was made clear to me as I sat in Father Bernard’s central Dublin office, in which a computer was his only concession to modernity. Father Bernard, a Dominican, was joined by his colleague, Father Tom Jordan, and also by John Hayes, who headed the philosophy department in a teacher training college in the western city of Limerick. Father Bernard observed that about fifty per cent of the Irish population still attended Mass regularly, which remains remarkably high for Europe. But he admitted that people in the countryside were much more likely to go to church than those living in cities. However, John Hayes suggested that there might be problems in the countryside soon. He explained that rural Ireland was changing so fast that the
small subsistence farms had already virtually vanished and were being replaced by industrialised farming, yet the small farms had always been the backbone of traditional Irish country life.
I was interested to know how much the Church mattered to young people, so I asked John Hayes about the students at Limerick University. He said a large number of the students in his teacher training college did go to Mass, but went on to explain that this might be because primary school teachers were still expected to act as ‘agents of the church’ in the countryside. In the other colleges of Limerick University he said Mass attendance was ‘almost insignificant’.
Although a large number of parents still bring their children to church for their First Communion, which is often quoted as evidence that Catholicism is alive and well in Ireland, Father Tom was not convinced. ‘First Communions are now becoming huge social events,’ he told me. ‘The socialising, the partying and all that is going up – but the religious content is going down.’
But Father Bernard did not entirely agree. He said, ‘I have met priests ministering in deprived areas where regular Mass attendance can be as low as ten per cent. They understand why events like first communion are celebrated with extravagance. They say it’s to break out of the routine dullness in which people live their lives. Besides which, you don’t have to be regular in attending Mass to take sacraments seriously.’
Father Bernard didn’t believe that Mass attendance alone was a true indication of the Church’s position in Ireland. Recently he had been asked to conduct a number of baptisms and weddings. Although none of the young couples probably attended Mass regularly, he found they did have a ‘real belief in God’s providence as bringing them together and as a guiding force in their future’.