We can only hope the Taoiseach’s speech after the Cloyne report did not cost us the chance of a visit for now.
A FORTNIGHT ago in Madrid, the
morning after Pope Benedict XVI said Mass in front of two million young
people for World Youth Day, a squad of journalists from one of the
leading Spanish dailies descended on the aerodrome at Cuatro Vientus,
where the event had taken place.
They walked around looking at the
ground, sifting among the detritus of the previous day’s happenings.
They were searching for beer cans, used condoms, evidence of drug use
among the young people who had gathered to greet the pope.
They found
nothing to satisfy them.
Before the visit, the media had been
promoting the grievances of a tiny group of secularist malcontents,
protesting on the spurious ground the visit was at the expense of the
Spanish taxpayer.
Now, the journalists searched for something by which
to reinterpret what had occurred.
All that day, despite
temperatures of nearly 40 degrees, hordes of young people sang and
danced as they waited for the pope.
On his arrival, they greeted him
with much affection.
Later, as Pope Benedict began his homily, there was
a change in the weather.
All day, firemen had sprayed water over the
growing crowds to keep the young people cool.
The rain that came now
left nothing or nobody unsaturated.
For a short time there was
confusion.
The pope abandoned his homily, and it became unclear whether
the event could continue.
Then he spoke again. He said the Lord had sent
the rain as a gift. He told the young people they would encounter
trials in their lives much worse than this rain, but should not be
fearful because they would be accompanied always.
“Your faith is
stronger than the rain,” he said.
Then, with the storm raging, the pope
knelt before the Blessed Sacrament, and the two million young people
assembled in Cuatro Vientus lapsed into silence.
Seasoned
policemen afterwards said they had never seen anything like it.
Had a
storm like this hit a rock concert or a football match, they agreed,
there might have been a catastrophe.
Here, there was silence, stillness,
before something immense and seemingly immeasurably attractive.
For
seven years, Spain had been in the clutches of a regime that sought to
squeeze the mysteriousness out of civic reality; but, still, the
children of that era, and their contemporaries from around the world,
could recognise something more hopeful than what politicians call
progress and more beautiful than what journalists call freedom.
Mercifully,
as with the pope’s British visit last September, enough reporters
carried enough of the facts for something of the true picture to emerge
above the peevish official narrative that has persisted for more than
six years.
This has insisted Benedict XVI could never be as loved as his
predecessor – being too austere, too cerebral, too reactionary and
obsessed with dogma.
Wherever he goes, Benedict XVI is embraced by
crowds that swell with each voyage.
Speaking through the megaphone of
his enemies, he delivers the clearest analyses of the difficulties of
seeing clearly in a world shrouded in the fog of unreason.
He speaks to
people of their deepest desires and they respond by opening their hearts
with a confidence that defies all expectations.
It seemed strange
that, when he went to Britain last year, the pope did not stop off
awhile here.
Perhaps someone told him that what was once the most
Catholic country in Europe has lately become the most anti-Catholic.
Another telling had it that he had planned to come for the Eucharistic
Congress next June.
From speaking to people in the know, I gather any
such prospect has been scuppered by the Taoiseach’s recent speech, in
which he criticised the Vatican and so completely misrepresented the
pope’s attitude to the civil power as to leave open the possibility of
some previously unsuspected malice.
But one source, whom I trust
implicitly, was not so sure: “The speech has made a visit diplomatically
impossible, but the pope is not a diplomat,” he told me. “He is a man
who knows his own mind absolutely.”
At the superficial level of
Irish public discourse, the idea that the pope might be deterred from
coming is likely to be greeted with glee.
Deeper down, in the silent
soul of Ireland, the loss of such an opportunity for renewal and healing
will be greatly felt.
Time after time, we have watched this pope
confound his enemies and provoke responses that were not – could not
have been – predicted.
Many of us have observed his quiet insistence on
reiterating his perceptions of modern society, and wished for something
of such insight from other quarters.
Many Irish people would welcome the
provocation such a visit would offer, as a way, at the very least, of
breaking with present patterns.
On balance, it seems the ugliness
of Ireland Past will continue to exclude any possibility of a
transformative event such as the pope’s presence has unleashed in other
places.