While America’s attention
has been absorbed in recent weeks by domestic affairs, something quite
remarkable has become unmistakably clear across the Atlantic: Ireland —
where the constitution begins, “In the name of the Most Holy Trinity” —
has become the most stridently anti-Catholic country in the Western
world.
Its Taoiseach (prime minister), Enda Kenny, recently took to the floor of the Dáil
to denounce the Vatican as a house of “dysfunction, disconnection,
elitism . . . [and] narcissism” and to commit an act of calumny against
Pope Benedict XVI, accusing him of being a party to the coverup of the
“rape and torture of children.”
Ireland’s attorney general plans to
introduce a new law that threatens priests with five-year jail sentences
if they do not violate the seal of confession when pedophilia is
confessed.
Polls indicate considerable support among Irish voters for
such an unprecedented violation of religious freedom, and the Irish
press has indulged its anti-Church phobias with virtually no restraint.
There
can be no doubt that the crisis of clerical sexual abuse — and the
parallel crisis of local Catholic leadership that failed to address the
problem — has been especially acute in Ireland.
Benedict XVI condemned
both the abuse and the coverup of abuse in a stinging letter to the
entire Church in Ireland 16 months ago, a letter that condemned abusers
and their enablers while offering a heartfelt apology to victims.
Apostolic visitations of the principal Irish dioceses and seminaries
have been undertaken, on Vatican orders, by bishops from the United
States, Canada, and Great Britain; their reports, one understands, have
been blunt and unsparing.
What has not happened, and what ought to happen sooner rather than
later, is a wholesale replacement of the Irish hierarchy, coupled with a
dramatic reduction in the number of Irish dioceses.
Ireland is in
desperate need of new and credible Catholic leadership, and some of it
may have to be imported: If a native of Ireland could be archbishop of
New York in 1850, why couldn’t a native of, say, California be
archbishop of Dublin in 2012?
The United States and Canada, in
particular, have Anglophone bishops who have demonstrated their capacity
to clean house and reenergize dioceses evangelically.
Thus the Vatican,
not ordinarily given to dramatic change, might well consider clearing
the Irish bench comprehensively and bringing in bishops, of whatever
national origin, who can rebuild the Irish Church by preaching the
Gospel without compromise — and who know how to fight the soft
totalitarianism of European secularists.
In the wake of Taoiseach Kenny’s hysterical rant in the Dáil,
the Vatican recalled its nuncio to Ireland for consultations, a clear
sign of displeasure with Irish politicians who, for whatever reasons,
deliberately foment anti-Catholic hysteria.
Yet as distasteful and
irresponsible as Kenny’s attacks were, they underscore the fact that
radical changes are needed in the Catholic Church’s leadership in
Ireland — now, not at some indeterminate point in the future.
The deeper question that the past several weeks of Catholic-bashing in
Ireland has raised — How on earth did this most Catholic of countries
become violently anti-Catholic? — touches on the modern history of
independent Ireland; serious answers to that question are likely to
offer little comfort to either Irish romantics or defenders of the old
alliances between Church and state.
Sixty years into the 20th century, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, and Quebec
were among the most intensely Catholic nations on the planet.
Fifty
years later, Quebec is the most religiously arid space between Point
Barrow and Tierra del Fuego; Portuguese Catholicism, outside the
pilgrimage shrine of Fatima, is hardly robust; Spain has the most
self-consciously secularist government in Europe; and Ireland has now
become the epicenter of European anti-Catholicism. What happened?
Perhaps some comparative history and sociology suggest an answer.
In
each of these cases, the state, through the agency of an authoritarian
government, deliberately delayed the nation’s confrontation with
modernity.
In each of these cases, the Catholic Church was closely
allied to state power (or, in the case of Quebec, to the power of the
dominant Liberal party).
In each of these cases, Catholic intellectual
life withered, largely untouched by the mid-20th-century Catholic
renaissance in biblical, historical, philosophical, and theological
studies that paved the way toward the Second Vatican Council.
And in
each of these cases, the local Catholicism was highly clerical, with
ordination to the priesthood and the episcopate being understood by
everyone, clergy and laity alike, as conferring membership in a higher
caste.
Then came le déluge: the deluge of Vatican II, the deluge that Europeans refer to as “1968,” and the deluge of the “Quiet Revolution” in la Belle Province.
Once breached, the fortifications of Counter-Reformation Catholicism in
Spain, Portugal, Quebec, and Ireland quickly crumbled.
And absent the
intellectual resources to resist the flood-tides of secularism, these
four once-hyper-Catholic nations flipped, undergoing an accelerated
course of radical secularization that has now, in each case, given birth
to a serious problem of Christophobia: not mere indifference to the
Church, but active hostility to it, not infrequently manifested through
coercive state power.
This, then, is the blunt fact that must be faced by bishops, priests,
and lay Catholics who want to build the Church of Vatican II, John Paul
II, and Benedict XVI — the Church of a New Evangelization — out of the
wreckage of the recent Irish past: In Ireland, as in the other three
cases, the Church’s close relationship with secular power reinforced
internal patterns of clericalism and irresponsibility that put young
people at risk, that impeded the proclamation of the Gospel, and that
made the Church in these places easy prey for the secularist cultural
(and political) wolves, once they emerged on the scene.
And that is why the leadership that Catholic Ireland needs may have to
be imported, at least in part. Men of indisputable integrity and
evangelical passion who have no linkage to this sad, and in some
instances tawdry, history are needed to lead the Irish Catholic reform
for which Benedict XVI has called.
I know no serious observer of the
Irish Catholic scene, anywhere, who disputes the necessity of clearing
the current bench of bishops; I also know no one who thinks that a
reconfigured Irish episcopate, even one leading fewer dioceses, can be
drawn entirely from the resident clergy of Ireland today.
This may be
one factor leading to the current languid pace in reforming the Irish
hierarchy; and that lassitude is what gave Taoiseach Kenny the
opening for his latest rabid attack on the Church, the Holy See, and the
Pope.
All the more reason, then, to make the reform of the Church in
Ireland truly radical by looking outside Ireland for men capable of
helping lead this once-great Church back to evangelical health.
— George Weigel is distinguished senior
fellow of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds
the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.