IN THE grand sweep of history, four decades is not a long time. This (or 39 years to be precise) is the time gap that separates the two papal visits to Ireland — John Paul II in 1979 and Francis in 2018.
Yet, in that relatively short period, the fortunes of the Irish Catholic Church changed dramatically.
The seeds of decline had been sown well before 1979, though the huge crowds who turned out for the papal Masses in September of that year appeared to indicate a vibrant faith and a Church on the threshold of reinvigoration. But it was to turn out that this was really the last hurrah for Cullenite Catholicism, though we who covered that visit didn’t see this at the time.
In her new book, The Way We Were: Catholic Ireland Since 1922, Mary Kenny writes insightfully about the changes in Irish Catholicism and in the wider Irish society. She doesn’t, on this occasion, use a word she had previously used to describe what happened to the Church — degringolade, meaning a rapid decline.
But context is everything when it comes to history, and Mary Kenny is not found wanting when it comes to reminding readers of the intimacy of the links between faith and fatherland and their role in shaping the Irish State.
For all the horrors revealed by the Murphy, Ryan, and Cloyne reports, and the scandalous stories of what happened in the Magdalene laundries and the mother and baby homes, there is another dimension to the story of Irish Catholicism. One of the merits of this book is to remind us of this, to make the point that there was much that was good, reassuring, and life-affirming about the “way we were”. Once.
When the then taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, spoke in Dublin Castle in the presence of Pope Francis, he very properly drew attention to this.
“People of profound Christian faith provided education to our children when the State did not ... They founded our oldest hospitals, staffed them, and provided welfare for so many of our people ... Providing healthcare, education, and welfare is now considered a core function of our State. When the State was founded, it was not. The Catholic Church filled that gap to the benefit of many generations of our people. We remain profoundly grateful for that.”
That needed to be said, even as Irish Catholicism was confronting its dark past.
Tone of regret
The tone of the book, at one level, is one of regret at what has been lost. This tone was expressed as far back as 1989 in an essay Mary Kenny wrote for The Furrow, that admirable monthly journal published from Maynooth: “For all the discontents I have felt, and can still feel in the most perverse ways, the heritage of Irish Catholicism remains an inspiration. Faith of our fathers, indeed! Living yet and ever!”
Yes, but increasingly on the margins of a society that has abandoned institutional religion and shows unmistakable signs of being more secular and multiracial and multicultural. Yet a note of caution is justified — giving up on church-going doesn’t automatically equate to a lack of spirituality. And we all live under the shadow of the past.
“Humanists and secularists in Ireland — of whom there are growing numbers — aspire to a state where religion plays no part in the public realm,” says the author. But public discourse from which religious voices are banned is an impoverished discourse.
Mary Kenny acknowledges that Ireland has moved towards a greater secularism in recent years, so much so that she warns that “Ireland will have to decide which model of secularism is adaptive to its culture”. But this is a culture formed by a rich religious heritage.
“Yet values and traditions often seep into the life of a nation in roundabout ways, and Catholic Ireland still retains many of these in its deposits,” the author notes.
Prayers are still uttered in the Oireachtas as a procedural prelude to business.
As for the future, she issues a timely reminder. “You can make the future as secular as you like, but you cannot change the past. It was faith and fatherland that created the Irish State.”
The final segments of the book consist of profiles of 12 prominent (indeed, famous) Irish Catholics, beginning with Gay Byrne. Among the others to be profiled are Frank Duff, Delia Murphy, Alice Glenn, Gerry Fitt, and TK Whitaker.
And the profile of Sean Mac Reamoinn, who covered the fourth and final session of Vatican II in 1965 for RTÉ, is a reminder that one of the book’s weaknesses is that it overstates the impact of that Council on Ireland.
Sean himself, and his friend Austin Flannery OP (who translated the 16 Council documents into English), were disappointed at the way Vatican II had been marginalised here.