Will it be Groundhog Day for Church reform? (Opinion)

Remember the Grand Old Duke of York immortalised in the words of the nursery rhyme?

Oh! The grand old Duke of York

He had ten thousand men

He marched them up to the top of the hill 

And he marched them down again.

It’s clear now that the reforms sponsored by Pope Francis (and the bearers of such hope for the future of the Catholic Church) are once again in danger of being kicked down the road.

I’ve been looking back a bit to a speech given by the then Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, and to a book I wrote in 1995.

The main thesis of Martin’s speech was that the Catholic Church in Ireland in the future would have to be very different from the past. 

In my book, Change or Decay, Irish Catholicism in Crisis, I wrote more or less the same thing. 

My main point was that unless we were prepared to embrace change the Catholic Church in Ireland would die on its feet.

Almost 30 years ago now, I wrote in the introduction:

The Catholic Church in Ireland is, in a number of key areas, in free-fall. Yet extraordinarily we still seem reluctant to face the truths that everyone else can recognise. A feudal church is incapable of conversing with today’s world. 

And unless we embrace change the Irish Catholic Church will turn over and die – unless we are prepared to move from denial to reality, from self-interest to gospel courage, from a necessary dying to a new way of living.

In effect, what Martin was saying was that we needed to embrace change so that we could re-make, re-create and re-imagine a new and very different Church. Which is more or less what Pope Francis is attempting now.

At the time, the outline of Martin’s ideas were clear: the old arrogance of an insensitive and domineering institution had to change; ‘the narrow culture of clericalism’ had to be eliminated; the Church had to become ‘a People’s Church’ with the people driving change; and so on.

What he didn’t say is what almost everyone else was saying: that we needed to re-image priesthood for a different world; that celibacy for all priests needed to be looked at; that the promise of women priests needed to be addressed; and that church teaching in sexual matters needed attention.

Martin didn’t say that because, at that time, it would have been a bridge too far. He had to be politically astute; he had to watch his back. So he half-said what needed to be said and while at the time half a loaf was better than no bread, the irony is that while Martin was said to be ‘going too far’, the reality (as we now know) was that he wasn’t going far enough. He didn’t foresee or at least suggest that a more fundamental shift was needed – from Roman control to local collegiality and from clerical control to lay decision-making.

But so far, so good. 

The great truth Martin named was the reluctance and the failure of the Catholic Church to change. An instance of this, Martin suggested, was what he called ‘signs of subconscious denial’ in our attitude to the child abuse revelations. After all that has happened, there were (he said) ‘still strong forces which would prefer that the truth did not emerge'. 

That reluctance then to name the truth and, according to Martin, to proceed accordingly with effective and monitored child protective measures were indicative of a wider denial: about religious practice; about vocations; about faith; about ‘Catholic’ schools; about transparency in financial matters; about our penchant for setting up new structures and pretending that therefore something is happening; and so forth.

The task of the Catholic Church was about personal and institutional renewal, getting back to the basics of what we are and what we do and jettisoning that oppressive and controlling culture that hindered us not just from engaging with the lived concerns of our people but that helped divest the gospel message of Jesus Christ of outdated and irrelevant baggage.

I remember at the time asking the question in this column: have we the will and the capacity to change? And pointing out that it was all very well for Archbishop Martin to say that there will be a very different Catholic Church in Ireland in the future, but who will change what needs to be changed?

Rome wouldn’t, because the evidence up to then was that Rome wouldn't countenance any significant change. The sounds coming out of Rome since the Second Vatican Council indicated that we were going backwards not going forward, holding back rather than pushing forward, about keeping control rather than encouraging freedom.

I suggested that the clergy wouldn’t do it because, even then, we were too old, too tired and too dispirited as well as lacking the resources, the energy and the direction to plot a course into the future.

The people wouldn’t do it because already they were telling us that it was probably too late. So many had walked away, so many were still in the pews but their minds were no longer with us, so many heard promises before of what was going to happen and nothing did, so their capacity to respond to the challenges of the present was limited.

Then years later Pope Francis arrived on the scene and suddenly more than what Diarmuid Martin had predicted and even more than I had imagined was not just possible but deemed necessary as there was no Plan B.

That seems to have changed as recently Francis indicated that at the Synod that starts in Rome today (Wednesday) no change might be expected – at this stage.

Surely it can’t be that once again at this synod, Francis (like the grand old Duke of York) having marched his troops up to the top of the hill, will just march them down again?