I argued that while some young people wanted what Bishop Coll suggested, young people in general in my experience want a Church that’s accepting of life and culture in the modern world, that respects developments in science and above all that’s open to change and reform.
In an editorial in the Irish Catholic (March 26), the writer – presumably the editor, Garry O’Sullivan, came down on my side of the debate: ‘Fr Hoban is right . . . a small, intense cohort (of young people) should not be mistaken for the future of the whole Church.’
I was surprised that O’Sullivan was so affirming of my position – not once but twice in the same paragraph – but my surprise didn’t last long. O’Sullivan suggested that the harder question is ‘what hope Hoban is offering instead’. The sting in the tail followed.
O’Sullivan listed a series of failures among what he called ‘the post-Vatican Two mainstream in Ireland’ and listed them in detail – school catechesis, adult faith formation, neglect of youth ministry, etc. ‘The record’ O’Sullivan wrote, ‘is hard to defend’ and ‘if Coll may be guilty of overestimating a small cohort, Hoban’s camp has often seemed guilty of presiding over drift and calling it maturity’.
Garry O’Sullivan is, of course, entitled to his opinions but he isn’t entitled to use the tired old trope of first ‘damning me with feint praise’, and then adopting the tactic of ‘the straw man’s argument’, painting me into a corner –– setting the terms of a discussion so that my position looks flawed from the start – and then attacking the limited arguments he has decided I have in my bag. I want to call him out on his manipulative framing of my position.
For O’Sullivan, ‘Hoban’s camp’ (whatever that means) has focussed on a vision that was ‘more administrative than evangelical’. And our failure is laid at the door of what the ‘camp’ proposed –‘style’ and ‘ideology’ but not ‘hearts of fire’, like the apostles on the road to Emmaus.
But directly blaming, as O’Sullivan seems to do, a small group of priests and others who campaigned passionately for the implementation of the vision of Vatican Two is to miss the target spectacularly. And, furthermore, the omission is compounded by completely ignoring that, as various reports have demonstrated, the vast percentage of Irish Catholics longed for and continue to long for the full implementation of the reforms envisaged in Vatican Two – something that would really set hearts on fire among many Irish Catholics today. Evangelisation could and would be better served by embedding a synodal church which we have only in recent times come to appreciate and recognize as the only credible way of bringing people to discover the joy at the heart of the gospel.
O’Sullivan’s attribution of responsibility – for the sidelining of church reforms voted by substantial and sometimes overwhelming majorities of the bishops of the world in communion with the pope – is completely misplaced. Those to blame (if blame is to be allocated) are not those who campaigned tirelessly and tenaciously for the implementation of the Vatican Two vision but those popes, bishops, priests, traditional Catholics and, yes, some Catholic media too who successfully blocked that implementation. O’Sullivan’s list of conspicuous failures from ‘the post-Vatican Two mainstream in Ireland’ is directly attributable to that latter cohort.
Garry O’Sullivan shouldn’t dump the failures of the Catholic Church since the Great Council on a ‘liberal or reformist wing’ whose ‘results’ during those years are not, in his estimation, ‘impressive’.
Like most of my colleagues who worked to keep the vision of Vatican Two alive, I was ordained on the cusp of the Second Vatican Council and the vision of that council and the documents it produced have been the guiding light of our lives.
We have argued in print and have striven in practice as priests and others, some for over 50 years, to promote and implement that vision. We’ve waited all our lives for a pope to implement the promise and purpose of the Great Council that had been sidelined and almost shelved for half a century and, to our unapologetic delight, in recent years two popes have arrived in quick succession to embrace once again the almost forgotten legacy of the Second Vatican Council.
My personal contribution involved the publication of four books – multiplecolumns in the Western People over 40 years, multiple articles in The Furrow and including (I would like to remind Garry) one recently in The Synodal Times, a supplement of The Irish Catholic, which he himself edits – in which I argued ad nauseam for a fair wind for church reform and not least through my recent book Holding Out For a Hero, The Long Wait for Pope Francis, in effect, a paean of delight for his arrival in our rudderless church during the last few minutes to midnight.
My unvarying conviction and focus that the remedy to much of the decline of the Catholic Church in Ireland was there in plain sight in the documents of Vatican Two led me over many decades to argue, plead and beg church authorities to implement them – a fixation that became something of a grand obsession for myself and something of an exasperation for my long-suffering readers.
I write this not because I want to trumpet my own contribution but to underline the way those who remained loyal to the flame of Vatican Two can so easily have their legacy so unfairly re-interpreted. It is unacceptable, unconscionable and egregious that O’Sullivan’s diminishment and disavowal would not be called out.