I had not meant to return so soon to the subject of the crisis in the
Irish Church, for though this is something I care about very much for
personal reasons, I’m still an Englishman and this isn’t my business.
But the American George Weigel has now written
with ponderous weight on the subject, and I cannot simply ignore his
piece, since people are influenced by what he says and somebody has to
say something about it.
After his epic and authoritative biography of
the late pope, Weigel now speaks plausibly about a wide variety of
subjects. And he’s a great one for the well-turned phrase which arrests
attention.
He has now outdone himself with an opening sentence to
an article in the respected National Review (which in Buckley’s time I
wrote for myself sometimes), a sentence which, though certainly
striking, is quite simply wildly untrue.
The article, disrespectfully
entitled “Erin go bonkers” (“Erin go brach”, of course, means “Ireland
forever”) opens thus:
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.
Well, now. The point is, of course, that the
current crisis in Irish Church affairs, involving certainly an
unprecedented fury against Ireland’s bishops and also against Vatican
bureaucratic procedures – of which Enda Kenny’s late performance was the
most striking example – is not about Catholicism at all.
Incidentally,
though the invocation of the Holy Trinity at the beginning of the Irish
constitution certainly implies that Ireland is Christian, those behind
the constitution (who also devised a national flag implying peace
between Ireland’s Catholics and Protestants) were well aware that the
Island of Ireland is home to more than the Catholic majority, and as
Mary Kenny pointed out recently in an article I quoted on Monday, the
constitution nowhere says that the Irish state is officially Catholic.
The
flaw in Weigel’s article is very obvious: to be anti-clerical isn’t
necessarily to be anti-Catholic.
Later in his piece, Weigel asks the
question “How on earth did this most Catholic of countries become
violently anti-Catholic?” Well, of course, it didn’t. To be strongly
disenchanted with your own bishops is hardly to be anti-Catholic (and it
may indicate precisely the reverse).
But Weigel isn’t saying that
the Irish are turning against the excessively deferential way in which
they themselves have treated their bishops (and high time too, some
might say) he’s actually saying (get ready for this one, it’s a corker)
that “Ireland has now become the epicentre of European
anti-Catholicism”.
The online version of this piece attracted a furious riposte:
Sitting here in Ireland, rather than thousands of miles away, I take serious offence at this inaccurate and misleading article.
“violently anti-Catholic”?
Firstly, Ireland is 85 per cent Catholic, and while there are many who have turned from their faith in despair, there is no violence (other than the priests who are obviously still quite content to rape and torture children as shown in the reports recently published) and there is no anti-Catholic actions – other than fully justified disgust that the organisation we have trusted for so long could be so lacking in any moral authority. As an 85 per cent Catholic country, one which I might add has been embroiled in fights for religious (Catholic) freedom for near on 800 years in one shape or another, we would need to be self-loathing to fill your inaccurate description of us.
That these crimes were committed by those who are meant to be the guides in life and one’s spiritual journey is sad, but in fairness the Irish congregation did put in place some (relatively soft touch) guidelines for the safety of children and reporting of crimes by clergy. What is unacceptable to many here is that the Church authority – the Vatican – would interfere and advise that same congregation (ie the Vatican’s staff as such) that those were not rules to follow but instead just things to discuss.
My good Lord! How dare they.
And for that matter – how dare you. What on Earth gives you the knowledge and authority to state “Ireland has now become the epicentre of European anti-Catholicism”? …. Or is it simply that you have failed to research your subject properly?
…We are more Catholic than you would comprehend.
Weigel’s
article is partly based on a common American error about Europe, the
notion that it’s really all the same country with a few different
languages in it. Another comment under Weigel’s piece made the point
rather well, I think, pointing out
… an error that is made all too often by American pundits or “experts”, and that is to refer to Europeans as a single group with the same culture and attitudes …a measure of how ["expert"] any American really is [is] that he can look at all these countries in Europe and say to himself “yeah, they’re pretty much the same”.
Weigel has a quick tour
d’horizon of the reasons for the secularisation of a few formerly
overwhelmingly Catholic countries, which leads him to a bewildering
conclusion: “Once breached, the fortifications of Counter-Reformation
Catholicism in Spain, Portugal, Quebec [not European, not a country],
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…”
Christo WHAT?
WHAT phobia?
What is actually a crisis in the governance of the Catholic Church in
Ireland has now become a general European hatred for the Saviour of the
world. As one of my Scottish critics vividly commented recently about
something I’d said: “Sheessh!!!”
Weigel’s plan for the reform of
the Irish Catholic Church is to clear out most of the Irish bishops and
import a load of foreign bishops who understand nothing of Ireland or
the Irish, to sort everything out: “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.”
And why
is that precisely?
No reason is given.
And where are the bishops to
sort this out to come from?
The US, perhaps?
Maybe the gruesome results
over the last 20 years of self-confident American efforts to tell other
people how to run their own affairs might be thought to rule this out?
England perhaps?
That’s all the Irish need, a few English voices telling
them what to do. I think we’ve been there before: it didn’t work.
The
point is, Mr Weigel, that the Irish spent 800 years shaking off foreign
tutelage: they’re certainly not going to accept it now.
The real point about the Irish people is that they have not become disenchanted with the Catholic religion
at all; it’s precisely by the moral standards of the Catholic religion
that they are now judging all too many bishops and some, a small
minority but still far too many, clergy.
The child abuse scandals
themselves have brought no decline in Mass attendance.
On the contrary,
far from being the “epicentre” of European anti-Catholicism, the
practice of the Catholic religion is one of the highest in Europe.
As Michael Kelly pointed out
in the Irish Catholic in April: “Decline in Church attendance in
Ireland happened long before revelations about abuse and the subsequent
cover-up. Polls show that in 1981 a staggering 88 per cent of Irish
people attended Mass at least once a month, with 82 per cent attending
weekly.
By 2006 that figure had slipped to just 48 per cent for weekly
Mass attendance while that figure climbs to 67 per cent when those who
attend at least once a month are factored in.
Subsequent polls have been
fairly consistent, putting weekly Mass attendance somewhere between 45
per cent and 48 per cent.
These are remarkably high figures by western
European standards (the latest figures for Italy are 22 per cent and
approximately 10 per cent for France).”
So, Mr Weigel, I think
it’s back to the drawing board for your “epicentre of European
anti-Catholicism”.
I don’t know where that would be: but it’s certainly
not Ireland.
Anti-clericalism, maybe…