POLARIZATION COMES TO IRELAND

...It was with particular anguish that in a newspaper interview he said: "If the church is a sign of something rather than actual life, then we churchmen should have been showing as much kindness as possible in the present situation in Northern Ireland, but in fact what we have been doing is no better than what was accepted as the then political norm in Northern Ireland, a norm which we now all recognize as abnormal...

...Thomas's school because McKeown previously had written an article considered by the authorities to be hostile to diocesan policy on schooling...

...The loudest applause of the meeting was accorded to a Protestant minister from the Shankill Road who expressed support for the action committee...

...There were shouts of "No," stamping of feet and jeering...

...john cooney (John Cooney is Commonweal's1 regular correspond-end in Ireland...

...Instead, the reader plows through outpourings of a canon law mentality allied to scribal inquisition in the form of petty charges levied by the bishop against the curate...

...Cahill asked...

...Catholics there were looking for their civil rights and an end to the discrimination and manipulation practiced by the Unionist Party...

...The odds are that the next round will still be staged in Belfast...

...Where the hell are they...

...It could be that ten years after Vatican II Irish Catholicism is about to experience the kind of turbulence that hit American Catholicism immediately after the Council...

...The division, as the Irish Times noted in an editorial, was clear-cut: "It is a clash of two theological viewpoints: on the one hand, Bishop Philbin upholds a feudal concept of the church in which as bishop he acts as if he had monopolistic ownership of the People of God in a defined geographical area...

...A spokesman for the committee explained that it was not seeking confrontation...

...CLERICAL DISPUTE POLRRIZRTIQN COMES TO IRELAND The Irish bishops at a "stock-taking" meeting in County Mayo last year felt pleased that in the decade since the Second Vatican Council the church in Ireland had avoided the so-called phenomenon of contestation or polarization that has bedeviled other national churches...

...Basically, therefore the "Wilson Case," like so many other "cases," highlights the unresolved tension in the church about the nature and operation of authority...

...Curiously, throughout the correspondence no attempt appeared to have been made by the bishop to elucidate the kind of alternative ministry that Father Wilson wished to pursue in his role of "retired priest...

...In particular, Father Wilson maintained that the Bishop of Down and Connor, Most Rev...

...Unfortunately, the recent history of the diocese of Down and Connor does not appear to measure up to the demands of such a criterion...

...Consequently, the Wilson Case and these other incidents resulted in an upsurge of populist Catholicism in opposition to the administrative rule of the diocese...

...This is particularly so when one of the parties to the dispute, the Rev...

...If the Vatican remains silent, it will implicitly support Bishop Philbin's view of church authority-and consequently accelerate an anti-clerical spirit in the North...

...But, as one commentator remarked, clerical karate is fast becoming the moral popular spectator sport in Ireland...

...Indeed, on account of the fact that the dispute has taken place in Belfast-the symbol of inter-church division and communal strife-it is of particular concern to Christians elsewhere...

...As shown by incidents such as the departure of Mother Teresa's nuns from Ballymurphy, the severe disciplinary treatment of priests and religious and the withholding of the Sacrament of Confirmation from children being sent by their Catholic parents to State schools, the diocese has clung to a legalistic ghetto mentality...

...When asked to submit the name of the priest witness, Bishop Philbin had refused to do so, but had notified Father Wilson that the unnamed priest would testify to the bishop on oath as to the veracity of the quotation...

...The summer months brought a recess from contestation in Ireland...

...on the other hand, Father Wilson is attempting in the harrowing circum-stances of war-torn and socially deprived Belfast to find a new way of performing bis ministry...

...This was dramatically instanced in the refusal by Canon Padraig Murphy to allow an Irish Press reporter, Mr...

...This mentality is seen in the use of the authorities of a system of persona non grata against persons considered to be deviants from diocesan conformity...

...Sean McKeown...

...Another voice called out: "If the parish priest refuses to meet his parishioners then we can refuse to have him the parish priest...

...Desmond Wilson, Northern Ireland's most popularly known priest, claimed that in resigning from the diocese of Down and Connor over policy disagreement, he felt that the Catholic Church in Belfast had been unable to produce better procedures than those used by the Unionist Party in the days before the present violence in the province...

...Like so many other clerics involved in conflict with immobile and implacable ecclesiastical machinery, Father Wilson had no option but to appeal to public opinion about the justice of his stand...

...Ciaran McKeown, to attend a prize-giving ceremony in St...

...The tone of the meeting was set by the remark of the elected chairman, Mr...

...Shankill Road is a main Protestant working-class area...

...This impression was to some extent strengthened by the publication of the correspondence between the bishop and the curate-a correspondence which is hair-raising in its portrayal of drastic breakdown in human communication...

...Ordained 25 years ago, Father Wilson in recent years had been living in a council house in the troubled working-class area of Ballymurphy in Belfast...

...Frank Cahill, when he said that the local people and the media were asking Canon Murphy and Bishop Philbin to come out and talk about Father Wilson's resignation, but that every time a request was made they were told there was no comment...

...One year later, however, the Irish church has witnessed a dispute as intense as that experienced in any other national church...

...It was with indignation that Father Wilson therefore informed Cardinal Con-way: "I feel obliged to refuse to answer further to any such charge because if I do I shall thus countenance a procedure which we have condemned in the Long Kesh (i.e., the Northern Ireland Prison for internees) tribunals, namely taking evidence on oath from unnamed witnesses whom an accused person cannot confront...

...The members sent a registered letter requesting an urgent meeting with Bishop Philbin...

...He refused to meet the priest...

...Arguably, nowhere in the world did the message of Vatican II require more urgent implementation than in Northern Ireland...

...It was this kind of charge against Bishop Philbin that underlay Father Wilson's terse statement that he had resigned as a priest of the diocese over disagreement with "policies which concern administrative matters, the treatment of people within and outside the Catholic 'Church, financial policy and the leadership which should be available to the people at this time...

...This statement followed a refusal by the bishop of Father Wilson's request to be granted the status of retired priest within the diocese...

...As the situation in the North is so sectarian and divisive, the Wilson Case is of such fundamental importance that the Vatican cannot morally take up the position of neutrality...

...Ironically, the headmaster of that school was McKeown's father, Mr...

...Of particular anxiety to Father Wilson was the bishop's claim that he had heard from a priest that Father Wilson had threatened in conversation that "By Christ, if I don't get what I want I have facts and figures which would ruin the church in this diocese,and I don't care if I bring the whole church down, or if it's the last thing I do...

...That action committee prepared a pamphlet, "Open the Window-Let in the Light," documenting their grievances against the exercise of diocesan policy...

...Philbin on the resignation...

...This ban on his son led to the resignation as headmaster of Mr...

...I hope you will realize that it would be quite improper for me to do anything of this, in spite of the fact that the matters in question are being made the basis of charges and imputations against me and other clergy...

...In the course of the correspondence the bishop withdrew Father Wilson's faculties as a diocesan priest...

...He told them by letter: "What you are asking is, in effect, that I should give you, through a process of question, answer and argument, what would amount to a public assessment of the manner in which a number of persons have been discharging offices in this diocese...

...William Philbin, had given priests instructions on how to vote for school committees in a closed-door fashion as undertaken by the Unionist politcians in their anti-Catholic maneuverings...

...Certainly, the record of the past decade appeared substantially to justify their lordships' optimism...

...Sean McKeown...

...it wanted to send a deputation to ask for consultation between the hierarchy and the people in the running of the affairs of the church and the parish...

...A speaker shouted from the floor "Does anybody in the hall see eye-to-eye with Dr...

...If Catholics wished the Protestant ascendancy to accept the rule of fair play, they, too, were under obligation to show in their church practice the virtues which they exhorted others to uphold...

...When the dispute came out into the open, it was therefore easy for many onlookers to dramatize the affair into a personality clash between Father Wilson, a skilled media communicator, public speaker and writer, and the shy, aloof but powerful Bishop Philbin, and his colleagues Monsignor Patrick Mullalley, the Vicar General, and Canon Padraig Murphy, Father Wilson's parish priest...

...However, Bishop Philbin would not meet the committee...

...More than 1000 militant parishioners held a public meeting in support of Father Wilson at which an action committee was set up to coordinate forms of protest (such as withholding collections) and to communicate with Bishop Philbin and other members of the Irish hierarchy...

...Over the years, too, it had become no secret that tension existed between the Ballymurphy curate and the diocesan office about the role of the church in Belfast...

...This becomes of particular significance in Northern Ireland as that province's preoccupations with the need for power-sharing and pluralism are strikingly similar to Vatican IPs concern with co-responsibility and with acceptance of different theological outlooks within the church...