Is Irish Catholicism dying?
Kirby, Peadar
SUCCESS COMETH BEFORE A FALL Is Irish Catholicism dying? PEADAR KIRBY T HE SYMBOLIC YEAR 1984 opened in Ireland with another of those periodic rows into which the Catholic bishops seem adept...
...Furthermore, the institutionalization of all church ministry in parishes, schools, hospitals, and charitable institutions in that period of expansion made the veritable army of church officials prison= ers of their own institutions, unable to adapt to the challenges of Vatican II or of the liberalization and expansion of Irish society in the 1960s...
...Sunday Mass remains a widespread practice, with the most recent statistics (1980) revealing that82 percent of Irish Catholics and 72 percent of those between 17-30 go to Mass every Sunday...
...Contrast the 1980 figures with the first national survey of belief and practice (1973-74...
...L'Argent won the Grand Prize of the 1983 Cannes Film Festival...
...In the absence of any real attempt on the part of the clergy to draw closer to the people, to listen sympathetically to their needs and experiences, and to fashion with them some new ways of living as church in this new situation, the only result can be the constant weakening of the residue of Christian faith which remains...
...Though not addressed to any particular issue, the bishops' comments on the need to respect and safeguard the moral principles of the majority of the citizens il...
...Religion appears as a fringe activity of one's private life...
...the episcopal submission warns governments and parliaments against yielding too easily to the demands of pressure groups...
...A marked divorce between practice and moral values was also shown in the surveys...
...However, they point to a particular challenge which appears to be lost on the Irish hierarchy...
...The figure dropped to 16 percent for those who said they found religion helpful in times of stress...
...And new issues such as social justice or nuclear disarmament have warranted major episcopal statements...
...This figure increases to 55 percent for city-born, and to 61 percent for the under-thirty age group...
...SUCCESS COMETH BEFORE A FALL Is Irish Catholicism dying...
...With the passions engendered by last September's abortion referendum just beginning to subside, the bishops, in a lengthy document leaked to the press in mid-January, returned to the subject which lay at the heart of that anguished debate -- the degree to which the Catholic church can expect to influence legislation on moral (for which read sexual) matters in the Republic...
...in reply, the primate, Cardinal Tomas O'Fiaich, asked in a slightly pained tone what else they could have been expected to say...
...I left L'Argent both exasperated and enlightened...
...But the problem is that it increasingly appears to be based on a fiction, namely the existence of a staunchly believing Catholic people...
...This decay is not yet evident on the surface in Ireland...
...The screenplay is bare, and the action transpires with a minimum of emotional display, even on the part of the victim and his eventual victims...
...The story is an absurdist parable, reminiscent of plays like Ionesco's The Chairs or The New Tenant, where human beings are subordinated to things and where human conversational exchange is reduced to the barest, bleakest noncommunication...
...The vast majority gave their reason for going to Sunday Mass as fulfilling the law or a sense of duty, while only 26 percent admitted to ever having a religious experience...
...Thus, in their submission to the Forum, they speak of "the moral perception of the citizens" which "will be influenced by the religious teaching to which they adhere...
...In many ways the real problem of the Irish Catholic church is due precisely to the very strength and success of its institutions...
...Furthermore, most of these lay participants are active in traditional organizations which embody little of the vision of a post-Vatican II church...
...A counterfeit bill is passed in a camera shop, and gets passed in turn to a gas man, who gets charged with the crime, loses his job, turns to real robbery, is jailed, loses his wife and child, and eventually is driven to murder...
...L'Argent is a stark tale about how money corrupts and destroys human personality...
...The new liturgy has been introduced without any significant backlash...
...The only groups that seem to take the bishops seriously on these issues are those tiny ultra-conservative Catholic groups whose crusading defense of traditional morality is largely linked to a futile resistance to all social change...
...January's document was a detailed submission by the episcopal conference to the deliberations of the New Ireland Forum, a political initiative of the liberal Taoiseach (Prime Minister) of the Republic, Dr...
...Little as the bishops might like to admit it, it is the liberal "pressure groups" using the pulpit of the media to preach their particular moral codes who are molding the values of the majority of the Irish people today...
...Bresson, similarly, seems to exploit understatement to defy an audience's expectations of what a realistic film ought to be...
...In the light of this schizophrenic faith, the increasing Commonweal: 336 majorities shown by successive surveys in favor of legalizing divorce or further liberalizing the sale of contraceptives are not to be wondered at...
...Screen MONEY & MUTINY AND MAYHEM & MUTILATION L 'ARGENT is derived from a short story by Tolstoy, and its director, French film master Robert Bresson, shares Tolstoy s old moralist's venom against both the complexities of civilization and the complexities of its art...
...Numerous episcopal commissions have been set up, like the Commission for World Development, Trocaire, which have been enormously successful...
...As a recent survey of youth attitudes to religion and the church discovered, most young people see the church as "an excluding church" offering them neither acceptance nor openness to their distinctive experiences and needs...
...The Irish Catholic church has responded better than most to the challenges of institutional adaptation in the postVatican 1I period...
...Significantly I I PEADAR KIRBY is an Irish journalist who lives in Dublin...
...As with so many other attempts to alert church leaders to the challenge facing them, this warning was largely ignored...
...Yet these figures constitute a dramatic decline in churchgoing among those groups which are on the increase in Irish society, the young, and educated urban dwellers...
...Much more revealing, however, was the quality of faith contrasted by these surveys...
...the framing of any new legislation were widely taken to indicate an opposition to the current moves in the Republic to change the constitutional ban on divorce...
...Any stannch defense of traditional moral values at the expense of some far-reaching pastoral program to involve lay people actively in the life of the church is bound therefore to result in the tired, bored, and mostly confused attitude most Irish Catholics have to their bishops...
...This is what is fast happening in Ireland, and the church leadership seems largely unaware of it...
...The latter showed 91 percent attending Sunday Mass, including 85 percent of the 18-30 age group...
...For most bishops these are an acute embarrassment...
...The reality rather, confirmed by numerous statistical surveys done over the past ten years, is that the unique phenomenon of Irish Catholicism is dying...
...As yet the church has provided few opportunities for lay people to explore their faith in a more challenging and socially committed way, and few lay Catholics seem to expect or demand such opportunities or challenges...
...This relatively minor row is important because it illustrates the dilemma in which Irish Catholic church leaders increasingly find themselves...
...The bishops' loss of influence is not due to any institutional weakness...
...For as they show themselves staunch in seeking to defend values, the very people on whose behalf they say they speak are showing little or no commitment to those values...
...As the bishops' own working party of 1977-78 warned, there is a great danger "that Irish Catholicism is increasingly absent from the major tasks of social, political, and human progress which face us...
...Over a third thought it right to put their own interests first, and only 28 percent would put the demands of religion first if they clashed with the interests of family, work, or even recreation...
...Few can fault the logic of the bishops' position or their right to express it...
...The percentages of lay Catholics actively involved in parish life is very low by international standards, only 5.6 percent...
...For the huge expansion of the numbers of clergy and religious in Ireland from the 1850s right up to the !960s led to the development of a highly clericalized church, with clergy and religious dominating all church activity, and the laity reduced to a largely passive and conformist role...
...PEADAR KIRBY T HE SYMBOLIC YEAR 1984 opened in Ireland with another of those periodic rows into which the Catholic bishops seem adept at landing themselves...
...The strict identification of Irish identity with Catholicism and its expression through a highly disciplined and clerical church appears to be far advanced on the road to decay...
...Underlying their public stances, particularly on the always touchy subject of liberalizing the law on matters of sexual morality, is an assumption that they speak for the Catholic people of Ireland...
...It is a death wish of astounding proportions...
...My own response spanned both reactions...
...Garret FitzGerald, which groups leading members of the three main parties in the South with those of the largest "Catholic" party in the North, the SDLP, to examine all aspects of the Northern Ireland problem and propose an all-party solution...
...But what works so comically in theater of the absurd is not so successful with tragic material, where the excessive contrivance of Bresson's technique prevents a passionate pre1 June 1984:337...
...Like his other films (Lancelot du Lac, The Trial Of Joan of Arc), L'Argent is filmed in Bresson's bleak, laconic style -- the kind of understatement that became a fetish to Tolstoy as he rejected the rich realism of his earlier novels...
...Another result of such a clericalized church is the lack of lay involvement...
...This Catholic people, they assume, is the vast majority, while those who lobby for contraception or divorce constitute a minority which, through its domination of the media, exercises an influence far in excess of its numbers...
...appropriately, Bresson was booed when he rose to accept the award...
...Predictably, liberal opinion, led by the media, raised its voice in horror...
...As Father Liam Ryan, professor of sociology at Maynooth, pointed out in an article last year synthesizing the results of different surveys in the field: "Over one-third of respondents report that religious principles selc~om if ever guide their behavior...
...As a working party set up by the bishops to report on the pastoral implications of the 1973-74 survey reported: "The clear trend among the younger age groups is towards a marginalization of religion into a ritualized practice...
...Depending on your point of view, Bresson both succeeds and falls -- if, indeed, given his aims, the two are distinguishable...
...Thus new catechetical programs have been introduced, and institutes opened to train teachers...
Vol. 111 • June 1984 • No. 11
