Nearer than the door

...Like the Irish are a friendly, generous people, even more interesting than the scenery...

...Although his daughters fear his moods, they internalize his sense of separateness and superiority...

...Why has no one brought representatives of all sides together to work for gradual demilitarization of the conflict...

...Although offering no hard evidence on Ireland's religious future, one of our most rewarding visits is to Glenstal Abbey, not far from Limerick, where we attend the monks' community Mass, and rejoice to see that half the concelebrants are young men...

...Our Dingle landlady thinks it a selling point to have us meet her parish priest, who is having coffee with her in the parlor, before showing us our room...

...But Catholicism is inevitably perceived as part of the established order, and one can easily foresee a pattern of growing alienation as Ireland, with the youngest population in Europe, becomes increasingly tied to the European community and rushes to embrace the international youth culture...

...God's power is never so much in evidence as in extending his mercy," he reminds us...

...living in simple companionship with each other and God...

...Ireland remains tragically divided between North and South...

...Other generalizations come linked with contradictions...

...Still, we're impressed with the crowd that fills the village church in Kerry—and with the sermon, which suggests that the miracle of the loaves and fishes had much to do with the people "coughing up their own rations...

...we find it hard to stand up if the crowd is against us...

...the children of a contemporary Moran would find it hard not to rebel against the church...

...Everywhere we meet the Ireland of the future, its lively, handsome, quick-witted children, not yet spoiled by consumer goods but whose images of the good life are increasingly shaped by U.S...

...even after they leave his home, he remains the chief Commonweal 13 March 1992: 21 influence on their lives...

...The Irish prayed with the heart like the people on the Aran Islands...

...A retired nurse in Sligo, after expressing her satisfaction that divorce is still illegal in Ireland—liberalization would discourage young couples from working out their problems—denounces the South African government's financial support of opponents to the African National Congress and indicates heartfelt sympathy for "that poor Mr...

...He is most alive in speaking of compassion and the Irish spirit of devotion...

...The traditional piety that produced a flood of vocations has resulted in many Irish priests and nuns becoming to some degree radicalized by their experience while serving in foreign missions...

...A long-time friend and native Irishman, however, arranged an itinerary that allowed us to see most of the country, rushing us north to Belfast after only a day-and-a-half in Dublin, then west to Donegal and Sligo, before proceeding to Mayo, Galway, Limerick, Cork, the Ring of Kerry and the Dingle Peninsula, and home from Shannon...

...A long-time lay activist voices the lament, familiar to U.S...

...A great deal, really, even though it may seem to bear out the familiar clichés...

...we'll shoot anyone you want...

...bombing visited on ordinary people in Iraq...

...In the evenings after we reach another B-&-B, I read John McGahern's novel, Amongst Women (Viking, $17.95, 184 pp...

...We talk to a pacifist priest, desperate to see the British out even if it means a bloodbath...

...Jack guides us through the Catholic 20: 13 March 1992 Commonweal slums, past his grammar school and the Catholic high school he attended—where Seamus Heaney had his first teaching job, and was teased by the city teen-agers because he was from the countryside...

...In his analysis the failure of both Dublin and the church to oppose the present system in the North—they do occasionally complain of individual excesses—is because a serious effort to build democracy in Ireland would force a critical overhauling of their own cozy relationship with the British government and the middle-class power structure...

...An eighty-two-year-old Benedictine who refers to himself as "guestmaster emeritus" humorously indicates his familiarity with exaggerated Roman concerns for order but admires the intellectual precision of pre-Vatican II collects...

...Only a close and long-time observer of Irish young people could offer even a probable response...

...The danger is that as they perceive the preoccupation of church leaders with "holding the line" on sexual morality, they may come to see Christianity itself as an anachronism...

...A few are making such efforts, building for a future they may never see...

...A friend tells of how she is temporarily held up at the border by contemptuous British soldiers because she made the mistake of telling them she was going to Derry instead of using the approved name, Londonderry...

...One must hope that Moran is a character from the past...

...as they rush out to create a new culture, will its men and women lose that sense of nearness...

...There is such a strong sense of local pride that one might expect a deadening provincialism, but all sorts of people showed an informed interest in international developments...

...If people are really against violence," he concludes, "they would be working night and day to build alternative, nonviolent, political means to force the British out...

...God was nearer than the door," he concludes, translating an old Gaelic phrase...

...We talk to a member of the Centre for Research and Development, founded by young people who had worked for nongovernmental organizations in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and came back to Ireland to find out if what they had learned about development education couldn't also be useful there...

...He speaks of courage out of a lifetime of meditation: "Oh, there's no shortage of physical courage in Ireland...

...The priest complacently claims that 90 percent of the people in his parish go to Mass on Sunday—the estimate we were given for cities like Dublin and Belfast is 25 percent—adding that women should be given more credit for keeping the church going...

...Like too many Irish-Americans, Sally and I were shamefully ignorant about the country...

...Clearly, Ireland's long experience of colonization induces many who are generally apolitical to sympathize instinctively with the third-world poor, whether in Central America or elsewhere...

...The question concerns all the young, not just those who emigrate: are they interiorizing a personal faith, or is their Catholicism a leftover from an increasingly outmoded rural life-style...

...We need that quality, too," he concedes...

...On singing night in a Limerick bar we hear a ballad about emigration, "It's a long way from Clare to here," with its poignant line in which the narrator confesses he's going to Mass less often every year...

...They hope to be an enabling center for poor and marginalized communities, North and South, have issued a report on the economics of West Belfast, and have hosted a Dublin conference on the similarities and differences between Ireland and third-world countries...

...we ask a man on the sidewalk for directions in Cork and he jumps into his car, parked alongside, makes an illegal U-turn, and calls out, "Follow me...

...Life goes on...

...mass media...

...We have the advantage of being shown around Belfast by friends—an American wife, her Belfast-born writer-husband, and their teen-age daughter, who have just arrived after living in Italy for several years...

...There are individuals and groups trying to prepare priests and teachers, parents and children, for the growing challenges of modernization, but a priest complains that Vatican II, despite its more liberal vocabulary, has become another trap, forcing people to conform to past formulations instead of envisioning new solutions to new situations...

...veterans of Catholic Action movements, that he and his wife seem to have passed on their values to their children but the latter find the church totally irrelevant to the living of these values...

...Those we meet fit no stereotype of the domestic drudge, but they represent the economically favored in a society in which 25 percent of the women are living below the poverty level...

...They are not quite apathetic but remain surprisingly passive, no doubt because the situation has not improved since the civil rights movement of the '60s and because their leaders offer no alternatives to the status quo...

...Hair-splitting over new language for a bill to be presented to the Dail, lowering the age limit for the purchase of condoms from eighteen to seventeen, is not apt to give them much respect for either government or religion...

...A Maynooth theologian sees little vitality emerging from below...

...Since it's all new to us, we're more nervous than we need be as we drive past armed British soldiers on entering Northern Ireland, or encounter random road blocks driving around Belfast...

...Who knows how much resentment has been built up by church teaching against contraception and the ecclesiastically influenced near-ban on abortion information...

...Mary has mixed feelings about bringing up her daughter in Belfast, but she and Jack emphasize the cultural vitality of the city, probably greater than Dublin's, in spite of—partly because of?—siege conditions...

...One quickly picks up examples: a missionary sister, knowing we are worried about driving at night, takes us out to Maynooth and back to meet academics and journalists at dinner...

...Everyone subscribes to violence: the British, the Unionists, the Irish government, both Catholics and Protestants...

...But we lack moral courage...

...Mandela...

...babwe a cappella choir, Black Umfolosi, are delighted and amazed at the tumultuous response, which, they declare, surpassed any they have received outside of Africa...

...He is not an evil man, but frightening in his need to control, his insistence on leading the family rosary even in the midst of violent family confrontations...

...Finally, Ireland remains a Catholic and patriarchal society...

...standards, Irish women are having fewer children than their mothers...

...The beauty and variety of the scenery were a revelation to us—palm trees and lunar landscapes, wilderness and carefully tended town gardens, and the sea everywhere—but better descriptions can be found in guidebooks...

...Surprisingly, considering their internationalist sympathies, most of those living in the Republic respond to another headline of violence perpetrated by either Unionists or IRA irregulars fatalistically, as if the killing is taking place thousands of miles away...

...While families are large by U.S...

...McGahern succeeds in making Moran all too credible, but the children we see on our route hardly seem cowed, the girls especially responding brightly to any invitation to humor...

...She's getting ready to go dancing that night...

...all we had were impressions based on a few of its modern writers...

...the reader cannot help but conclude that the protective devotion of his wife and daughters is largely misplaced...

...But the door is opening now in Ireland—opened by longrepressed winds of change...

...Even in the North, if population trends continue, Catholics may be a majority by 2020...

...At the Galway Arts Festival, the ZimJOSEPH CUNNEEN is co-editor of Cross Currents: Religion and Intellectual Life...

...Some who have fought the good fight for years, building ecumenical networks, creating small areas of hope in a society dominated by institutionalized oppression of the minority, have grown understandably frustrated...

...Though President Mary Robinson has no direct power, political leaders are worried about her growing popularity, and even prevented her from giving a BBC lecture on the present position of women...

...Which doesn't mean that living there doesn't take its toll...

...when we offer the positive example of an older sister who speaks perceptively of contextual theology as an alternative to traditional abstractions, he insists that there are few younger women—or men—coming along to build on her work...

...Rome prayed with the head in neat, precise formulas...

...it betrayed her "Catholic" sympathies...

...What images of Christ and the church are they given, and what do they make of them...

...It's hypocrisy to denounce IRA violence," he says...

...we meet Jack's mother, who is proud of her educated author-son...

...Is it a small note of hope that links between the generations still seem stronger than in the U.S., that the local Irish rock band drew an audience of all ages at the Galway festival, including many family groups...

...winner of The Irish Times Aer Lingus award, in which Moran, the central character, dominates his family out of pride and the need to be the center of attention...

...22: 13 March 1992 Commonweal...

...We have tea with Jack's sister, who's off with her husband and children for a weekend in the west of Ireland, across the border...

...The question is: Did we learn anything...

...Church doors have posters on famine in Central Africa, and while there is no sympathy for Saddam Hussein, we meet frequent questions about the devastating U.S...

...Organized feminist groups would be hard to find outside of Dublin, but it is symptomatic that the Galway Film Festival is devoted to "Women and Film" and that a woman is in charge of the avant-garde Druid Theater...

...a lady who ran a Limerick bed-and-breakfast and didn't have a room for us stops her car later that night and rushes across the street as we were walking back to our place—she was concerned about whether we'd found a room and wants to drive us to where we were staying...