David Quinn
Bishop Dermot Farrell Dublin’s new shepherd must continue to acknowledge the negative side of the Church’s recent legacy, while reminding us of the great good the Church has done and still does, writes David Quinn
Ireland is one of the most anti-Catholic countries in the Western world.
The often authoritarian behaviour of the Church in the past, in addition to the scandals and the legacy of institutional abuse have made Ireland a cold house for Catholics – at least for those who actually follow Church teaching.
There are now many people in Ireland who see the Church only in a negative light and priests and religious are regularly demonised, in particular, it would seem, nuns.
HerStory project
On St Brigid’s Day, as part of the feminist HerStory project, an image was projected on to the wall of Sean Ross Abbey in Co. Tipperary of a young sister sweeping the skeletal bodies of babies under the rug. Sean Ross Abbey was one of the country’s mother and baby homes and many infants died therein.
The image invited us to think the nuns had deliberately killed these babies and then hidden the bodies, even though death certificates exist explaining the causes of death, which was often diphtheria.
The fact that such an image could be shown, at taxpayers’ expense, and with no public backlash, shows the extent to which nuns have been demonised and how the good that countless religious sisters have performed, and still perform, is forgotten.
Reducing the Church simply to its crime and misdeeds in this way is anti-Catholic for the same reason it would be anti-British to reduce British history to its crime and misdeeds.
This is by way of describing the atmosphere that any bishop must now operate in, including the newly-installed archbishop of Dublin, Dermot Farrell.
One way to do so is by telling the stories of individual Catholic heroes, past and present”
He will face many challenges, and one of them is continuing to acknowledge the negative side of the Church’s recent legacy in Ireland, while also reminding us of the great good the Church has done, and still does.
In fact, Church leaders regularly express sorrow and regret for the terrible things that happened at the hands of some in the Church. It is now expected. It is one of the first things any new bishop must do, and continue to do, and it must be done.
But it is absolutely crucial that the positive side of our story is also told. That means reminding ourselves of what that looks like and learning to tell it well. This is where we look to our leaders because if they do not show us how to tell our story, then who will?
One way to do so is by telling the stories of individual Catholic heroes, past and present. For example, we learnt again from the recent mother and baby homes report of the deeply Christian approach that Frank Duff, founder of the Legion of Mary, adopted towards unmarried mother and their children.
Legion volunteers
He, along with Legion volunteers, endeavoured to keep unmarried mothers and their children together in the Regina Coeli hostel. No-one else was doing this for a very long time. Anyone was free to do so, including the anti-clerics of the time, the Noel Browne-left, for example.
There must be Legion volunteers, now in their old age, who worked with these women and children. Archbishop Farrell should try and find them, and give them their due credit.
Up and down the country, including in Dublin archdiocese, there is an army of Catholics who continue to do great good work, even now, during this pandemic.
Who are the chaplains still going into the hospitals? St Vincent de Paul Society volunteers continue their work. In my parish, the local branch was left a bequest and used it to buy laptop computers for students having to do classes and projects at home and wouldn’t be able to do so without a computer.
Crosscare, like the ‘Vinnies’ carries on doing which it does best; meeting the needs of the poor.
A couple of years ago, I contacted a nun with a view to her giving a talk on a new book she had written. She couldn’t do it, she told me, because she and a group of (officially) retired Irish nuns were off to South Sudan, one of the remotest and dangerous places on the planet, to teach the next generation of teachers and nurses there. Most of us are not fit to untie the sandals of women like that.
Actress and producer, Ruth Hayes, has just produced a programme about Nano Nagle, who founded the Presentation Sisters 200 years ago and whose legacy lasts to this day”
Around the world to this day, the Catholic Church runs more than 5,000 hospitals and 16,000 health clinics, mainly in the developing world. It operates tens of thousands of schools educating tens of millions of pupils who might otherwise receive no education at all. The Catholic Church is a leading educator of girls where the education of girls can still be frowned on.
In Nigeria, the terrorist organisation, Boko Haram, targeted school-girls for exactly this reason. Irish nuns founded many of the first schools for girls in that country.
Actress and producer, Ruth Hayes, has just produced a programme about Nano Nagle, who founded the Presentation Sisters 200 years ago and whose legacy lasts to this day. The programme, a podcast, is called ‘Finding Nano – The life and legacy of Nano Nagle’.
Perhaps the HerStory project might like to project an image of Nano Nagle on to the wall of a major building sometime? She is one of the most important Irish women in history, as were the founders of other Irish female congregations, women who proved, long before the rise of modern feminism, that women could found and run giant multi-national organisations, in this case teaching and nursing orders.
Christian motivation
There is no excuse for neglecting their stories, but if they won’t be told by society in general, and if the State has no interest in them, then we must tell those stories ourselves and explain the deep, Christian motivation behind them.
This, I think, is one of the many tasks awaiting the new archbishop of Dublin; to remind us of the heroic stories of countless Catholics, including those no-one has yet heard of, and act as counter-balance to the present widespread anti-Catholicism.