Greg Daly
Archbishop Diarmuid Martin Comments by Archbishop Diarmuid Martin at a conference in Germany are helpful neither to Irish Catholics nor to relations between Church and State in Ireland, a leading academic has said.
Describing as “distorted” the archbishop’s assessment of the origins of the distinctly Catholic character of independent Ireland and the reluctance within the Church to hand over Church-owned schools to the state, Prof. William Reville identified the “unhealthy entanglement” of Church and State in 20th-Century Ireland as “a two-way interaction in which the State was equally as complicit as the Church”.
Prof. Reville, who is Emeritus Professor of Biochemistry in University College Cork and a frequent contributor to The Irish Catholic, wrote in The Irish Times that he had been “dismayed” by Dr Martin’s July 8 comments in Würzburg.
Although he acknowledged the sincerity of the archbishops’s views, he contested the claim that “Catholic sectarianism frustrated the realisation of the new Ireland envisaged by the 1916 Proclamation”.
Difficulties
Maintaining that Irish Catholics do not want Church leaders to deny either current and historical difficulties in Church-State relations or abuses within the Church in the past, Prof. Reville called for bishops such as Dr Martin to emphasise also the good done by the Irish Church and the reality that both Church and State in 20th-Century Ireland were expressions of Irish society.
“Irish Catholics want their leaders to provide wise, fair and courageous leadership, calling for public acknowledgement of the good done by the Irish church and for public acceptance that the way Irish Church-State relations developed over the 20th Century was an organic interaction between the two,” he wrote, adding that this simply reflected the nature of Irish society as a whole.
Backdrop
Against a backdrop of the ongoing controversy over the supposed ‘baptism barrier’, which has been shown to be a minor issue compared to a lack of places in oversubscribed schools, Prof. Reville said: “Irish Catholics also want their leaders, when negotiating with the State about schools, to lobby for overall provision of increased numbers of school places and to take due account of the deep affection and loyalty that so many members of the laity feel for their Catholic schools.”