Dublin now needs an archbishop who is not afraid to be counter-cultural

Church leaders should be realistic without constantly going for a downbeat assessment of the future of Faith, writes David Quinn

In his latest thoughts on the future of the Catholic Church in Ireland, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin notes that ‘no religion’ is the second most ticked box in the religion section of the national census. This, he says, is “the fruit of choice”. Is it though, or are people being conventional about the matter, in the same way most of us have always been conventional?

Archbishop Martin made his comment in a homily to mark the feast day of Laurence O’Toole, the patron saint of Dublin”

One of the complaints about religious practice is that so much of it is done out of habit. In the past, we are told, we went to Mass because everyone else was doing the same. This implies we were not really doing so out of choice, and there is an element of truth to that.

Human beings

But human beings are permanently creatures of habit. We follow conventions constantly. It is how our brains are wired. We are social creatures, adapted to living in society. Therefore, it is too simplistic to say people are ticking the ‘no religion’ box out of choice. (For the record, 9.8% of people did so in the 2016 census).

It would also be far too simplistic for anyone to suggest that older people still go to Mass out of convention, but younger people are not doing so out of choice. Young people are easily as prone to copying their peers as older people, and probably more so. The great majority of 20-year-olds don’t go to Mass, so it takes a fairly brave 20-year-old to stand out from the crowd by doing so.

Archbishop Martin made his comment in a homily to mark the feast day of Laurence O’Toole, the patron saint of Dublin.

It was characteristically downbeat. He rarely praises the Church of the present or the past. If he surveys the long history of the Church to find examples of where it made a positive difference to social attitudes and the lives of ordinary people, there is little evidence of it.

Once again he speaks of the “harsh, authoritarian Irish Church” of the past, as though that is all there was to it, as though countless Catholics, lay and religious, did not also live lives of devoted service to others, carrying out all the corporal and spiritual works of mercy on a daily basis.

It is not balanced to focus only or mainly on the crimes and misleads. The good that people do should not be interred with the bones.

We should, in fact, learn to marvel again at the fact that the Catholic Church produced vast religious orders run by women that founded enormous international networks of schools, hospitals and other charitable outreaches that to this day transform for the better the lives of tens of millions of people every single day.

Welfare state

It would be good as well to reflect on the fact that this huge charitable outreach is what eventually led to the welfare state, which we now take for granted, and which often grew out of what the Churches had previously founded.

To focus so disproportionately on the negative side of the ledger would be like looking at the history of any given country, Britain or France say, and looking only at their colonial pasts, and nothing else. It would produce an entirely distorted and demoralising view.

Would it behove, for example, a leader of Fianna Fáil to be consistently downbeat about his own party, and to be overemphasising its undoubted failings and current decline?

At the end of his homily, Archbishop Martin says: “The hearts of the indifferent and of those who feel disillusioned by their experience of the Church will only be reached by a Church marked by holiness, care for the poor and by engagement in bringing an authentic Christian contribution to the common search for goodness and truth.”

This is true, but needs to be fleshed out. It should acknowledge, for example, that the Church has always done a tremendous amount to care for the poor. In fact, in the Western world at any rate, the Church practically invented the practice of caring for the poor. What pagan religions or philosophies back in the days of the Roman Empire produced the great charitable outreaches of the Church? The answer is none.

Also, what is “an authentic Christian contribution to the common search for goodness and truth”? What does it consist of? Indeed, those very terms “goodness and truth” need to be looked at. What can they mean in a relativistic age where there is my ‘truth’ and your ‘truth’? Does morality have any objective content at all?

One aspect of the Christian contribution to this “common search for goodness and truth” must be a willingness to scrutinise the intensely individualistic, relativistic morality that is so prevalent today and is ruining so many lives.

Scrutiny

This is a form of scrutiny the Archbishop of Dublin has always seemed unwilling to undertake. For example, he has been almost completely silent on abortion since the referendum was passed more than two years ago, even when it was revealed that 6,666 abortions took place here last year.

He has said nothing I’m aware of about moves to legalise assisted suicide.

He says nothing about growing family breakdown or the number of children growing up without the benefit of a good father. He is silent on the havoc the sex revolution has wreaked in the lives of countless people.

These don’t even have to be his top issues. Any given Christian might prefer to make poverty, or the environment their big issues. But as the leader of the country’s biggest diocese, his silence on the above matters is deafening.

Pope Francis is not silent about them. He frequently condemns abortion, he speaks out against assisted suicide. We know he does not devote as much attention to these issues as his two immediate predecessors, but he does not ignore them either. By no means.

We don’t yet know who the next Archbishop of Dublin will be. But whoever it is, he needs to be better at speaking positively about the Church and its history, without downplaying the negative aspects obviously, and in respect of the currently prevailing individualistic morality, he must be more willing to be counter-cultural, even if that invites inevitable criticism.