Michael KellyTraditional Irish Catholicism, for all of its positive qualities, was infused with an arrogance that is now scarcely believable.
The term “an Irish solution to an Irish problem,” attributed to the late Taoiseach Charles Haughey, is usually greeted with howls of derision. In many cases, unfairly so. But, in some cases, particularly in the Church, the parochial and provincial mind-set that sees the Church in Ireland as unique among the countries of the world, the ‘Irish solution to an Irish problem’ phenomenon has led to a virtual paralysis.
Traditional Irish Catholicism, for all of its positive qualities, was infused with an arrogance that is now scarcely believable. A fusion of pride and self-satisfaction at our forefathers’ adherence to the faith “in spite of dungeon, fire and sword” led to complacency.
There was often a smugness in holding on to the ‘one true faith’ that made theology and deeper study and reflection on the faith unnecessary luxuries.
The story is told about a British visitor to Ireland in the 1950s. He was in the midlands and surveying from a distance a wonderful castle still owned by a Protestant Anglo-Irish family. It begins to rain and he notices an elderly woman beckoning him to come into a ramshackle cottage to shelter. The hospitable woman offers him tea and a place by the fire to dry himself. They get to talking about history, the Famine and how her family were driven from their land. “And the castle,” the English visitor asks, “aren’t you bitter that they live in luxury up there?”
“Sure, what good it is to them,” the old lady says with glee, “when they don’t have the true faith?”
At one level, it’s a charming anecdote, at another level, it speaks of inward-looking smugness.
And many people in the Church in Ireland are still disappointingly inward-looking and reluctant to countenance that what works in other countries to renew and grow the Church might work in Ireland too.
A Polish priest told me recently about his experience working in an Irish diocese. He is treated by his bishop and fellow (Irish) priests as an ‘extra pair of hands’.
Any ideas he has, any initiatives he proposes are casually dismissed without discussion with an arrogant wave of the hand and either “we’ve never done it that way” or “that might work in Poland, but it won’t work here”.
But why not? Why wouldn’t what works in another country work in Ireland?
Vocations
Take the vexed issue of vocations, for example. Some cynical clerical pundits delight in the stubbornly low numbers of men entering seminary in Ireland. It suits their ecclesiology, you see. It’s not in their interest to promote vocations to the priesthood and religious life: if the numbers entering seminary in Ireland actually started to increase, it would jettison decades of conventional wisdom that the Church must dramatically change the theology of priesthood to make a vocation more attractive.
When one points to places like England and Wales – where almost 60 men entered seminary this year, as opposed to the 14 in Ireland for a broadly similar sized Catholic population – one is met with a mixture of bewilderment and disappointment by these same clerical pundits. Meetings organised about vocations focus solely on the same issues like relaxing the rules on mandatory celibacy rather than looking outside of the groupthink for a moment to see what is working elsewhere.
Archbishop Eamon Martin has pledged to lead a ‘humble renewal’ of the Church in Ireland. We would all do well to start looking at the Church outside of Ireland and having the humility to admit that what is promoting growth and vitality elsewhere just might work to promote growth and vitality here.