Michael Kelly“religion is an important fact of life in the world and that Marian devotion is a central part of the faith of many believers”, writes Editor Michael Kelly
The cover of National Geographic magazine caught my eye on a newsstand at the weekend. It depicted an image of the Mother of God with the simple words “Mary the most powerful woman in the world”.
It was an intriguing headline which immediately piqued my interest and the magazine went on to describe Our Lady as “both a personal intercessor and a global sensation”. In all, 30 pages of the December issue are devoted to Mary.
The genesis of the intriguing cover story dates back to last year when an exhibition opened at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC. ‘Picturing Mary: Woman, Mother Idea’ brought together more than 70 works of art from the 14th Century to the 19th Centuries from collections as diverse as the Vatican Museums, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and the Lourve in Paris.
Remarkably, the exhibition drew the largest crowd ever for the museum, a fact that caught most commentators by surprise.
“That got us wondering,” National Geographic Editor-in-Chief Susan Goldberg writes, “what is it about Mary? She is the world’s most depicted woman, yet among the most mysterious, with more written about her in the Koran than in the Bible”.
National Geographic is not a magazine that normally pays much attention to religious themes, it has a circulation of 6.8 million copies every month and it primarily contains articles about geography, history and world culture.
The feature article on Our Lady is in no way devotional while at the same time beautifully reflecting the devotion many believers have. It is respectful in tone and theologically-literate in a way unheard of in mainstream publications in Ireland. In short, National Geographic is alerting its readers to the fact that religion is an important fact of life in the world and that Marian devotion is a central part of the faith of many believers.
In their book, God is Back, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge argue against the thesis that the world is gradually becoming less and less religious and that faith will eventually die out. In fact, they argue that the opposite is true, that there is a global revival of faith that started in the late 20th Century. The authors insist that, quite apart from whether one is religious or not, understanding religion is integral to understanding the world.
I contrast this with Ireland where the latest dose of groupthink from the commentariat is that since religion is, they argue, less-and-less important, young people should be free to opt-out of religion class in school. Now, we’re not talking about faith formation and sacramental preparation, but religious studies as a rigorous academic pursuit.
So, if it’s true that understanding and having knowledge about religion is a vital part of understanding the world, then what is being argued is that it is healthy and desirable for Irish young people to leave school ignorant of a major force in the lives of billions of people. Research indicates that of the 6.9 billion people in the world, 5.8 billion of them are religiously-affiliated, that’s 84% of the world’s population who identify with a religious belief.
The bizarre thing about encouraging teenagers to be entirely ignorant of the importance of religion in the world is that the same commentators would immediately see the farcical nature of encouraging children to opt-out of mathematics or science.
To what extent, I wonder, is it motivated by a reactionary rejection of Catholicism and an attempt to silence the Catholic voice in the public square?
Acknowledgement
Emma O’Kelly, RTÉ’s education correspondent interviewed Minister for Education Jan O’Sullivan on Morning Ireland on Monday. It was fascinating. The RTÉ correspondent was revealing in her questioning asking the minister: “What about people who are fed up with the dominance of the Catholic Church in education here and would’ve hoped that Labour in government would have stood up to the Church?” At no point was there ever an acknowledgement that this has nothing to do with Church dominance? In fact, for many years religious studies was not an exam subject in the Republic when the influence of the Catholic Church was considerably more dominant than now while North of the border, where the Catholic Church was hardly in a position to exert great influence, it was an exam subject. This fact is either unknown or ignored.
Paradoxically, while those advocating the religious opt-out feel they’re getting a chance to kick Catholicism or undermine some real or perceived Church influence, they are, in fact, significantly undermining the ability of future generations to understand an extremely complex world.
The spread of the so-called Islamic State and the Islamist ideology as well as the fact that Ireland is becoming more religiously-diverse (most immigrants who come to Ireland identify as religious) means that what we need is greater understanding of religion, not less.