Courtney McGrailDear Editor, It seems, to judge by your letters page and comment online in recent months, that there is a depressing determination among otherwise informed and faithful Catholics to turn their backs on the modern world.
Perhaps the three most dramatic and obvious illustrations of this have been Catholic support for the Brexit vote in Britain, white Catholic support for Donald Trump in the US, and what is becoming a reflexive kneejerk opposition to Pope Francis among a vociferous Catholic fringe who hold up Pope Emeritus Benedict as a rallying point for what day by day looks more and more like outright dissent.
That the Brexit vote has its cheerleaders among some Irish Catholics is hardly surprising, given how some Catholics have opposed the European project from the beginning, though it seems bizarre to read them claiming nowadays, like their British peers, that the project was only ever intended as an economic enterprise.
Even as early as 1961, Seán Lemass told the Fianna Fáil ardfheis that membership of the Common Market would require embracing the political aims of the project, with “political confederation in some form” being “a natural and logical development of economic integration”.
“Henceforth,” the then Taoiseach said, “ our national aims must conform to the emergence, in a political as well as in an economic sense, of a union of Western Economic States, not as a vague prospect of the distant future but as a living reality of our own times.”
Such a union, he knew, would have its roots in Catholic social teaching beloved by the founders of the European project. It seems astounding now, then, that Catholics should seek to spurn that project when our European brethren feel threatened by the rise of Russia, while our Christian and Muslim cousins in the Middle East most need our combined help.
Yours etc.,
Emily Fitzgerald
Lucan, Co. Dublin.