Breda O'Brien
The View
The referendum defeat poses significant questions, not just for the pro-life movement, but for the Church. While abortion is not just a Catholic issue and some of the most active retain campaigners were atheists and agnostics, belief in the sanctity of life is a core value for Catholicism.
Although I am completely sure that I would continue to believe that abortion is always a really bad choice for women even if I lost my Faith, I am increasingly glad that I belong to a Church that upholds the right to life of everyone.
But it is a message that seems to be lost on many of my fellow Catholics. People keep telling me anecdotes about ‘Yes’ voters, including about the 82-year-old daily-Mass-attending father of a priest.
Bishop Kevin Doran was asked a direct question on RTÉ Radio about Catholics who voted ‘Yes’ and gave a nuanced and careful answer that seemed to bring the roof in on top of him. He suggested that voting ‘Yes’ in the knowledge that it would facilitate abortions might cause someone to consider going to Confession.
Even his fellow priests lined up to condemn him for allegedly making a bad situation worse. How, exactly, does upholding Catholic teaching make things worse? Perhaps if it had been upheld a little better in the last ten years we would not have had the spectacle of allegedly committed Catholics voting for abortion?
Painful
Being forced to face the truth is vital, no matter how painful it is. There is a hard core of about a third of voters who resisted all the manipulation, all the strategic avoidance of the word abortion, all the focus on tragic cases, and who still voted ‘No’.
The bravest people in Ireland are the 13% of young people aged 18 to 24 who voted ‘No’ because the level of propaganda and intimidation was shocking.
We need to find every one of those young people and make sure that they are linked in with peers because it is on this small rock that we must begin to build.
We have churches full of Catholics who no longer believe that it is right to defend the voiceless, helpless, unborn child and who believe that choice is the best answer we can give as a culture to the often-tragic dilemmas people face in pregnancy.
We have to face the fact that many of those people are CINOs – Catholics in name only. They may believe in God, but they share the cultural assumption that no-one should have to shoulder an unchosen burden, a message which is the antithesis of what Jesus told us.
He told us to bear each other’s burdens, but also to take up our cross daily and to follow him.
We know what the next moves are: the vulgar, crass celebrations in Dublin Castle were only beginning when people began to tweet about ‘coming for the Catholic schools’.
But take a secondary school where the majority of the staff, the parents, and the students who were voting for the first time, all voted for abortion.
In what sense is that a Catholic school?
The State has resisted taking over primary schools, not out of any great love for religious freedom, but because it cannot afford to. The vast majority of Catholic schools are heavily subsidised by their parishes and their boards are unpaid, not even receiving minimum expenses.
But there may be a case for a bargain basement deal with the State leading to a largescale divestment of Catholic schools, allowing parishes and dioceses to set up and maintain a small number of truly Catholic schools.
That is, if we are allowed even that. I was told of a very senior former civil servant, not given to hyperbole, who mused aloud recently about a return to Cromwellian levels of persecution.
But we have not retreated “to hell or to Connaught”, unless we happen to live in that lovely province or holiday there. Instead, we have come together in large and small groups and begun to plan for the future.
Formation
Real religious formation for young people must be a priority. We have to stop the sham of first Holy Communions that are merely secular rites of passages with fancy clothes and a nice backdrop. Let children be prepared for the Sacrament in the parish and quietly receive for the first time in a way that focuses on the Sacrament, not the haul of cash afterwards.
Similarly, we need to stop making it easy to be a Catholic. Let us raise the bar to the level of being willing to make real sacrifices for Faith. Who knows? Paradoxically, it might make Catholicism more attractive.