Courtney McGrailWhat faith has to offer society is much more important than the challenges being experienced by Catholicism, writes Francis Campbell
Francis Campbell
As we continue to commemorate the centenary of the Easter Rising, which kicked off the push for Irish independence, it is right to ask what form of republic is emerging in Ireland and what this will mean for faith.
This will broadly determine how the Republic relates to religion – Catholicism in particular as both the largest denomination in the country, but also because of the key role played by Catholicism in the push for Irish independence and nationalism.
Up until recently, the Irish model of a republic did not robustly separate religion from the State as it had a fully integrated model of co-operation with churches operating schools and hospitals. When Ireland gained independence in 1921, the State developed on the back of the Catholic Church.
The Church had a utility for the State. The scene has changed significantly since 1921 or 1937. Few would willingly credit the Church with helping the State to get on its feet, and a generation has grown up exposed to the Church’s mishandling of the sex-abuse scandals. While Irish society shows significant signs of de-Catholicising, it is not yet clear whether it is secularising at the same pace.
Separation
So now that the State does not have the same utility for the Church, is there a growing pressure for stricter separation? What form will that separation take or what model will be applied? These are crucial questions, for how Ireland handles religion in these next decades will be key to how it develops as a society.
Will it see religion as having a positive contribution to make to the growth of the society as in the model of the American republic? Or will it be seen as a sort of pre-modern embarrassment, a view echoed by some found in the French republican tradition?
Irish society in the last century has come from a rather socially conservative stable only to swing very rapidly to quite a socially liberal space in the 21st Century. Perhaps the absence of a thinking Catholicism in Ireland in the 20th Century contributed to an over-reliance on a rather more dogmatic approach to faith. 20th-Century Ireland could certainly not have been described as pluralist. Dissent and difference were not valued and the society was quite conformist.
But does today’s Ireland value dissent and difference and a challenge to social conformity? Could the same mentality of the 20th Century still be around in the 21st Century – an unthinking and uniform dogmatism, but this time with very different outcomes? If that is still a risk then it poses a challenge to the liberal State.
In both periods the media and political system do not seem to have the spectrum of plurality of perspectives that are found in wider society. For example during the recent referendum on same-sex marriage, it was reported that only three TDs out of a total of 166 were against same-sex marriage. Yet 38 per cent of voters opted against same-sex marriage.
If the referendum results were reflected in the make-up of the Irish parliament at large then 63 TDs would have opposed the motion. Equally in the media, it is difficult to find the newspapers and publications in Ireland that represent a less liberal stance.
In this context, what role can or should religion play? Much depends on the views of the government and that will come down to how the state sees itself with regard to broader society.
If it adopts a pluralist approach then faiths can engage and help to keep the state anchored and liberal. However, if the State sees itself as going down a more absolutist state model to the detriment of society then it is unlikely that faith groups will be able to engage as freely as they might like.
That would be a loss to society because of what it would signify, because society would lose some of its most core and basic freedoms at the expense of an ever encroaching state. Ultimately freedom would be impinged, societal and personal.
A ‘state pays so state rules’ approach could lead to difficulties for Church bodies providing a public good and engaging in society. Taken to an extreme it could lead to totalitarianism and upset the inherent equilibrium in society, and on which democratic states rest as it would reduce or even remove difference and the right to be different.
Purpose
The purpose of the state is to provide the opportunity for a good life for its citizens, not to define such a life for all citizens, or extract resources from those citizens without representations and adequate checks and balances, nor is the purpose of the state to impose uniform beliefs on a population.
While the state can impose reasonable restrictions on the use of public funds, it shouldn’t use the threat of deprivation of public funds either as a matter of outright strangulation of unfashionable beliefs and groups, or to favour unfairly some parts of the plurality over others.
That would destroy over time associations and communities that do not hold the state line in every way.
The state should encourage what de Tocqueville called the mediating associations between people and the state that carve out room for a good and virtuous life.
The risk, as highlighted by Alasdair MacIntyre, is that the modern secular state sees itself in competition with such communities and associations, and as its resources grow, it will seek to wipe them out. Ultimately, unless we are very careful, secular states with absolutist tendencies can destroy difference and in turn democracy, which requires difference to function and renew.
But also there are risks for faiths. They too must remain in the societal space. In the case of Ireland that would mean that Catholicism in the Irish tradition will have to become more thinking, articulate and engaged, and more accustomed to being a minority faith than one supported by an unofficial quasi establishment.
Faith groups in democracies must contribute beyond their own self or community interest which cannot be too narrowly drawn. Faith with a right to occupy a social space must commit to protect and promote the social space of others, and of difference. Threats to that societal space must be tackled collectively, but not by eroding the space for difference in society, but ensuring its distinctiveness within our overall societal context.
So how does faith engage the world around us? We must give an example and take on the arguments posed to us with solid evidence, intellectual rigour and in the example of Pope Francis with a humility, but not weakness.
That means we must retain conviction about the offer Catholicism can make to wider society whether through education or other forms of outreach and apostolate. It must be done with conviction and not fear.
We must avoid the temptations to be complacent about the future of our societal endeavours or smug about our historic achievements. We must not retreat when we get a robust challenge. Pope Francis said “do not withdraw from the world but be active”.
For faiths to operate effectively in the world and in respective societies they must take a long hard look at their environment and know what it is and not just what it was. For Catholicism to flourish in that world it must take on the arguments of the day and not retreat from them and it must not shy away from offering something radically distinctive.
To succeed in re-embedding Catholicism in the public square we must set the argument in its widest context and to show that the engagement touches the very notion of freedom within our society.
Within that context Catholicism should always make a distinctive offering to the society through a variety of agencies.
Co-operation
Of course such a model of co-operation between the Church and State will prove challenging along the way. Complexity usually is.
But engagement and participation is always preferable to isolation and marginalisation both for State and Church, provided one does not lose independence or distinctiveness to the other.
The pluralist context in these islands has given us a wonderful system where faiths can engage and exercise considerable freedom. It is a system that evolved and depends on a delicate equilibrium which must be promoted, explained, and if need be defended from time to time in the political and public arena.
Such a system is not without its tensions and challenges, but it remains a fine example of a contract within a pluralist society between state and faith which works to the benefit of both, but most of all to citizens.
It has the potential to answer a much-needed response to our contemporary culture as we struggle to define and build cohesive communities.
It has worked for previous generations and it can work for ours too.
People of faith must always believe that the opportunities to serve the greater good and society are much stronger than the challenges and that even the challenges will help us to remain agile, and to refresh our offer and reacquaint ourselves with our own intellectual tradition of why things are as they are.
If we do that then everything is to play for, and we can reinvigorate our contribution to wider society by ensuring a thriving and vibrant engagement which will protect pluralism and wider freedoms in society which is in all our interests, whether we are religious or not.