In the first week of August, as dark clouds loomed for the Roman Catholic church in Ireland, Cardinal Sean Brady, Archbishop of Armagh and heir to Saint Patrick, made an important intervention: he wrote to senior figures of the Gaelic Athletic Association in Armagh, Louth, Derry and Tyrone demanding that Gaelic football matches and training should not clash with weekend mass.
It’s easy to mock, and right to do so. The fact that the head of a church increasingly seen as at odds with the interests of the people of the island felt that he could make such a demand of the one major institution of the nation that has emerged from the rolling catastrophes of the past five years with its integrity intact, even enhanced, reveals a staggering lack of humility. One would be tempted to add that the church has displayed a lack of self-awareness, but for the fact its self-awareness was all too evident in protecting its reputation by covering up sexual abuse cases as recently as five years ago, as evidenced by the Cloyne report which has precipitated this latest crisis.
And this really is a crisis – the biggest church-state clash since the mother and child scheme of the 1950s. That too, was an issue of child protection, when the government proposed free healthcare for children under 16. The church (and the wealthy medical establishment) were aghast at the idea of this “intrusion” on the family. (Article 41 of the Irish constitution recognises the nuclear family as “the natural primary and fundamental unit group of Society, and as a moral institution possessing inalienable and imprescriptible rights, antecedent and superior to all positive law.”) Meanwhile the Roman Catholic church, while never established as a state religion, was acknowledged as having a “special position as the guardian of the Faith professed by the great majority of the citizens” (although this clause was removed in 1972).
As the row deepened, the then Archbishop of Dublin John Charles McQuaid made it clear to politicians in the coalition government that no challenge to the church would be tolerated, leaving then Taoiseach John A Costelloe of Fine Gael to announce in a 1951 Dail debate:
“I am an Irishman second, I am a Catholic first, and I accept without qualification in all respects the teaching of the hierarchy and the church to which I belong.”
Flash forward 60 years, and to another Fine Gael Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, telling the Dail: “This is not Rome. This is the Republic of Ireland 2011. A Republic of laws, of rights and responsibilities, of proper civic order; where the delinquency and arrogance of a particular version of a particular kind of ‘morality’ will no longer be tolerated or ignored.”
Kenny went on to demand that the church be penitent, a reversal few could have imagined.
Does this mean the end of Catholic Ireland? No. People will still believe in heaven and hell, the Holy Trinity and the immaculate conception in some form or other. What it may mean, though, is the final recognition of morality as a concern for the profane rather than the sacred. The people of Ireland now not only resent being told what to do by priests, they may actively feel that the clergy do not even actually know what morality is. Morality from now on will be discussed, not decreed. After the upheavals in the party political system in this year’s election, this is another major step in the development of a true republic.
