Replacing a community of believers with one of citizens

Watching Orangemen claim their territory with marches and ritual displays, southern Catholics affect a kind of superior puzzlement. These strange demonstrations, half-way between a carnival and an invasion, seem absurdly childish. Just imagine - grown men dressing up in their best suits and parading around with bands and colours, affecting at the same time a triumphal swagger and a pious expression of religious righteousness.

Except that, now and again, my mind goes back to childhood and the annual Corpus Christi processions. I remember the triumphal procession around the parish with the Blessed Sacrament beneath an ornate golden canopy. The local troop of the FCA marching with their rifles on their shoulders. Garda out in their sprucest uniforms. Men in their Sunday suits, women in their best finery, kneeling on the hot concrete in the middle of the road while the parish priest gave out the Rosary.

One year, I walked at the front of the procession in my altar boy's outfit, strewing rose petals from a wicker basket on the rough roads of Crumlin. Another, I carried the pole that held up one of the four corners of the canopy that shielded the monstrance in which the sacred bread was displayed to the faithful. I loved the sense of power, the feeling of being part of a such a supremely confident claim on the ownership of the place we inhabited. When I see the strut of the Orangemen, I know how they feel.

I was reminded of that feeling recently, not just by the Orange marches, but also by something completely different, a statement by Father Andrew Farrell, parish priest of Trim, Co Meath. Father Farrell decided recently to cut his church's contribution to the local primary schools - the so-called capitation fee which the local community, and hitherto effectively the local parish, pays towards their upkeep - from £8.50 to £7. This may seem to be no more than a minor local issue. But Ireland is still small enough for such everyday events to have, from time to time, a greater national resonance. In explaining the move, the priest pointed that, in the past, the parish and the local community very much coincided. The local community was the parish where almost everybody went to Mass and contributed to the support of the parish. But this is, he said, no longer the case. Towns across Ireland are no longer to be seen as parishes. They are population centres that contain parishes of the faithful within them. What made sense when the parish and the community were one is now obsolete.

This is, in its way, a shift as fundamental as any we have experienced in the upheavals of contemporary Ireland. It goes to the heart of something very basic: the sense of place, the way we imagine, not this or that community, but the very notion of community itself.

For as long as anyone can remember, the idea of the parish has been central to the way most Irish people understood themselves. The parish tied civic and social life together with religious faith and communal identity.

It expressed in a way that other notions of place - townland, housing estate, political constituency, county, city - could not, the notion that a place was more than just an arbitrary physical division of space. It gave to our sense of place a ritual dimension.

WHAT made the Corpus Christi parades of my childhood possible was that notion of the parish. The procession marked out the place, claimed the territory, on the basis of an absolute assumption that, in Father Farrell's words, the local community and the parish coincided. That assumption, almost certainly, was incorrect.

There were, in every area, people who wanted to be part of the community but not part of the parish. But the assumption was so powerful that this kind of distinction was almost impossible to make. The cost of being outside the parish was to be placed outside the community, and few were brave enough to risk that fate.

I remember, too, that my own knowledge of the place I grew up in was utterly bound up with the church. I learned my way around the warren of similar roads that made up the corporation estate where I grew up by collecting the Easter and Christmas dues for the clergy.

The priest would pile us into the back of his car, drive to the end of a road and wait for us while we went from house to house demanding the little envelopes that we had distributed the previous week and that now bore the weight at least of a few large coins. My mental map of the community I belonged to was largely formed by this parochial exercise.

This powerful connection between faith and place, community and parish was certainly, in many respects, oppressive. It was saturated with an arrogance that could not conceive of contradiction. It carried with it the implication that the unbeliever was not just spiritually but also socially beyond the pale.

It encouraged us to think of Ireland as one great parish in which the political community and the community of the faithful were one and the same, and the idea of a shared public realm in which people could meet as citizens rather than as co-religionists was hard to sustain.

In that sense, Father Farrell's acknowledgement that the community and the parish are no longer the same thing is a sign of maturity. We can see, in the animosity that continues to surround contested Orange marches, the consequences of trying to insist on claiming a religious meaning for a public space that is no longer inhabited by people who share that meaning.

But there is a need, too, for something to replace the sense of belonging that was for so long bound up in the idea of the parish. Religious parishes, of course, will continue to exist, and if and when Catholicism begins to democratise itself, they may even acquire a renewed vigour. But the broader meaning of the parish, the feeling that a place has more than just a physical existence, is no longer possible in the kind of pluralistic society that is emerging. The danger is that since so much of the Irish sense of community is bound up with that notion, it, too, will wither.

One way to deal with the end of the old notion of the parish is to retreat into narrow individualism. Both at the local level and in the bigger parish of the State, we can replace an excessively insistent sense of belonging, an insistence that everyone must conform to a communal identity handed down from the top, with the careless rapture of not giving a hoot for anyone else. Or we can, somehow, begin to articulate a set of values that does justice to social obligations as well to individual rights, and that replaces the community of true believers with a community of equal citizens.