Charging naked into the Ganges, the Hindu holy men looked like geriatric hippies on speed. Every TV channel showed them. The Greatest Show on Earth, Channel 4 called it. If applying the Barnum & Bailey circus slogan to a religious festival doesn't offend you, Kumbh Mela probably is the greatest show on Earth. All that nudity, energy and hair - great, grey, guru-ish swirls of hair - give Hinduism elemental, wild and mystical qualities. The charge is a spectacle of shameless audacity. It looks demented and perhaps it is. But it sure has gusto.
Contemporary Irish Catholicism (even in those suburbs that sprouted because of wild and mystical planning permission rituals) seems tame and anaemic in comparison with the gusto by the Ganges. That's not to sentimentalise Hinduism with its Brahmins and caste system. Catholicism, whatever its faults, is not that atavistic. But what used to be a thunderous, hell-invoking, fire and brimstone religion appears increasingly feeble and tepid. It's not as though it has become less authoritarian or Anglican effet e. It's just that materialism and scandals have sapped much of its vigour.
No surprise then that there has been a muted public reaction to the news that the Archbishop of Dublin, Desmond Connell, is to become a Cardinal. Despite the fact that Dr Connell has been a controversial figure in an era of intense feelings about the Irish Church, the public is mostly indifferent. Only at the margins is there genuine celebration or genuine hostility because, truth is, the hierarchy has lost centrality in Irish public life. Yesteryear's attitudes of fear, respect, deference, reverence even occasional loathing towards it, have been largely replaced by apathy.
Indeed, media hype about "the red hat coming to Dublin", as though a publicly coveted trophy had been contested and won, sounds overblown and anachronistic. Too few people feel sufficiently strongly for such a Sky Sports tone to be justified. Fair enough, media pundits have properly focused on the significance of the appointment for ecumenism and politics - some testy spats too - but the public is scarcely interested. And it's not merely because the decline of Catholic power has been accelerated by the scandals revealed in the 1990s. Even before Bishop Casey's disgrace began the Church's decade of disaster, that power was waning.
The break-up of community - through television, relative affluence and the consequent broadening of the contexts in which people saw their lives - made this inevitable. The one kind of a society that a Church can't adapt to is no society at all. Thatcherite "no-such-thing-as-society" economics have severely weakened traditional ties and fragmented communities. No such thing as a free lunch, says the market and the community-dependent Church has paid a substantial part of the bill. After all, a religion - its theology aside - is also a society in one of its aspects.
If you were to pinpoint a single subject which began Church decline - well before scandals greatly accelerated it - that subject would have to be birth control. It's one thing for sex to become more interesting than God to teenagers (God, if you believe in Him, has made this unavoidable). But it was bizarre that sex should have become so consuming of Catholic teaching. Whether or not Freud overstated its role as the motor of human motivation (who can know?) sex obviously matters hugely. Any institution which proffers answers to questions of ultimate meaning and moral value must have things to say about sex.
But so much of what was said seemed not only to fetishise the subject above all others - which was ironic in itself - but it sounded bitter. . . desperately bitter. At one time it might reasonably have been argued that it was precisely this obsession with sex which gave Catholicism mystical gusto. Clearly, Church teaching on the subject was not namby-pamby. Yet nobody ever explained why birth control should have become a subject of such consuming theological interest. You could argue that it was, well, potentially, a matter of life but it certainly wasn't (with the exception of abortifacients) a matter of life and death. Why so much fuss?
At 14, I saw the late Father Michael Cleary pound a pulpit with his fist as, red with anger, he ranted against "withdrawal" as a form of birth control. His sermon, an advertised mission "special", was delivered to a congregation of mostly working-class men and teenage boys. Three decades ago, Father Cleary was marketed as a guitar-playing, trendy priest - a clerical dude. Maybe he even believed what he was saying. But if he did, it means that instead of being hypocritical, he was hysterical. He was shamelessly audacious, all right - only in a repelling, not in an engaging way.
Anyway, on the subject of birth control, the Catholic Church lost the battle in Ireland. Its teachings were too extreme for most people, few of whom, just because contraception became available, engaged in gross promiscuity or orgiastic debauchery. Quite simply, condoms and the pill did not lead to a re-enactment of the depravity of the late Roman Empire. It just didn't happen. Still, conservatives such as Dr Connell continue to espouse tough teaching on birth control and that is their right.
But the focus of just as much Catholic vehemence nowadays is the media, especially television, the most popular and populist medium of all. Fair enough - the media needs watching. In its edition of January 17th, L'Osservatore Romano argued that "the media must never forget the moral dimension" in "a culture of the ephemeral which is often more attentive to sensations than to values". It's hard to fault that. Yet, at the Irish level, Catholic press attitudes towards mainstream media are characteristically more belligerent and certainly seem more bitter.
"We weren't left wondering how long we would have to wait before RTE launched into a `knock the new Cardinal' mode," wrote Dick Hogan in The Irish Family of January 26th. "On Monday, just a day after the appointment by the Pope of Archbishop Connell of Dublin as the first Dublin Cardinal since 1885, RTE came up with a very negative offering that might have been expected in The Irish Times, but which came badly from the country's national broadcasting body."
Whoa . . . just stop! Stop the nonsense. The piece attacked RTE, described as "hostile to everything that might be considered Irish and in particular to the Catholic faith" for pointing out, correctly, that Dr Connell's appointment is not the most ecumenical of moves. It's not and it doesn't have to be. The Catholic Church is perfectly right to award its own promotions. But in its intemperance, Mr Hogan's column (luridly headlined "Shame on RTE") seems to me to defy L'Osservatore Romano's advice that "the media must never forget the moral dimension". Morality demands proportion - not ranting - and the Catholic media can't be exempt from its own advice. Even the more measured David Quinn, writing in The Irish Catholic, criticised RTE's Six One News for relegating the story of Dr Connell's promotion down the running order. It had been given top billing on a number of RTE news bulletins that day but Mr Quinn argued that it "was worthy of the lead all day long". Well, news values are a subjective matter. But Church politics do not interest Irish people like they once did. RTE was right because the hierarchy's contemptuous slowness in answering the public over criminal scandals has offended and alienated many people. Ask them and they will tell you. After anger, disenchantment, then apathy.
The Republic remains a Catholic state but the Church's complexion is increasingly social - at births, marriages and deaths, really - rather than pervasively psychological as it used to be. Though hard dogma remains, the gusto is gone and it cannot be easily recreated because it must grow out of a society rather than be imposed. So, even importing a few thousand seminarians and persuading them to do Hindu holy men routines on, say, Dollymount Strand, would not work. It might be intense but only intensely bogus.
In fairness, Irish Catholicism still has Croagh Patrick, Lough Derg and some Lenten fasting. However, to many people, even these appear as much cultural as religious nowadays. Although they retain elemental and mystical traces, they could soon be absorbed by the kind of heritage industry nostalgia which made the Faith Of Our Fathers CD a commercial success. No doubt there are some anti-Catholic individuals - as there are pro-Catholic ones - in the media. But targeting the media for the Church's problems is, quite frankly, simplistic, counter-productive and absurd.
The decline of a state of mind is easy to observe, if hard to chart. In communal Ireland - before the country of Neighbourhood Watch, Crimeline reconstructions and security companies in league with the insurance industry - people had beliefs. Now, in the country of individuals, beliefs are being supplanted by opinions. But that doesn't mean that there is less desire for meaning. It does mean that aggrandising the significance of "red hats", fetishising your doctrine around sex and then attacking the media for doing its legitimate job, is guaranteed to push people away.
It's fair enough to argue that a religion shouldn't trim its doctrine to appeal to fickle public fashions. But it's equally fair - especially if you claim that the media ought to accord more prominence to Church politics - for those politics to be examined critically. The Pope is unwell and probably nearing the end of his papacy. Like Desmond Connell, he is rigid and conservative on doctrinal matters and keen for his legacy to safeguard these positions. Hence Dr Connell's appointment. If the Roman media can call it that way, why is it "anti-Catholic" for the Irish media to do likewise?
Of course, it's not. It's an honest opinion and a reasonable belief. It's not just Catholic liberals - among whom are some of the finest people in the country - and media heretics who can see the damage being done to the Irish Church by its dysfunctional, fundamentalist rump. The appointment of Dr Connell will please hardliners. But the price of that is likely to be an Irish Church with shrivelling appeal and little glee or gusto. The awarding of this particular red hat means that a majority of Irish Catholics are resigned to be treated as sheep in a flock . . . but determined to behave as grown-up people. So be it.