Recent castigations of the Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Desmond Connell, would have been more reassuring if the anger had been more correctly focused. The origin of the controversy lay in a recent address by Dr Connell in which he cautioned a group of graduating religious education teachers about the dangers of wholesale repudiation of the past. He pointed to what he called a "climate of criticism, and even hostility" towards the church, "which is making many young people ashamed of their history and, in particular, of their Catholic past".
He questioned the assumption that the influence of the Catholic church in Ireland has been "overwhelmingly repressive". Blaming the church for all our ills was damaging Irish society, he argued. Too little is heard, he said, about the historical context and the good the church has done. Dr Connell's critics centred on his failure to apologise for the abuses perpetrated by church personnel. Words like "disgust" and "shame" cropped up more than once. Once again, clerical humility was called for.
Since the argument about the dangers of repudiating the past is one I have made myself, it might be expected that I would side with Archbishop Connell. In fact, I find myself no more in agreement with him than with his critics, while also believing that both have succeeded in avoiding the kernel of the matter. The two sides of this debate are actually mirror images of one another. Both rely on the same language and assumptions. Both regard themselves as having similar powers of forgiveness, and display similar tendencies to withhold absolution. Both are talking about the same thing, but not about the thing they would have us believe they are talking about. Both are interested in power.
I believe we should have a lot more criticism of the church, but also that we should go beyond the garden gate and into the many mansions of Our Father's house. I also believe it is time this debate was joined by the unpious multitudes of modern Ireland. One of the problems with these discussions is that there is an unwritten rule that only the devout and the detached - both equally fanatical - are entitled to participate.
Those who would wish the church to become stronger, but perhaps on a different path, are rarely heard above the din. The two sides, oddly, are equally pious. If an opinion is ventured by someone who is not noted for this quality, the response of those in the thick of the discussion is to pause for a brief sniff before continuing as before. The piety of the debate, of course, exists for the purpose of concealing the fact it has nothing at all to do with God.
Dr Connell is, of course, right to warn about the dangers of denigrating the past. His critics, too, are correct when they point out that the past was not entirely a pleasant experience. If that were the end of it, we could all agree to differ and part as enemies. But that is not even the beginning.
A few weeks ago, I had the great pleasure of spending a day as a facilitator in a discussion with a group of Catholic missionaries, who are spending a year in Ireland before embarking on a new wave of evangelisation. Some of those present were Irish, but many came from continental Europe, Africa and the former communist countries. We spent a considerable amount of time discussing the impressions the non-Irish missionaries had of Ireland and of Irish Catholicism, most of them having come here for the first time.
The virtually unanimous response was deeply critical of Ireland in the matter of its Christianity/Catholicism; but the focus of comment was not on abuse, sectarianism, discrimination, or the lack of humility on the part of church leaders. What the missionaries talked about was the experience of walking into an Irish church and being unable to find God there, about the absence of joy, ritual, or celebration.
One priest from Nigeria described his sense of desolation on saying his first Mass in Ireland. He had come here, he said, in a mood of great expectation, to the land which had sent forth the missionaries who had led his own people to God. Ireland, to him, was the centre of gravity of Christianity. But he could find no trace of God in the eyes of his congregation. "When I looked at the people sitting before me, I realised that every one of them was dead," he said.
Perhaps this is what the native critics of Catholicism have at heart when they lash out at Dr Connell. But it is not what they say. They focus on the externals, the symptoms. The core problem with Irish Catholicism is not the abuse which its personnel have inflicted on the Irish people, nor any failure on the part of church authorities to apologise for this. (In truth, Irish bishops never stop apologising.)
God did not depart from Irish churches because its priests were abusing children; He had long been banished by the time this started to occur. It could not have happened if He had been present.
Dr Connell is right when he says we should have more respect for history and tradition and what he called the ideals and vision that created the integrity of our tradition. But there is a danger, which he has taken no steps to avoid, that his words might be interpreted as an injunction simply to respect the past for its own sake. This would be unhelpful. History, you might say, is the process whereby facts become purified into truths; it should not be respected because it is past, but because it is true. For example, in this the era of the folk Mass, many Irish people have a secret longing for a return to the Latin mass; but this is not because the Latin mass was "traditional"; it's because it was magical in a way that Morning has Broken can never be.
The story of the Irish church is a story of a struggle for power. Even the good was done with an ulterior purpose. There are indeed historical reasons for this, but they are more complex and deeply-rooted than the archbishop suggests. Dr Connell is wrong to suggest, as he implicitly does, that the evidence of God's absence in the past should be counterbalanced by the evidence, in the good works carried out by the church, that God was present. I am not a theologian, but I figure that if God were present it would not be a matter of a balance of probabilities. The trouble is that most of the church's critics are also interested in power. This desire has been at the core of the recent "modernising" debate and the attendant continuing moral civil war. All the discussions about Catholicism, and in particular about its demise, have been about the ebb and flow of power from one side to the other. The word "God", when it is used at all, has become a synonym for control.
The mention of God, from a clerical mouth, is often couched in the form of a threat: if you do not do what we say, we will take our God away, and then we will see how you manage without Him. Those who answer, allegedly on behalf of us all, appear to say: you can keep your God.