Our view of Pope is not shared elsewhere

It is wrong to risk spreading foot-and-mouth disease for a quick profit. Female genital mutilation is barbaric, not just in Ireland but everywhere. The sale of a five-year-old girl into slavery for £25 is a scandal. These are statements with which most Irish people would agree.

But why do we agree? We have not been strong on examining our beliefs, appearing to believe they are self-evident. But neither here nor in other parts of the world are they self-evident.

We have traded on a Christian tradition of moral thinking, sometimes without much reflection. This has left us vulnerable to being morally inarticulate, unable to argue convincingly in support of our beliefs.

This week I heard an unusual candidate proposed as a moral visionary. Unusual in Ireland, anyway. George Weigel, an American who has written what many would feel is the definitive biography of Pope John Paul 11, Witness to Hope, was in Dublin for the inaugural Lismullin lecture.

He presented John Paul as a moral colossus with huge influence worldwide. In Ireland it seems a paragraph cannot be written on the Pope without the use of any or all of the adjectives, rigid, authoritarian, conservative, or dogmatic. An extraordinarily provincial view of him prevails as though his only thoughts were on clerical celibacy and reproductive matters. It is good for us to be reminded that, elsewhere, John Paul is seen differently.

Weigel argued that his greatest contribution has been a particular kind of radical humanism, a belief in the unique dignity of each person because he or she has been created by God.

John Paul believes societies not anchored in a strong public moral culture are in danger of self-destruction. Culture is the place where habits of heart and mind are formed. Democracy is dependent on a solid moral-cultural foundation because, without one, women and men will not have the attributes for self-governance.

John Paul believes the church has to move from an authoritarian to a persuasive mode to influence society to produce citizens of virtue. Without a shared moral judgment, the only question becomes: who is going to impose power on whom? If there is no absolute truth, only your truth and my truth, all moral disputes boil down to who is going to impose their truth on whom.

Weigel was particularly impatient with the liberal/conservative lens through which church matters are viewed. The labels do not fit and are not useful, he said bluntly. John Paul transcends such categories. He claimed the Pope does not see himself as preserving an institution, but as the servant and leader of a radical movement to spread the Gospel through rational argument. The church has to be prepared to show there are valid arguments on moral positions accessible to people of all faiths and of none.

It was hard to decide who would be more nonplussed by such ideas on John Paul, those who have him neatly boxed into a narrow conservative stereotype, or those who have the responsibility to bring to fruition his vision.

The Irish Roman Catholic Church has been in defensive mode for some time. The idea seems to be to batten down the hatches and weather the storm. The kind of radical vision described by Weigel challenges that defensive mode and says the church has to learn a whole other way of being: persuasion through lived example and careful presentation of positions in a way accessible to believers and non-believers alike.

The Irish Catholic Church is a long way from such self-understanding. It is not surprising in ways. Having endured long periods of persecution, the church enjoyed a relatively brief halcyon period where media and politicians alike were obsequiously respectful. Brief it may have been, but many within the church have not recovered from the shock of its loss. It will take a long time for it to develop the confidence to become a force in Irish society in an entirely different way, a way dependent on reasoned argument and persuasion rather than power.

Weigel enjoyed unprecedented access to the Pope during the preparation of the biography, including 20 hours of interviews. The Pope gave him access to confidential documents and to trusted advisers. In typical American fashion, Weigel occasionally seemed well pleased at his degree of access, not to mention his lunch with the Pope in the previous two weeks. I have to admit his pleasure occasionally triggered the Irish begrudger in me.

More seriously, Weigel has strong Republican leanings, and a distrust of the state and of social welfare systems which goes with that political view in the US. In Witness to Hope, those political leanings sometimes intrude. He is naturally delighted the Pope is such a staunch and influential critic of communism and socialism, but not quite so pleased when he launches broadsides against the negatives of capitalism.

For example, he appears to believe that in the Pope's second social encyclical, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, John Paul was led astray by Catholic intellectuals who believe both communism and capitalism are deeply flawed. A more plausible reading might be that the Pope has an acute sense of the limitations of all economic systems.

Weigel is obviously delighted by the Pope's qualified endorsement of free-market economics in Centesimus Annus. He seems a great deal less delighted by his ongoing critiques of economic liberalism.

Such quibbles aside, his lecture was stimulating and provocative, particularly in the context of a Celtic Tiger economy where there is a danger that unthinking consumerism will become the dominant moral orthodoxy.

bobrien@irish-times.ie