ANALYSIS:FOR ARCHBISHOP Diarmuid Martin, whose brother Seamus was a correspondent in Moscow during the years of perestroika, there are lessons to be learned from Mikhail Gorbachev's doomed tenure in office, writes THEO DORGAN
Like Gorbachev, the archbishop seems to be a man of good intentions, a true believer who nevertheless knows that a radical change is needed in how his church understands its relationship to the people it purports to serve.
Like Gorbachev, the archbishop seems to have few friends among his powerful and privileged colleagues and, like Gorbachev, he seems also to understand how profound is the chasm between ordinary people and the powerful ruling cadres whose attitudes to both faith and faithful he is challenging. He seems, to judge by his words and his suffering countenance on our screens, to be hoping against hope that his own personal goodness may serve to deflect the wave of history.
It seems to this disinterested observer that the archbishop is very likely to be disappointed in both his challenge and in his hopes, as was the former general secretary.
The essential tension at the heart of the Soviet state was between communism as a moral and social proposition, on the one hand, and the apparatus of power on the other hand. When this tension, this contradiction, became unbearable, in a number of senses, the whole thing blew apart.
Gorbachev proved the last throw of the dice for a sclerotic regime so preoccupied with the exercise and maintenance of power that it had become oblivious to the fatal chasm that had opened up between what people actually knew about the state, and what the state believed it was keeping to itself.
Archbishop Martin, long-time Vatican insider, a compassionate and intelligent man as far as I can judge without ever having met him, has assumed responsibility for defusing and dissipating the explosive contradictions that have been building up inside Irish Catholicism for a very long time.
He understands better than most, and maybe better than many of its critics, the real dangers of the present situation for the institutional church in Ireland. Simply put, the average Catholic in Ireland can see clearly that the church is concerned, perhaps always has been concerned, not so much with the witness of shared faith but with the protection above all else of the institution originally evolved to protect and promulgate that faith.
The contradiction that faces Catholicism now is the contradiction between a faith rooted in simple theological and moral tenets, and a human institution that has ossified into what may prove terminal self-regard.
Ordinary Catholics, right now, need nothing less from powerful individuals in their church than a clear demonstration of shared faith and values. What they are getting is the unlovely spectacle of men clinging to power when the wiser (and, not incidentally, morally better) course would be a renunciation of worldly vanity, the voluntary relinquishing of power. It is open to any bishop, for instance, to whom the merest whiff of scandal clings like unholy incense, to make a virtue of stepping aside, to seize this opportunity of demonstrating that charity, humility, justice and compassion are the animating forces in their lives as well as the cornerstones of a shared faith.
Why has this not already happened? I strongly suspect it is because both the aware, like Martin, and the unaware, like Murray of Limerick, are fundamentally agreed that the authority of the church, the integrity of the competent organs, must be maintained. They differ, in political terms, only on how this is to be done.
I remind myself that even while Gorbachev was busy about perestroika and glasnost, mainstream ideologues in the politburo and in the party were confidently grooming the next generation of traditional Soviet apparatchiks. What all had in common, of course, was a wish to see the power of the party perpetuated, and this in the end would provide the reason why they perished together, conservatives and reformers alike.
Here, now, while Archbishop Martin and others are striving to bring the more historically obtuse of their colleagues to an understanding of the actual situation, there is every sign that the institutional apparat, ruled with an iron fist from Rome, is in profound denial, wedded to the tried and tested tactic of riding imperiously over the questions and doubts of the faithful. There is every likelihood, in the present circumstances, that they are digging the grave of their church.
A Moscow street sweeper, watching some party functionary sweep past in an armoured limousine, had only to ask herself “is this man a Communist?” for the insupportable lie at the heart of the regime to declare itself. Such knowledge, multiplied in the hearts and minds of millions, even without the gulags and the terror, was corrosive enough to bring down a state that had thought itself secure for ever.
It took time, of course, but once the lie is exposed, downfall, however indefinitely delayed, is both sure and certain.
I wonder at how blind the powerful are, how contemptuous of, how utterly divorced from, those whom they presume to rule.
Neither the Vatican nor the Kremlin seem to have pondered the ironic hidden truth in Lenin’s proposition on behalf of the party: “He who is not with us is against us.” When this is spoken by the powerless, when this becomes the agreed belief of the powerless, empires fall.
As with Catholicism, so with communism. One might have imagined that, with doctrine and faith clarified and established, only the simplest of church or state structures would have been needed to maintain the teachings and integrity of the faith.
Instead, of course, we had the all-too-human emergence of, to bend Milton’s phrase, “better to reign on earth than simply to serve heaven”.
The fatal flaw in the USSR lay in this, that having appropriated the “duty” of making concrete the moral ideals of common interest and mutuality, the party rapidly moved to distinguish itself as over and against the very people in whose name it claimed a legitimate right to exercise power.
More rapidly than many human institutions, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union ended up at the dialectical opposite of what its foundation myth proposed – to put it crudely, instead of the party apparatus serving the people, the people would find themselves, at horrific cost, constrained and obliged to serve the party.
For Catholics today, now more than ever, the question is: do the people serve the church, or does the church serve the people?
A small thing, a branch snapped underfoot, will trigger an avalanche. The point is to be aware not of the trigger-moment as such, but of the weight that has been building up on the mountainside. It has not gone unnoticed, certainly by women and in swelling numbers by men also, that the abuse of children within the protective structure of the church has been carried out almost entirely by men, has been covered up and, in a distressing number of cases, absolutely ignored by an authoritarian, centralised patriarchal power structure – a structure, no matter how you parse it, that holds unswervingly as an institution to the primitive Abrahamic belief that women are not fully human.
It wouldn’t matter, in terms of the power dynamic at work here, if the church were a thoroughly matriarchal institution, and it was men who were suffering this exclusion, this reduced identity as human beings.
What matters here is the nature of the dynamic at work: both men and women in rapidly growing numbers are stepping aside and are looking at the same thing from converging perspectives: a human institution built on privilege, denial and exclusion – an institution in flight from the truth of the actual as it is being experienced in real time by real (and equal) men and women – an institution in flight from its own fundamental professed tenets and precepts.
I do not believe the apparatchiks of the Vatican comprehend what is in store. Rome, which speaks with the voice of thunder when it suits, would now have it that individual bishops are more or less independent medieval princelings. Ours when it suits us; on their own when that suits us, is the message from pontiff and curia.
Clarity of analysis is gaining weight and momentum among the believers. I do not think the efforts of decent people will be enough to hold back the fatal slide. I doubt that the moral goodness of a few decent men will be enough. Together with perestroika, reconstruction, came glasnost, openness. It was glasnost that undermined perestroika.
Openness, the free unencumbered sharing of the truth, is fundamentally witness. Between witness and power, no matter how long it takes, witness will always win out, catastrophically for the power apparat and, it seems, equally a catastrophe for the foundation myth on which that power has for so long rested.
Archbishop Martin, as I began by saying, would do well to reflect on how quickly and thoroughly history disposed with comrade Gorbachev. He may yet have to choose between the faith and the church, between the faithful and the unreformable apparat.
He may care to reflect on joining the rest of us, unbelievers and believers, as we prepare for the power vacuum to come. He will certainly have to consider, and I wish him well in it, the now unavoidable question: with us or against us?
It seems very likely that something has changed forever in our Republic. The skeletal presence of the Catholic Church in our institutions and in our mores has begun to wither away, smoke in a gale, dust in the wind; there is a danger that with it will go the foundational ideals of justice, charity, compassion and mercy. We can already see the damage done in our country’s short-lived flirtation with mammon. We have seen what happened when the post-Gorbachev USSR turned to gangster capitalism. We would do well to begin thinking clearly, and very soon, about what we will choose for the moral foundations of a post-Catholic Ireland.
Theo Dorgan is a poet, writer and broadcaster