IT IS not without its black humour that the Catholic Church should employ the number, one diversion of modern Ireland 1950s bashing in an effort to mitigate the effects of the Goldenbridge affair.
"The humbling lesson to be drawn from all this," said Cardinal Cahal Daly in a sermon in Armagh last month, "is that we church people are all to prone to be influenced by the culture of the" time rather than by the standards of the Gospel of Christ. When we should be transforming the culture by gospel standards, we can often instead be allowing the culture, rather than the gospel, to shape our behaviour."
The irony arises mainly from the fact that the church, as one of the bastions of "traditionalism" in Irish life, usually finds itself providing target practice for those who are able to explain every thing about everything in terms of the stygian blackness which pervaded every part of this society up to 36 years and four months ago. Now the church has seen the benefits of joining in.
Think about precisely what is being said. We are being led to believe that, just 40 years or so ago, the underdeveloped nature of the human mind, at least as it existed in this State, was such that it was believed appropriate to beat and torture little children. Only the enlightenment of the present moment enables us to see that this was not such a good idea.
Cardinal Daly was, of course, underlining the modern day condescension towards the past in, order to invoke a sense of innocence which might be imagined to have existed in those far off days as a result of which, one presumes, it was not fully understood that children could feel pain. It is this reliance on the national present centred hubris which is most interesting about his remarks.
Underlying Cardinal Daly's argument, whether he is aware of it or not, is a belief in the civilising capabilities of television. For he is tapping into the argument of those who live by the belief that progress, enlightenment, civilisation and modernity are bound up with the achievements of the present generation alone, and all of these have resulted from the "opening up" which resulted from public debate on television. Before, there were 5,500 years of stupidity, savagery and ignorance.
IN my view, it is a strange thing for a follower of Jesus Christ to believe. For if the thinking of the 1950s has become so exposed in the modern enlightenment, what is there to be said of the thinking of a man who has been dead for 2,000 years?
I am, I rather think, an unlikely defender of the 1950s. I suppose I do it, partly at least, because nobody else will. But I do it, too, because I am tired of seeing the scapegoating of pre 1960s Ireland used in order to avoid responsibility for past horrors and avoid the consequences of present day mistakes. I have a soft spot for the 1950s, perhaps because I was born in the middle of them. The 1950s never did me any harm. Neither did the 1960s or the 1970s.
I have never been assaulted by a calendar in my life. However, in the course of these three decades, a number of men and women in the uniform of the Catholic Church made attempts to do me serious bodily injury on a regular basis. They did not do this because they were backward or stupid, or because they had never heard of Gay Byrne. Curiously enough, or perhaps not, they did it because they were trying to "civilise" me.
And this is the point. It was the pressure to achieve "modernity", rather than the backwardness associated with "traditionalism", that created the culture of brutality which infected the church controlled education system since the foundation of this State. In reality, the church was the creator of this culture, rather than the unwitting victim that Cardinal Daly would have us believe.
What the Cardinal might have said, in explanation if not in mitigation of Goldenbridge and other places of barbarism, is that the church created this culture of violence in response to and from the wider society. This is the aspect of the Goldenbridge which this society might most profitably examine.
There was nothing intrinsically "backward" about the barbarism of the 1950s, any more than there is anything intrinsically backward about the barbarism of the 1990s. Barbarism is barbarism. We would be better off trying to understand it than dismissing it as part of the culture of the times. There is an Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children poster on boardings in Dublin which says something like "3,5 per cent of adults in Ireland believe beating children is wrong. Think about it". Think about it.
As to the wider question of the present centred hubris, I wonder sometimes whether every generation, to a degree, doesn't come to think that its own time has been endowed with a special form of illumination and civilisation. But even so, the condition appears particularly acute in the present generation in Ireland.
I have a theory that this line of thinking is based on the misplaced equation of 20th century time with a notional human lifespan. We look back at the century and see a human life in symbolic terms the childhood spent under the iron rule of adults, the teenage rebellion, the independence that came with young adulthood, the complacent middle age, and so on.
In our later years we look back with a mixture of indulgence and exasperation at our earlier attempts to live and grow. At the grand old age of 96, we shake our heads in wonder and mock horror at the innocence of earlier times.
THIS kind of thinking may be natural and healthy for human beings, but it is not a sensible way for societies to see themselves. Do we ever stop to consider, I wonder, that in less than four years' time we will have, by this logic, passed into a completely new existence?
Does it occur to us that, a decade from now, mention of "the 1990s" will occasion much louder shrieks of laughter than mention of the 1950s does today? No doubt, the clerics of this new century will be explaining away 1990s phenomena like tax evasion, unemployment and serial killings in terms of "the culture of the times".
If our behaviour as individuals or as a society is stupid or intolerant or ignorant, it is not because of the year on the calendar, but because we are not listening to the voice of truth. The head of the Catholic Church in Ireland, of all people, should know that truth is as timeless as good and evil are eternal.
We are what we are now because of the incremental development of thousands of years. Evil was not abolished on the first day of January 1960. And if history shows us anything, it shows us surely that a misplaced belief in the dawning of sudden enlightenments can lead to the greatest evils of all.