Issues

The state of the Catholic Church in Ireland

Armagh-RC-Cathedral-3As Dublin prepares to host 100,000 people at the 50th International Eucharistic Congress, the Catholic Church in Ireland is still searching for a clean break from the past. Stephen Dineen reports.

The last time a Eucharistic Congress was held in Ireland, thousands attended processions, Dublin was laden with floral arrangements and bunting, and a million people gathered in the Phoenix Park for an open air mass.

Seventy-nine years on, Dublin will host the international congress again from 10-17 June. A series of masses, workshops, talks and concerts will take place, but with little national excitement in advance. Heavily bruised by a litany of abuse scandals and decreasing participation, the church is grappling with itself in a more secular society, vastly changed from that of 1933.

The most recent report to provoke debate on its role was that of an apostolic visitation in Ireland, published in March. Visiting archbishops and cardinals met with seminary representatives, members of the Conference of Religious in Ireland, abuse victims and the National Board for Safeguarding Children in the Catholic Church.

In its report, the visitation made a number of observations:

•    the church’s child protection guidelines are being followed;

•    greater concern needs to be shown to the intellectual formation of seminarians;

•    a deeper formation of young people’s faith is needed, as is a new focus for the laity; and

•    there is a widespread tendency among priests, religious and laity to hold theological variance with the teachings of the magisterium (i.e. the church’s teaching authority), something which needs particular attention.

A reference was made to re-configuration of the church’s diocesan structure in Ireland, which the Holy See and Irish bishops have already started to examine.

The 2011 census in the Republic found that 3.86 million people (84.1 per cent of the population) regarded themselves as Catholic, only marginally down from the 86.8 per cent in 2006. The 2001 Northern Ireland census recorded 678,462 Catholics (40.1 per cent of the population).

Weekly or more regular church attendance among Catholics in Northern Ireland stood at 40.5 per cent in 2009-2010, according to figures from the International Social Science Programme. In the South, the comparable figure from the 2009-2010 European Social Survey is 51.6 per cent.

Influence in education remains strong on both sides of the border. 392 primary schools (one quarter) and 100 post-primary schools (46 per cent) in Northern Ireland are Catholic, while 2,841 primary schools (89 per cent) and 359 post-primary schools (49 per cent) are of the same patronage in the Republic.

The Republic’s Education Minister, Ruairí Quinn, plans to create a more pluralist primary school patronage system.  The independent Forum on Patronage and Pluralism sets out a template for divesting Catholic schools in 47 local areas.  It also calls for a review of religion’s central place in the curriculum.  In Northern Ireland, five post-primary schools were earmarked for closure in the Northern Ireland Commission for Catholic Education’s review, alongside 23 other amalgamations.

In the South, relations between the church and the new Government have been less than harmonious, as shown by Enda Kenny’s scathing attack on the church and the closure of the Irish embassy to the Vatican on 16 January. Fianna Fáil has called for the embassy to be re-opened.

In 2010, the First Minister and deputy First Minister declined an invitation to meet the Pope when he visited Britain. Relations between the British state and the Vatican are more reassuring, perhaps, for some Catholics in Northern Ireland than might be the case under Dublin rule. A joint communiqué issued by the Holy See and the British Government following a ministerial visit to the Vatican in February acknowledged the church’s “significant” contribution to the good of British society.

Father Eugene O’Neill, parish priest of St Mary’s Church, Glengormley, said earlier this year that many Catholics are
re-thinking their nationalism. While the Republic had become “a cold house for Catholicism,” he saw the Queen and senior British government ministers as defenders of the faith.

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