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CONOR O'CLERY

How times have changed since Pope John Paull II visited Ireland

By
Conor O'Clery

Published Tuesday, September 29, 2009, 7:39 AM
Updated Tuesday, September 29, 2009, 12:18 PM


Still looking for women priests: A nun watches the Pope at Killineer in Drogheda
Still looking for women priests: A nun watches the Pope at Killineer in Drogheda

How times have changed since Pope John Paul visited Ireland in September 1979 – and I’m only talking about smoking.

When the Pontiff flew to Ireland on the Aer Lingus Boeing 747, named the St Patrick for the occasion, the stewardess announced after takeoff , “Holy Father, distinguished visitors, you may now smoke if you wish.”

I was on that flight as an Irish Times reporter and the deference shown to the Pontiff by some elements of the Irish media illustrated something else that would change over time, the traditional Irish awe of Catholic Church representatives.

A colleague, presented with an unique opportunity to put one question to the Pope in a crush of reporters on the plane, asked “Holy Father, will you bless this picture?”

You wouldn’t get that nowadays from a media made much more cynical and hard-nosed about religious affairs after the scandals that have undermined the leading role of the Catholic Church in Ireland in the last two decades.

The huge and enthusiastic turnout for the Pope’s visit to Ireland created much speculation that it would regenerate the Irish Catholic Church.

The welcome was, however, as much an expression of appreciation for the international recognition that he gave to the relatively young Republic of Ireland, as it was an outpouring of religious fervour.

It was the first ever papal visit to a country that had suffered for its Catholicism in the past, and only the second foreign trip by a Pope who was to visit almost every Catholic country in the world thereafter.

It was an endorsement of the culture of a mass-going nation and a high point for the Irish Catholic Church.

But the slow secularisation of Ireland was already under way and would accelerate with the greater prosperity brought about by the consumer-driven Celtic Tiger.

Many recalled the visit in later years for the fact that the two most prominent and supposedly celibate clerics at the youth mass the Pontiff celebrated in Galway, Bishop Casey and Father Cleary, became the center of scandals for the way they conducted themselves after secretly fathering children, and how the Holy Father’s constant companion in Ireland, Cardinal Marcinkus, later became involved in shady financial dealings that led to the collapse of an Italian bank and the suspicious death of two Italian bankers.

And in the 1990s the nation learned with horror of the terrible, cruel sexual abuse of children in Ireland by some Catholic clergy, which continued unabated long after the Pope had been and gone, and more recently of the cruel treatment and abuse of children in industrial schools run by religious orders.

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How times have changed since Pope John Paull II visited Ireland | Irish News | IrishCentral


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