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EDDIE HOLT

Thirty years after Papal visit to Ireland, the Catholic Church is in dire straits

By
Eddie Holt

Published Tuesday, September 29, 2009, 4:10 PM
Updated Tuesday, September 29, 2009, 5:07 PM


Pope John Paul II

The Pope called to Ireland in 1979. He had never come here before, despite Ireland’s reputation as “the greatest little Catholic country on Earth”. I was in London but I watched most of the scenes that greeted his arrival. Thirty years later, the Catholic Church is in rag order. Were the current Pope – Benedict XVI – to visit Ireland, he could not expect crowds like his predecessor Pope John Paul II.

Benedict could not expect crowds like John Paul because of sexual activity and gross punishments on the incarcerated by priests, Brothers and nuns. There had been rumblings – The Irish Times sat on the story for months, fearing that the paper might have been boycotted by staunch Catholics – about Bishop Eamon Casey. In early summer 1992, the story was published: Bishop Casey had a then 17-year-old son with American Annie Murphy.

 It was dynamite but worse was to follow. Father Michael Cleary, who shared the Galway gig with Eamon Casey was secretly the father of two children. Then Father Brendan Smyth arrived. A member of the Norbertine order, he embarked on a 40-year career molesting at least 20 children in parishes in Dublin, Belfast and the United States. The rate for Sunday mass attendance fell from 68 per cent to 48 per cent in less than a decade. It is still falling.

First though was the bleak 80s. Emigration was back – big time – and this time, Irish people went to the United States mostly as ‘illegals’ or ‘undocumenteds’. It was the era of Charlie Haughey (Fianna Fáil) and Garret FitzGerald (Fine Gael). When Haughey, as prime-minister, appeared on TV at the start of the 80s, he told us all that “we were living beyond our means”.

That was before Haughey spent millions on a Gandon mansion, an island and racehorses. It was before he dressed up in Charvet shirts, went to the top restaurants in Dublin and had a long affair with gossip columnist Terry Keane. FitzGerald too, though not as spendthrift as Haughey, had two banks AIB and Ansbacher, bail him out by writing off bad debts of £200,000. He had left politics at the time.

Then it was on to the 90s, the clerical scandals coming thick and fast and the Celtic Tiger. Most people date the Celtic Tiger in 1993 and it lasted until 2008 but there were harbingers of its arrival. The fact that consumerism became the new mantra was aided by disgust at the Catholic Church. The Northern ‘Troubles’ had a ceasefire in 1994 – though London was bombed in 1996 – and the Republic was on average the second wealthiest nation on the planet.

The difference between Ireland in the 80s and Ireland in the 90s was telling. It’s true that Ireland in the 80s, characterised by emigration, began to immigrate many people in the 90s – Poles, Chinese, Nigerians, Latvians, Lithuanians and others. Mind you, the Poles have kept the Catholic Church going.

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Thirty years after Papal visit to Ireland, the Catholic Church is in dire straits | IrishCentral


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