The birth rate has tumbled, and many more married women are at work. The abortion rate is estimated to have risen from around 4.5% of pregnancies in 1980 to over 10% in 2002 (mostly carried out in Britain); over the same period, births out of wedlock have soared from 5% to 31% of the total. The divorce rate is creeping up.
. . .
As for religion, although almost 90% of the population still claim that they are Catholic, the Catholic Church is not the force it was. It fought hard against the legalisation of divorce, but lost decisively. It is hard to imagine the church in its heyday tolerating a taoiseach living with a woman who was not his wife, as Mr Ahern did for many years.
. . .
It is not only churchmen who regret Ireland's growing secularism. David Quinn, a journalist at the daily Irish Independent, points to rising drug and alcohol consumption, a sharp increase in suicides, a greater incidence of sexually transmitted diseases and a growing “yob culture”. He suggests that with the decline of religion, society has lost a moral compass.
After a lot of mulling, I think he has overstated the problem, and in some ways misstated it. There are serious problems in Ireland, most certainly including the huge rise in single motherhood, the rise in abortions, and possibly an increase in the crime rate, although I am less sure of that.
Some of these problems are not the result of a declining church, but of a dominant church. The dominance of the Catholic Church in Ireland, like any monopoly, was begging for abuse. When Douglas Hyde, the country's first president (and a Protestant), died in 1949, the government ministers sat outside the church, because the Catholic Church made it clear that they were not to go into a Protestant church.
The child abuse scandals hit the Church very hard here. Part of the reason was that people were afraid to challenge the Church. Another part was the refusal of bishops to accept that priests could behave that way. There is more to it than that, but I think these parts are important because they suggest that an authoritarian church is an unreflective church, and an unreflective church is a dying church.
I went to Catholic schools in Chicago in the 1960s when Catholic parents were terrified of sending their children anywhere else, and the bullying by teachers was intense. Still, I have been startled at the number of intensely bitter stories I have heard, from reasonably devout Catholics, about the regular beatings they got in school. I know several people with one Protestant parent who described the almost maniacal determination of the nuns and the brothers to beat the evil out of them. I am inclined to believe them. (Full disclosure: my father was raised as a non-denominational Protestant, and converted to Catholicism solely to get the nuns to lay off me and my sister. You can take a guess what it is like to a six year old to be kept after school so that the nun teaching his class can emphasize to him how important it was that his father end his evil ways.)
It is clear that the reported suicide rate is rising, a mix of increased reporting and increased incidence. A 2001 report, "Suicide in Ireland" offers this unhappy diagram, showing the suicide rate for men in Ireland and in the EU.
This piece argues that in the 1960s, fewer than half the suicides were correctly reported, and that by 1990, most suicides were correctly reported. It also argues that the true suicide rate doubled over that period. Because suicide is a mortal sin, coroners were under huge pressure to not list deaths that way. You still read stories of wildly implausible accidents that are clearly suicides, but everyone involved wants to deny it. Serious attention to suicide has begun only recently, and healing was blocked by too much shame. I do not know why the suicide rate has risen in Ireland. I do think that the problem was ignored for too long by a false shame.
Shame can be a good thing, when it makes you think about what you do. But it can be destructive when it gets people to do the wrong thing. I know a fellow, about 50 or so, who spends his days chatting with people in the pub, not working, and almost certainly incapable of it. When he was a teenager, he suffered what we used to call a severe nervous breakdown. His parents shut him up in his room, because they were ashamed to let anyone see him. He got his meals in his room. He lived there, 24 hours a day, year in and year out, for something like twenty years, until both his parents died. His parents let their shame nearly destroy their son.
I am not trying to dump all the blame for Ireland's difficulties on the Catholic Church. The fellow who was locked in his room for twenty years was brought out by a local priest, who had spent years trying to get his parents to behave better. The child abuse scandal is horrendous, but Fr. Sean Fortune(a monstrous predator who commited suicide in 1999 while awaiting trial on 66 counts of sexually abusing boys) was protected by more than the bishops. He was protected by a climate of silence. Recently, a man was sentenced for repeatedly beating and raping his daughter over a 15 year period. She complained bitterly that people in the area knew, but would not say or do anything. The near mania for silence and secrecy in this country defeats my attempts at explanation. I have frequently heard in Ireland variations on this joke:
An Irishman goes on a quiz show. To the first question, "What church does the pope lead?" he says "pass." To the second question, "What was Jack Lynch's last name?" again a pass. To the third question, "What year was the 1916 uprising?" yet another pass. And from the audience, another Irishman shouts "That's it, Paddy. Don't tell him a thing."
My concern is rather with what role the Church can play in dealing with its own crisis.
The Irish Catholic layman David Quinn has written about the distinction between an authoritarian church and an authoritative church. The Catholic Church in Ireland has lost its authoritarian position, but has not become authoritative. In other words, it has not dealt with its loss of power by emphasizing clear moral standards and a clear theology. Instead, it has rambled on as if it were a group of social workers. It lets the radical priest, Sean Healy of the Conference of Religious of Ireland, be its regular spokesman. By all the accounts I have heard, Fr. Healy is a good and decent man, but he presents the Church as primarily a social work agency. (That I think his policy proposals would increase poverty in Ireland is not relevant here, which I guess is why I mention it.) The Church is not first and foremost about social work. If it were, then it ought to be more important to the poor than to the rich.
I agree with Bainbridge that Ireland is in important ways in trouble, and that those troubles are partly connected to the decline of the Catholic Church. But it seems to me extremely important to the survival of the Church (and the state of the country) that it begins to reflect on how its previous dangerously authoritarian position is at least partly responsible for its downfall. Not to sit around feeling guilty, but to ask instead how a Church becomes central to people's lives.
And here is my tiny contribution to doing so. Recognize that sin is not just about feeling bad, but also about the joy of redemption. I know I am going to make no friends writing this (but why give up a habit of a lifetime), but I do not understand why the Irish revel in misery. Frank McCourt made fun of this in the opening of Angela's Ashes:
When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.
People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless loquacious alcoholic father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying schoolmasters; the English and the terrible things they did to us for eight hundred long years.
Above all — we were wet.
Never outside Ireland have I been to a midnight mass at Christmas (second only to Easter as a day of joy among Christians) and heard Joy to the World sung as a funeral dirge.Posted by sjostrom on October 20, 2004 07:49 AM
