The Eucharist in Church history

In a 1955 letter to her friend Betty Hester, the American writer Flannery O’Connor described a dinner party she had attended some years earlier.

Conversation had eventually turned to the Eucharist, which O’Connor’s host, who had left the Church in her teens, said that she had come to think of as a symbol, and a fairly good one at that. “Well,” said O’Connor in a shaky voice, breaking the silence that had marked her evening, “if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.”


Unfortunately, if last week’s Ipsos MRBI survey for the Irish Times is to be believed, 62 pc of Irish Catholics share O’Connor’s host’s view that the Eucharist merely represents the body and blood of Christ.

Richard Dawkins’ branding of all such Catholics as dishonest should be recognised as the ignorant smear that it is, given that this is less likely to be the fruit of considered dissent than poor catechesis and human weakness, but the fact remains that in this respect it seems the majority of Irish Catholics are out of step with the Church throughout time.

The Eucharist, described by the Second Vatican Council as “the source and summit of Christian life”, has always been central to the Church’s existence.

Acts 2:46 describes how the early Jerusalem Church celebrated the Eucharist daily, meeting at the Temple for preaching and prayer, but breaking bread in their own homes rather than attending the Temple sacrifices.

Poor translations sometimes make it seem as though the phrase “breaking bread” is just another way of saying that the early Christians ate together, but the original Greek text is unambiguous in its distinction between liturgy and lunch.

Early Church
The first Christians’ devotion to the Eucharist shouldn’t surprise us. Luke 22:19 and 1 Corinthians 11:24-5 record how at the Last Supper Jesus commanded them to celebrate the Eucharist in remembrance of him, while at John 6 Jesus repeatedly describes himself as the bread of life, clearly stating “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you; he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life.”

It might be tempting to interpret this passage in a symbolic or spiritual way, but the Greek text simply doesn’t allow this.

The passage describes the listening crowd being horrified at Jesus’ words, and asking him to clarify them; he did so by making his language more graphic, emphasising the reality of what he was asking his followers to do by replacing the word phagein – to eat – with the rather more tactile word trogein – to munch, or gnaw, or chew.

Significantly too, the word the passage uses for “flesh” – sarx – is used on six other occasions in John, each time as something emblematic of the physical rather than the spiritual world, beginning with the declaration that “the Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us”.

Intolerable teaching
Many disciples left after this, finding Jesus’ teaching intolerable, while those who remained did so in apparent confusion.

It wasn’t until after the Last Supper that the meaning of Jesus’ words became clear and the Eucharist was embraced as a real participation in the body and blood of Christ, such that, as Paul put it in 1 Corinthians 10:27, “Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord.”

The disciples’ own disciples took this to heart, and it seems clear from the writings of St Ignatius of Antioch – a pupil of John, and bishop of the city where Christians first bore that name – that an acceptance of the Eucharist as Christ’s body and blood was the hallmark of orthodox Christianity before the end of the first Christian century.

On his way under armed guard to Rome, where he was to be martyred, he wrote a series of letters to churches including one in which he said that those Gnostics who believed that Jesus’ body was but an illusion were easily identifiable:

“They even absent themselves from the Eucharist and the public prayers, because they will not admit that the Eucharist is the self-same body of our Saviour Jesus Christ, which suffered for our sins, and which the Father in his goodness raised up again.”

Worship
St Justin Martyr, writing a few decades later in the middle of the second century, gives us the earliest detailed description of Christian worship: the main Christian ceremony took place on Sundays and had two parts: a liturgy of the word with readings from the scriptures and a sermon, and then a liturgy of the Eucharist, in which bread and wine were offered up, blessed, and distributed.

Explaining mainstream Christianity to the Roman emperor, he describes the Eucharist as follows:

“For not as common bread and common drink do we receive these... the food which is blessed by the power of His word, and from which our blood and flesh by transmutation are nourished, is the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh.”

The Eucharist was so central to early Christianity that it was common for the Church’s Roman persecutors, who scorned that which they couldn’t understand, to describe Christians as cannibals – as well as incestuous atheists!

The early Church was so convinced of the reality of the Eucharist, that it wasn’t even deemed necessary to refer to the Eucharist in the Nicene creed; it simply went without saying that during Mass the Eucharistic elements would become the body and blood of Christ.

Of course, it was obvious that they didn’t appear to change, but the Church was unanimous that Christ’s word was to be trusted.

Metaphorical?
It was not until the ninth century that speculation began about how this change took place.

These debates attracted little attention at the time, but almost two hundred years later n archdeacon named Berengar of Tours began to wonder whether the Eucharistic change was merely spiritual or even metaphorical.

Berengar’s theories were recognised as contrary to the historical teaching of the Church, and were condemned, but further speculation continued and so the Church gradually embraced the idea that “transubstantiation” was the best way of explaining the Eucharistic change.

The language of transubstantiation may have been a medieval innovation, but the idea behind it – that the bread and wine literally change to the body and blood of Christ – stretched back to the foundation of the Church.

If it is true that only a quarter of Irish Catholics really believe that this happens at the Mass, it would seem that the International Eucharistic Congress isn’t happening a moment too soon.

We need to be reminded of what unites us with our fellow Christians throughout the world and throughout time.


-- Originally published in The Irish Catholic, 14 June 2012.

For a Friend

I've been reading a fair few short stories lately, and reading about them too -- trying to see behind the curtain, if you like, to understand what was in their authors' minds when writing them. It's given me a fine excuse to pore once more over The Habit of Being, that wonderful collection of Flannery O'Connor's letters. Here's one, just as a taster: her very first letter to Betty Hester.

Milledgeville

20 July 1955

Dear Miss A.,

I am very pleased to have your letter. Perhaps it is even more startling to me to find someone who recognizes my work for what I try to make it than it is for you to find a God-conscious writer near at hand. The distance is 87 miles but I feel the spiritual distance is shorter.

I write the way I do because (not though) I am a Catholic. This is a fact and nothing covers it like the bald statement. However, I am a Catholic peculiarly possessed of the modern consciousness, that thing Jung describes as unhistorical, solitary, and guilty. To possess this within the Church is to bear a burden, the necessary burden for the conscious Catholic. It's to feel the contemporary situation at the ultimate level. I think the Church is the only thing that is going to make the terrible world we are coming to endurable; the only thing that makes the Church endurable is that it is somehow the body of Christ and that on this we are fed. It seems to be a fact that you have to suffer as much from the Church as for it but if you believe in the divinity of Christ, you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it. This may explain the lack of bitterness in the stories.

The notice in the New Yorker was not only moronic, it was unsigned. It was a case in which it is easy to see that the moral sense has been bred out of certain sections of the population, like the wings have been bred off certain chickens to produce more white meat on them. This is a generation of wingless chickens, which I suppose is what Nietzsche meant when he said God was dead.

I am mighty tired of reading reviews that call "A Good Man" brutal and sarcastic. The stories are hard but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism. I believe that there are many rough beasts now slouching towards Bethlehem to be born and that I have reported the progress of a few of them, and when I see these stories described as horror stories I am always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror.

You were very kind to wrote me and the measure of my appreciation must be to ask you to write me again. I would like to know who this is who understands my stories.

Yours sincerely,

The one frustrating thing about O'Connor's letters to Hester The Habit of Being is that it's just half of a conversation. Although the two didn't meet until a year after they first wrote to each other, they became close friends, and Hester wrote O'Connor hundreds of letters. Many of the letters between the two, not included in The Habit of Being, were made public in 2007. I have no idea of Hester's own letters to O'Connor were among them, or have survived in any sense.

Queen and Country

On Tuesday 15 May, the Norwegian Parliament voted to introduce a constitutional amendment to disestablish the Lutheran state church of Norway. Those besotted with outdated ideas of historical “progress” might cheer such a development, but on the same day in England the BBC published the result of a ComRes poll which found that 79 per cent of people believe Queen Elizabeth II has an important faith role, with 73 per cent believing that she should remain Supreme Governor of the Church of England and retain her title of “Defender of the Faith”.

The monarchy’s not lacked good publicity of late. After sixty years on the throne, the Queen’s more than earned her place with Alan Bennett and Judi Dench as a “national treasure”, and last year’s trip to Ireland won over many of her more sceptical Irish subjects. Prince William’s April 2011 wedding, at which Richard Chartres, the Anglican archbishop of London, preached a sermon that may have been heard by more people than any other in history, was an occasion for national celebration that seemed to go far beyond cynical opportunism at an extraordinary public holiday. And, of course, the public image of the monarchy could hardly have been better served than by 2010’s Oscar-winning film The King’s Speech.

One of the film’s most arresting scenes takes place in Westminster Abbey, when Colin Firth’s soon-to-be-crowned George VI demands that his speech therapist, Geoffrey Rush’s Lionel Logue, vacate the coronation throne, the seat of Saint Edmund the Confessor.

“Listen to me,” cries the king. “Listen to me!”

“Listen to you? By what right?”

“By divine right if you must. I am your king.”

Roles

The idea of kings ruling by divine right may have a rather seventeenth-century air about it, but even now the idea that there is something holy about the monarchy underpins the British constitutional settlement. “The monarchy by its religious sanction now confirms all our political order,” wrote Walter Bagehot in his 1867 classic The English Constitution, still widely regarded as the most insightful book ever written about the structures of the British State.

Bagehot’s book is one of two treated almost as training manuals by young members of the royal family; the other is Elizabeth R: The Role of the Monarchy Today, written in 1992 by Anthony Jay, best known for his work on television’s Yes, Minister. Jay recognised, and the royal family have clearly embraced his explanation, that the monarchy has two roles: the Queen is called upon formally to be “Head of State” and informally “Head of Nation”.

It’s surely in the latter sense that she’s understood her role as “Defender of the Faith” as having developed over the decades. When she was crowned in 1953 she swore to the utmost of her power to maintain the laws of God, the Protestant Reformed Religion established by law, and the settlement of the Church of England.

It seems, though, that she does not regard her role as a narrowly sectarian one; on the contrary, she sees the Church of England as having a role in fostering pluralism. Earlier this year she explained that, “Its role is not to defend Anglicanism to the exclusion of other religions. Instead, the Church has a duty to protect the free practice of all faiths in this country.”

There’s a lot to be said for having a public figure or institution whose role is to stand as a permanent reminder of what religious faith does and has done for the country, especially at a time when, according to a recent parliamentary enquiry, religion is being marginalised in public life.

The report Clearing the Ground found that although Christians are not being victimised in Britain, religious illiteracy has created situations where religious belief is misunderstood and restricted; court decisions have established a hierarchy of rights with the freedom to manifest religious belief and act in accord with one’s conscience being deemed less important than other rights.

Of course, it’s impossible for a Catholic to discuss Britain’s monarchy without acknowledging the fact that, in a sense, Catholics are second-class citizens in Britain, the only people explicitly barred by law from marrying into the line of succession; any royal who wishes to marry a Catholic must abdicate their position in the line. Recognising that this is discrimination, David Cameron has made noises about changing this, in order to make the monarchy more modern, and the Archbishop of Westminster has welcomed this.

I’m not so sure. I think we all know that in a meaningful sense, British Catholics have the same rights as all other British citizens, and I don’t think it’s a good idea to start pulling threads out of Britain’s constitutional tapestry in order to achieve what would be but the tiniest and most cosmetic of symbolic gains.

Besides, Zara Phillips is off the market.

-- Originally published in The Irish Catholic, 31 May 2012.

A Republican Abroad: Reflections on Britain's Monarchy

I remember little about my first visit to England: being smacked for swearing, and meeting a cousin who I wouldn’t see again for more than thirty years; but then, I was barely two.

I was four the next time I visited, being roused from my bed in the dead of night by my dad, taken to my older sister’s flat, and bundled onto the boat, to sleep on the floor through the night and tread nervously across the gangway to Liverpool’s Pier Head in the morning, looking down at the Mersey’s dark waters. I wasn’t good at heights, even then.

I’ve clearer memories of that second trip, much of which was spent with a cousin a few years older than me: a taxi from the port to my mum’s elder sister’s house, my cousin teasing his older sister’s ‘yucky’ denim skirt and having his wrist hurt when one of his dogs tugged excitedly on the leash he’d wrapped around his hand, proudly whispering the few Irish words I knew to other cousins, skittering across the gravelled ground in a playground after ignoring instructions not to go on the slide as someone had put wax on it, admiring little rubber dinosaurs and finger monsters in a shop, and eating fish on Good Friday. I had a choice of packets of Monster Munch on the boat back home: not just the ones with the Cyclops on the back, the only ones you could get in Dublin, but ones with pictures and descriptions of the Minotaur and the Harpies too.

I’m not sure if modern crisp packets offer a rudimentary Classical education. I suspect not.

I really liked my knights

While I was there I was given a packet of toy knights by an aunt. Little silver-coloured plastic knights, wielding swords and maces. I was thrilled, and my cousin and I sat playing with them together by the window of the living room. ‘They protect the king,’ I said.

‘Don’t be stupid,’ said my cousin, ‘there are no kings anymore. Only queens.’  

‘What,’ I stared, ‘only queens?’

‘Only queens.’

A couple of years later a friend in Dublin earnestly informed me that the Queen had no power and that if she told me to kneel down in front of her then you wouldn’t have to, but that if Mrs Thatcher told me to then I would. That, of course, wasn’t an issue in Ireland, he said: ‘Because Ireland’s a free country.’

I had, it must be said, a somewhat confused childhood view of the British monarchy.

Strange though it seems, there were adverts on the telly when I was a boy, recruiting people for the Household Cavalry. I wanted to join, of course. Swords and breastplates, helmets and boots, black horses and red cloaks: the Life Guards looked like knights, and for a little boy besotted with the legend of King Arthur, this was clearly a career to which one should aspire.

Even now, I reckon the sovereign's escort justifies the monarchy's existence

Being English, my mother approved, though she was far less impressed by my reactions when she made me watch the opening of Parliament one year. The pageantry and the Queen cast no spell over me on that occasion, as I’d have rathered be drawing or reading or playing on the road: ‘Huh,’ I’d scowled, ‘I wish Guy Fawkes had blown it up.’

The years passed, and the British royal family’s shenanigans seemed like one of those soap operas that you never watch but occasionally notice in the background. To this day I’m not sure of the extent to which my memories of Charles and Diana’s wedding are my own or ones manufactured by Sue Townsend and planted in my head by the fictional pen of Adrian Mole. ‘Lady Diana is a commoner,’ I remember my Mam telling me. This mattered, clearly, and was a good thing, though I wasn’t sure why.

We had a Charles and Di tea caddy at home too, acquired at the time of the royal wedding. I think it lasted longer than their marriage. We told scurrilous schoolboy jokes about the royal family at school. ‘Did you hear that Princess Diana is forming a band with Chris Rea? She’s going to call it Diarrhoea!’* ‘Why does Prince Charles have a multicoloured willy? Because he dips it in dye so often!’

None too respectful, you’ll surely agree, but well, we were about ten, and it was no worse than what we sang about what the Queen got up to in 1976. No, I’ll not repeat it here.

A Modern Republic

Curiously, our own largely symbolic head of state, President Hillery, didn’t impinge on my consciousness at all. He met ambassadors, and signed legislation, and inspected the armed forces, and played golf, and generally kept to himself. I remember seeing a red squirrel when peering through the gates of his official residence one day. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one since.

1990 changed that, of course, as we had the first presidential election of my lifetime, with Mary Robinson beating Brian Lenihan and Austen Currie in an AV election.** Robinson changed the Presidency dramatically, expanding the office beyond its official role of ‘Head of State’ to give it a new direction as – to borrow the terminology of Antony Jay’s Elizabeth R – ‘Head of Nation’. She deliberately imbued the office with symbolism, and paved the way for President McAleese’s two terms. McAleese’s presidency, I think most Irish people would agree, was a model of what the presidency can be, and her role in 2011’s visit of the Queen brought that home.

Those English people who seem to think that the only alternative to a constitutional monarchy is an American-style executive presidency merely show how limited their knowledge is of political systems. There are lots of ways to run republics.

Ah, sure, the English are known for the craic...

When I moved to England the first time, back in 2001, I was scornful of the monarchy; it was obviously an anachronism, and an indignified one at that. As the thirtieth anniversary of Bloody Sunday passed I muttered about atrocities being committed against the Queen’s subjects by the Queen’s soldiers, and as the Queen’s fiftieth jubilee approached I scowled and told my friends in halls that there was no way I’d be joining them at the jubilee party at our brother hall.

Minutes before my friends set out I relented, and nine of us headed off, arriving just as one corpulent student – a South African, I think – finished belting out ‘God Save The Queen’. We settled in for an evening of drinking games and even karaoke, with Russell, visiting Dave, insisting that we all join in a rendition of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ that was as energetic as it was surely cacophonous. At the end a drunken undergrad stepped up to join us, so we left him to slur a high-pitched ‘any way the wind blows...’

Afterwards he challenged me to a fight with giant inflatable boxing gloves in the bouncy castle the boys had hired. I smiled and let him charge at me, and stepped aside so that he fell. He struggled to his feet, and I knocked him over again. And again. And again. Letting him steady himself, I waited for his charge once more and again stepped aside so he crashed to the mat. And again I smiled as he wobbled upwards, before knocking him over again.

Afterwards my friend Paul, who died in an accident almost exactly four years later, admiringly said ‘Mister Daly! I’ve never seen such malevolent delight on anyone’s face before!’ He definitely approved.

Back in our own place, we set up a table and chairs and sat drinking and chatting on the lawn till half four. Koji, a Japanese fellow in our hall, joined us and took to running about – for no discernible reason – with his T-shirt drawn over his head. Madeleine rested her head on my shoulder, and we all decided it was time to crash. We planned to rendezvous at breakfast, and belt out at least a bar or two of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ to startle the undergrads, some of whom had witnessed our travesty.

Needless to say, not one of us made it to breakfast.

It had been an absolutely superb night, and the first one we’d had out in weeks where we hadn’t been on edge for half the evening, expecting some kind of trouble. Mary McAleese is great, I thought, but she’s not once given us an excuse for a party.

Not a system I'd establish, but one I can embrace

Last year’s Irish presidential election was a horrible affair, such that I don’t know many people who wouldn’t happily have had Mary McAleese for a third term if only the Constitution would allow it. There was something incredibly unedifying about choosing a head of state – who we’ve now come to think of as a head of nation – through an election that dragged all manner of dirty linen and closet skeletons into public sight.

British republicans who cry out for the glories of an elected head of state seem to be speaking from dogma, not experience; they seem like embodiments of the saying about the grass being greener on the other side. The fact is that there’s something to be said for people being reared and trained through decades for such a role, with there being no question of who the next in line for the job will be.

I’m still a republican, of course; even with nasty elections like the 2011 one I prefer the Irish model of having a largely ceremonial president to a largely ceremonial monarch as head of state, but I’ve come to see that the British solution isn’t that bad, really. It’s not one I’d invent if I were charged with coming up with a political system, but it’s not a bad one to have ended up with, and it's such that I'm wary of attempts to tinker with it. I'm not sure how many wooden blocks can be eased away before the Jenga tower falls.

The monarchy gives constitutional stability, and expresses national unity, and provides a justification for the country being called the United Kingdom, after all. Get rid of the monarchy and the UK would need a new name. For starters.

God save the Queen, so. On balance.



_________________________________________________________________________________
* Yes, I know. Exactly the same joke was made about Chris Rea becoming lead singer of Dire Straits. It makes more sense in that context.
** Yes, because despite the lies of the No lobby in the 2011 AV referendum, more than three countries in the world use AV, with one of the ones using it being the only country with which the UK shares a land border. The first two times I voted it was in AV elections. I still think it's a better system than the absurdity that is FPTP, where the typical MP goes to Westminster having been voted for by fewer people than voted for other candidates.

Bunting

Years ago, some weeks before the last jubilee, I was living in halls when one of my fellow students asked me for help with an essay; I can't remember the topic, but people regularly came to me for advice on essays, whether they were on history, French cinema, Spanish literature, developmental economics, physiotherapy and the mechanics of the human elbow, or whatever.

My own work done for the evening, I ambled down to Sophie's room -- let's call her Sophie, for convenience -- to help her with her work. I knocked, and she answered, and I entered. And stared.

She'd been doing laundry, you see, and was drying it in her room. And not just any laundry, mind. Underwear, of which she appeared to have vast quantities.

She'd drawn lines of twine about her room and hung her laundry from these lines, such that her room was decorated with a multitude of thongs, myriad colourful triangles swaying in the slight breeze her window let in.

To this day I have never seen more pants.

We sat down to work, but after about the fifth time I frowned, restraining an obvious joke about whether she was expecting the Queen to visit, Sophie realised what was bothering me, started to laugh, and suggested we go down to the common room.

Even now, I can't look at bunting without thinking of Sophie's room and shaking my head. This jubilee weekend is proving quite a challenge.

Seal of confession and playing to the anti-clerical gallery

There’s something rather disingenuous about Alan Shatter claiming that the legality of the Confessional Seal is a “side issue”, “a diversion”, and “an entirely bogus issue” in the debate about mandatory reporting of abuse and other serious crimes.


To hear the Minister for Justice talk, you’d almost think that he’d never raised the prospect of the Seal being threatened and that Catholics are kicking up a fuss over nothing. All that’s necessary to refute that is a quick glance at what he said on the very day the Cloyne Report was published.

Announcing that he would be introducing a bill to make the withholding of information about child abuse an offence, Minister Shatter claimed that there would be no “legal grey areas” when it came to the implementation of this legislation. He specifically stated that the laws would also apply to the priests, even where this information is revealed in the confessional.

The crude one-size-fits-all nature of such legislation, as proposed, alarmed me, not least because the last coalition of Fine Gael and Labour considered and decided against introducing mandatory reporting, recognising that such legislation would be impractical and probably counter-productive.

Troubled by this, I took the – for me – unprecedented step of writing about my concerns to the Taoiseach, whose office forwarded it to the Ministers for Justice and Children for their attention. Nine months later, I have yet to receive a substantive reply from Frances Fitzgerald’s office, despite one being promised, but Minister Shatter’s office promptly sent me an interesting email.

Citing section 7(2) of the Criminal Law Act 1997 and section 9 of the Offences Against the State (Amendment) Act 1998, the Minister’s office explained that all citizens already have a duty to report certain serious offences unless they have “reasonable excuse” for not doing so. It would be the purpose of the proposed legislation to extend this principle to cover the withholding of information concerning serious sexual offences against children or vulnerable adults.

It’s worth noting that the government has already extended this principle once; the Criminal Justice Act 2011, as Michael McDowell has pointed out, makes it a criminal offence to fail to report even trivial cases of shop-lifting.

“It must be borne in mind, however,” the letter concluded, “that in regard to the interpretation of the phrase ‘reasonable excuse’ it is a matter for the courts to determine whether any particular circumstances constitute a reasonable excuse. The proposed Bill does not propose any change in that position.”

Now that it’s been published, the Criminal Justice (Withholding of Information of Offences Against Children and Vulnerable Persons) Bill 2012 makes for fascinating reading, not least because it represents an impressive – and I think prudent – backtracking on the part of the government in terms of the exemptions it grants.

Under the terms of the bill, huge numbers of people are exempted from the legislation, notably – the legislation not having a retroactive aspect – everybody who currently has information of abuse having happened. There are vast numbers of such people.

The 2002 SAVI Study found that 27pc of the adult Irish population had experienced some form of sexual abuse in their childhood, most of this committed by people in the broad family circle, including neighbours and family friends. Almost half of Ireland’s abuse survivors – more than 350,000 people – had confided only in family, friends, or trusted professionals, without reporting their abuse to the Gardaí.

It is, I think, a relief that the government has decided against criminalising the tens or even hundreds of thousands of people who have committed no worse crime than listening to abuse survivors tell their stories.

This leaves the specific issue of the Seal of Confession. The reality is that regardless of what Ministers Shatter and Fitzgerald may say in order to look tough and decisive, nobody knows whether the Seal is under threat.

There’s no mention of the Confessional Seal in the bill, but this is hardly surprising: a law directly attacking such a manifestation of religious belief would almost certainly be unconstitutional and wholly contrary to the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees a right to manifest one’s religious beliefs save when it is both lawful and necessary to limit that right.

If neither the IRA’s conspiring with the Nazis during the Second World War nor Republican terrorism during the 1970s and 1980s had provided sufficient grounds to introduce such uniquely repressive legislation, it is difficult to imagine how its introduction now could be legally justified on the basis of “necessity”.

Is it, then, indirectly threatened?

At the heart of the new law is the principle that a person commits an offence if three conditions are met: he or she must know or believe that a sexual offence has been committed by another person against a child or vulnerable adult; he or she must have information which he or she knows or believes might be of material assistance in securing the apprehension, prosecution or conviction of that other person for that offence; and he or she must fail without reasonable excuse to disclose that information as soon as it is practicable to do so to a member of the Garda Síochána.

The obvious problem with construing this as an implicit legal ban on the Seal is that it would be completely unenforceable. Priests are not obliged to accede to requests for face-to-face confession, and given the anonymity which the confessional box exists to protect, why would priests believe themselves to have materially useful information that should be given to the Gardaí?

Even if a priest had known a particular penitent’s identity, how could it be proven in court that said penitent had informed a priest of anything? There would have been no independent witnesses to the conversation, and priests could only respond to interrogation by refusing to comment, barred as they would be from either confirming or denying any questions on the subject.

In practical terms, it seems that this law could only ever to be used to challenge the Confessional Seal if spurious “confessions” would be recorded in cases of entrapment.

More fundamentally, “reasonable excuse” is not defined in law, and the new legislation expressly states that it does not remove any rule of law entitling a person to refuse to disclose information. As such, the existing common law and constitutional recognitions of priest-penitent privilege would almost certainly preclude the courts against interpreting the seal as anything other than a reasonable excuse.

I don’t believe the Seal is threatened in any meaningful way, and if it is, it’s been threatened for fifteen years, with priests breaking the law for the last one if they’ve not reported penitents who’ve confessed to shop-lifting.

The reality, surely, is that the government is simply bluffing in yet another transparent attempt at playing to the anti-clerical gallery.

  -- Originally published in The Irish Catholic, 3 May 2012.

Future for Faith in Schools

The recent proposals from the Advisory Group to the Forum on Patronage and Plurality in the Private Sector make for depressing reading.

While I’m glad that Ruairí Quinn’s dream of half of Ireland’s primary schools being divested from religious patronage looks to have been given short shrift, I take no solace from the recommendation to abolish the requirement that schools should seek to inculcate Christian values, with each faith-based school henceforth being obliged to display images reflecting all the school’s students’ religious traditions

There can be no doubt that the increasing diversity of Ireland’s population and the large number of small schools across the country jointly pose serious challenges for our education system, but the Advisory Group’s suggested solutions seem unimaginative and shallow. They give no sign of a serious attempt to grapple with the real needs of the majority of Irish families or to place Ireland’s changing needs in a meaningful European context.

Irish education is regularly discussed in terms of a narrative that states that we are a diverse country, and as such should have an educational system that reflects that diversity. This narrative, which is repeated ad nauseam by the likes of Ruairí Quinn and Aodhán Ó Ríordáin, doesn’t really follow, not least because modern Ireland isn’t nearly as diverse as we’d sometimes like to think it is.

Diversity

In 1961, according to the census figures from that year, almost 95pc of people living in Ireland self-identified as Catholic; by 2011 the proportion of the Irish population self-identifying as Catholics had dropped to just below 85 per cent.

Catholics may make up a smaller proportion of the Irish population now than half a century ago, but a nation that identifies itself as 85pc Catholic is not a religiously diverse nation. Ireland in fact stands – in name if nothing else – with the likes of Italy, Poland, and Portugal as one of Europe’s most overwhelmingly Catholic countries.

This relative homogeneity makes all the more baffling the Advisory Group’s choice to look for inspiration to Scandinavia, Germany, the Netherlands, Scotland, and Northern Ireland in order to consider how religious education takes place within the primary education systems of a number of other European jurisdictions.

One might wonder why the Advisory Group considered only educational systems in historically Protestant countries, with Catholics being miniscule minorities in some of them. Granted, the Scandinavian countries – with high levels of notional affiliation to national Protestant churches – provide superficial parallels to Ireland’s situation, but none of these jurisdictions are really comparable to Ireland, where the education system has long been rooted in a specifically Catholic idea of education.

Aside from the Advisory Group’s curious disregard for how historically and still largely Catholic countries have handled the challenges posed by increasing religious diversity, I cannot fathom why they didn’t consider how England and Wales – a genuinely diverse jurisdiction – approaches such issues. They may offer answers less simplistic than those proposed by Ruairí Quinn and the Advisory Group.

Two months ago, Baroness Warsi, the Muslim co-chairperson of Britain’s Conservative Party, gave a speech in the Vatican where she spoke of how she had chosen to send her daughter to a convent school:

“Many might think it is unusual for a Muslim mother to send her daughter to a Christian school. But I knew she would be free to follow her faith there... that she would not be looked down on because she believed. And as I had hoped, she found it strengthened her faith, allowing her to define her Muslim identity, allowing her to reflect Christianity within that, adopting the Lord’s Prayer as her own by simply substituting the word ‘Amen’ with ‘Ameen’.”

Pupils

About 10pc of the schools in England and Wales are Catholic, with almost as many schools again being run in combination with other churches. Catholic schools were established in the nineteenth and throughout the twentieth century to educate the children of Irish and other immigrants, and historically were set up by the Catholic communities themselves.

Originally founded primarily to serve immigrants and the poor, such schools persevere in this mission even today, being one of the most powerful instruments of social cohesion in modern Britain. Whereas 22.5pc of the pupils in a typical English school are members of ethnic minorities, 27.5pc of those in English Catholic schools are from such backgrounds, and typically about 30pc of pupils in English and Welsh Catholic schools are not from Catholic families.

Social commentators in Britain typically look to the numbers of pupils in care or in receipt of free school meals when evaluating the extent to which schools cater for the poor, and Catholic schools appear to be broadly in line with the national average in this regard, but it may be the case that these metrics are inadequate for measuring deprivation in schools, not least because there can be a stigma attached to claiming school meals.

Mike Craven, chairman of the board of governors at the illustrious Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School in west London wrote in The Tablet last month to point out that the Vaughan has over twice the national average proportion of pupils with special educational needs with a deprivation indicator well above the national average. He points out that Catholic schools, as a rule, tend to have a much higher proportion of students from the most deprived areas than other schools do and a smaller proportion of students from less deprived areas.

Quality

Heeding the words of Gravissimum Educationis, the Second Vatican Council’s declaration on education, Britain’s Catholic schools “spare no sacrifice... in caring for the needs of those who are poor in the goods of this world.”

The quality of these schools is enviable. National inspections show that Catholic primary and secondary schools are more likely to be “good” or “outstanding” than British schools in general, with pupils in Catholic schools tending to show impressively high levels of learning achievement and personal development. Perhaps most strikingly, given the Irish debate, pupils in Catholic schools have been found to do better in terms of willingness to engage with those from other cultures.

Of course, from a Catholic point of view, this isn’t enough, and there’s a danger that parents could neglect their children’s religious education, leaving it in the hands of the schools so that it stops at the schoolyard gate. As Bunreacht Na hÉireann recognises, the family is “the primary and natural educator of the child,” and this applies as much to religion as anything else.

As Archbishop Diarmuid Martin said on Would You Believe? last December, if we want our children to be members of the Church we need to have maturity and start facing up to our responsibilities. We need to remember that the State is there to help us raise our children, not to do our job for us.

-- Originally published in The Irish Catholic, 26 April 2012.

The Shame of Cardinal Brady?

Well, having had a heads-up that it'd be on, and knowing that I'd be called upon to talk about it on the radio this morning, I watched the BBC's This World documentary, The Shame of the Catholic Church, last night. About abuse in Donegal's diocese of Raphoe, perhaps the most remote part of the country, and about how the Brendan Smyth investigation in the diocese of Kilmore was handled in 1975, it was a powerful piece of television.

I watched it with lips pursed, stomach churning, and eyes narrowed and at times tear-clouded; I can't imagine anyone else watching it without feeling upset, furious, even betrayed. I’m still distraught over it.

I know an enormous amount about abuse in Ireland, knowing quite a few abuse survivors extremely well, and having read several books, hundreds of articles, and all the national and a few international reports on the subject, and even so it was agonising to witness the suffering etched on the faces of Brendan Boland and so many others as they told their tales of the horrendous abuse they suffered at the hands of Eugene Greene and Brendan Smyth.

It was, in its weird way, inspirational too. Whenever I hear abuse survivors coming forth to talk of what was done to them, I'm always struck by their courage.

In the aftermath of last year's Cloyne Report, Archbishop Neary of Tuam preached the Reek Sunday homily on Croagh Patrick, in which he said:

'A woman asked me last week when it would all end. The honest answer is that it will not end until every survivor has told their story and until every victim is facilitated in embarking on their journey to real healing, where true dignity is accorded.'

In that sense, I have to say that I'm glad the BBC has made this documentary. It's afforded some people – some terribly, grievously, shamefully wounded people – the opportunity to tell their stories, and to be heard by millions. I only hope that doing so will help them in some measure towards healing, and will help others tell their stories too.

Misleading

That said, I have serious misgivings about the programme itself, which even while watching it and despite by general sense of disgust at what had happened, I thought was deeply misleading. Of course, Cardinal Brady's recently-issued statement  seems to suggest it was rather more than that.

It was, when you get down to it, two wholly separate documentaries – one on Greene and Raphoe, one on Smyth and Cardinal Brady's role in his investigation – bound together by some commentary, notably by Colm Tóibín, whose book The Sign of the Cross, taking him across Catholic Europe and deep into himself, is something well worth the readings.

The commentary gave the wholly false impression that the Catholic Church in Ireland is a monolith, whereas the reality – as I said yesterday – is that it's more like a loose network of 184 separate organisations, all in communion with each other but with nobody in charge and nothing remotely resembling a chain of command. This isn't a trivial point, because it's utterly crucial to understanding how the abuse phenomenon happened

As Ian Elliott, the Protestant Head of the Church's child protection agency said in 2007,

 'The task of organizing and motivating the whole Church to adopt and implement a single approach to any issue should not be underestimated. Authority is structured in such a way as to allow independence. No one person in Ireland can direct and require the various constituent parts of the Church to act or to follow one particular course of action. This simple fact helps to explain why it has been so difficult to implement a single strategy in the past or to apply across the whole Church the valuable lessons learnt from painful experiences.'

You'd not think, to watch the programme, that one of the people responsible in 1996 for having herded those 184 cats in such a way that the Irish Church collectively adopted the most stringent child protection procedures in the land was the then Coadjutor Archbishop of Armagh, Seán Brady. Granted, the groundwork must have been done by others, but I don’t think we can dismiss his contribution.

These are crucial errors of omission, but there were other errors too – clear factual errors. Notably the programme claimed that when it became news in 2010 that the then Father Brady had been involved in 1975 in an internal abuse investigation about the late Father Brendan Smyth, it was argued that Brady had just been an innocent notetaker. This enabled the programme to wheel out Father Tom Doyle O.P. to argue that this is nonsense, and that the transcripts of the investigation show that Brady was an investigator, even though, by Brady's own account, the transcripts explicitly identify him as a notary.

Now, leaving aside how the story originally broke in 1997, being reported on 10 August of that year in the Sunday Mirror, it simply wasn't argued in 2010 that Brady had merely been a passive notary. As my own account of the matter on my 18 March 2010 blogpost shows, it was widely recognised and never disputed that he'd participated in interviews, taken oaths, and presented findings as well as taking notes:

'Over the weekend it turned out that the current Irish cardinal, Sean Brady, had learned of Smyth's actions back in 1975. An ordinary priest at the time, Brady was a schoolteacher who had been trained in canon law. In this capacity in March and April 1975 he interviewed two teenage boys who had reported Smythe's behaviour, taking notes on the interviews and administering oaths that required the boys to confirm the truthfulness of their statements and to guarantee that they would preserve the confidentiality of the interview process.

Father Brady, as he then was, passed on his findings to his bishop, who made his decision – that Smyth's priestly faculties should be withdrawn and that he should receive psychiatric help – which he passed on to the superior of Smyth's order, the Norbertines. The Norbetines, as we know, utterly failed to enforce the order restricting his priestly role, simply moving him from place to place, and we all know what horrors ensued.'

Betrayal

Other than hearing the stories of the victims themselves, which stood as powerful witnesses to their extraordinary courage, the only new thing in the programme was the fact that during the first interview, that of Brendan Boland, the then Father Brady was given the names and addresses of possible victims. Of course, these would have been passed on to his superior, Bishop Francis McKiernan, but neither McKiernan nor Brendan Smyth's order, the Norbertines, acted to protect these people, with the terrible consequences we all know.

I think it's hugely unfair to blame Brady for not having contacted the families of those children directly, and for not having reported the matter to the police. That might sound crazy, but think of this: nobody, I hope, would ever accuse Brendan Boland's parents for having covered up or facilitated Smyth's abuse by not reporting it to the police. The reality is that the Bolands trusted Bishop McKiernan to handle the matter properly, and the then Father Brady did exactly the same thing.

Brady, in short, was as innocent as Brendan Boland’s parents, and I think his own account of what’s happened is well worth reading. He corrects what appears to be some serious errors in the programme.

I think the teenage Brendan Boland acted heroically in coming forward as he did. And I think he was horribly let down – even betrayed – by some in the Church, to some degree by the late Bishop McKiernan but most especially by Brendan Smyth's superiors in the Norbertine order. I don't think, however, that he – or Smyth's other victims – were betrayed by the then Father Brady.

I'd go further, in fact: I think Brady himself was betrayed, as he interviewed the boys, believed them, passed on his findings to his superior, and trusted in good faith that matters would be handled properly. And they weren't. It’s hardly surprising that he says he was horrified when he learned decades later that his findings had ultimately fallen on deaf or uncaring ears.

Leadership

That said, and I hate to say it, but I'm not convinced that Cardinal Brady really can carry on as the nearest thing the Church in Ireland has to a man at the top. Unfair it may be, but he's fatally tainted by his connection with the Smyth affair, such that it persistently undermines him. I'd not say that he should resign – that's for him, of course – but I'm just not convinced he can be the leader we need right now.

He's already effectively asked to be sidelined, of course, having requested that the Pope appoint either an assistant bishop or, depending on who you ask, a Coadjutor Archbishop – a regent, if you like – such that he could slip off the scene, and I'm not surprised. Although he's done a good job in pulling the Church's disparate elements together to implement common guidelines far tougher than those of the State, it's looked to me as though his confidence has been shot ever since this story was revived a couple of years ago.

I'm just not sure he can be the man to lead a renewal of the Irish Church. And that, I think, is yet another tragedy.

On Brian D'Arcy and Media Hysteria: Some Musings

If this rambles, it's because I'm just trying to get my thoughts straight on something. Feel free to join me on my journey...

Fintan O’Toole’s column today is a forlorn but functionally ignorant piece that disregards recent developments in the Irish Church and comments with scant regard for current context; while I have some sympathy for his views, they should, nonetheless, be taken with more salt than doctors generally recommend.

His general thesis is straightforward. Back in the day, had such priests as Fathers Brian D’Arcy, Tony Flannery, Gerard Moloney, Seán Fagan and Owen O’Sullivan been censured for saying what most Catholics actually think about celibacy, women priests and homosexuality, he would have written a column about the Church abusing its power. Such a column was, as he puts it, ‘a reliable old standby’, the kind of thing Fintan could have written in his sleep, and probably often did.

Nowadays, however, he just sighs. He sees what’s happened as a tragic and humiliation generation of a generation of priests who were full of hope and openness to the world, ‘infused with the energy of reform and renewal’.

Like a legion of lesser journalists, Fintan then turns to the cliché that is the abuse issue, something he has elsewhere recognised is not a Catholic issue or even a clerical one, and says:

‘This is the institution that told us that it was unable to control child rapists in its ranks because it couldn’t just issue orders... Remember the stuff about how bishops were lords in their own dioceses and religious orders were their own kingdoms?

When priests were raping children, the institutional hierarchy was wringing its hands and pleading “what can we do?” The Vatican was very busy and very far away. But when a priest makes some mild suggestions that women might be entitled to equality, the church is suddenly an efficient police state that can whip that priest into line. The Vatican, which apparently couldn’t read any of the published material pointing to horrific abuse in church-run institutions, can pore over the Sunday World with a magnifying glass, looking for the minutest speck of heresy.

An institution so stupid that it thinks its Irish faithful is more scandalised by Brian D’Arcy than by Brendan Smyth is not worth anyone’s anger. It is doing a far better job of destroying itself than its worst enemies could dream of.’

Hyperbole and nonsense, I’m afraid. Hyperbole and nonsense, without a shred of understanding of how things have changed, or any attempt to grasp why this is so.

A Network, not a Monolith

All the stuff about bishops being lords in their own dioceses and religious orders being their own kingdoms was true. Ian Elliott, the Protestant head of child protection for the Catholic Church in Ireland, put it well back in 2009 in a speech on child protection in the Irish Church:

‘Although it is described as a single Church, it is more easily understood as a single communion with close to two hundred different constituent elements. There is no one person who is resident in Ireland and holds the authority to direct all the various parts of the body to act in a particular way...

The most difficult issues for the Church to overcome are those that arise from its structure. It is the largest membership organisation on the island of Ireland with over four and a quarter million members. There are 1366 parishes, 2646 churches, 5069 priests, 942 brothers, and 8093 sisters. By any scale, it is a very substantial organisation. However, it is not a single body but rather a number of quite separate ones that are linked. There are dioceses, religious congregations, orders, missionary societies, prelatures, and religious institutions. In all, there are 184 different parts to the Church in Ireland and each has its own head. Many have their own constitutions and relate to head quarters located in Italy, France, the United States, or some other part of the world.’

Structurally speaking, then, the Irish Church is much better understood as a network rather than a monolith, with that network existing within the much larger network that is the global Church with its roughly 5,000 bishops, 400,000 priests, 750,000 sisters, 220,000 parishes, 5,000 hospitals, 17,500 dispensaries, 15,000 homes for the elderly, and so forth.

Of course, if people don’t believe Elliott, the man whose investigations in Cloyne led to John Magee’s ‘resignation’ and the subsequent Cloyne Report, they could look to the first national investigation of the institutional Church, that being 2005’s Ferns Report, which has a hugely informative section on the institutional structures of the secular diocesan priesthood; of course, I’ve explained all this at some length before.

A System Wholly Dependent on Honesty...

The crucial thing about Church structure that the Ferns Report rightly identified is that contrary to popular mythology it is incredibly decentralised, and communication is almost always a bottom-up rather than a top-down phenomenon. With the all-important exception of doctrine, given the teaching authority invested in the Pope as successor to Peter, the flow of information goes from the parishes to the dioceses and from the dioceses to Rome and does so on a voluntary basis: the quality and comprehensiveness of the information being supplied is wholly in the hands of the supplier.

Putting it another way, in the normal course of things the Pope knows only what the bishops choose to tell him, and the bishops know only what their priests choose to tell them.

This shouldn’t surprise us. Even if it were theologically appropriate to do, as John Allen, the most astute of Vaticanistas, commented last October, Rome simply doesn’t have the tools to micromanage the Church: the total workforce for the Church’s central bureaucracy is 2,170 people, who rely on a budget roughly half that of UCD’s to serve a Church of 1,200,000,000 Catholics.

Sadly, as we know from the two Murphy Reports, as well as interviews with the likes of Monsignor Charles Scicluna, who Marie Collins has described as someone who ‘gets it’ when it comes to the problem of abuse, an awful lot of important information has historically not been passed upwards or even sideways.

Indeed, in terms of abuse, it looks as though the tendency of the Church at a local level – at least during the sixties, seventies, eighties, and early nineties – has almost always been to deny its reality and to hide it from others in the Church. Everything was dealt with, as much as possible, in-house. And, of course, it was usually dealt with badly.

Enter the Visitation

In Mach 2010, in the aftermath of the first Murphy Report, the Pope wrote a pastoral letter to the Catholics of Ireland, in which he expressed great concern about developments in Ireland, saying that he was ‘deeply disturbed’ by what he had learned about the abuse of children and vulnerable young people, and shared in the ‘the dismay and the sense of betrayal’ that so many Irish Catholics felt on learning of what had happened and how the Irish Church authorities had dealt with reports of abuse.

He apologised to abuse victims for their sufferings, saying that he was truly sorry for the wrongs abuse victims had endured, the betrayal of their trust, the violation of their dignity, and the failures of so many in the institutional Church to listen to those courageous enough to speak out.

Commenting on changes within the Irish Church he talked of how traditional sacramental and devotional practices had been increasingly neglected, noted the increasing tendency of Irish priests to engage with the world without sufficient reference to the Gospel, and condemned Ireland’s bishops and heads of religious congregations for grave errors of judgment and failures of leadership, which – among other things – had seriously undermined their credibility and effectiveness.

Listing various actions the Pope was going to take in order to facilitate a renewal of the Irish Church – a renewal that ought to ensure that such horrors as the abuse crisis not happen again, the Pope announced that he was going to organise an inspection or investigation of the Church in Ireland.

‘Furthermore, having consulted and prayed about the matter, I intend to hold an Apostolic Visitation of certain dioceses in Ireland, as well as seminaries and religious congregations. Arrangements for the Visitation, which is intended to assist the local Church on her path of renewal, will be made in cooperation with the competent offices of the Roman Curia and the Irish Episcopal Conference. The details will be announced in due course.’

In other words, the Pope announced that he no longer trusted the Irish bishops to tell him what was going on in Ireland, and so he would be appointing people to go in and find out directly. This, of course, is something that’s not normal practice. When Paul went to Corinth, Peter didn’t send a sceptical Thomas after him to check that he wasn’t hiding something, just as Jesus hadn’t chased after the Seventy Two to make sure they were doing their job. Nicholas I may have invited Cyril and Methodius to come to Rome, but he didn’t dispatch spies after them when they went back to the Moravia and Pannonia, and neither Paul III nor Julius III sent monitors to Indian and Japan to find out what St Francis Xavier was playing at.

It’s been reported that the Irish bishops sought to limit the terms of the Visitation to two issues, these being the handling of child abuse allegations, and the formation of future priests in seminaries. Rome, on the other hand, took the view that such serious problems in the Church were likely to by manifestations of other problems, possibly ones with very deep roots, and that a much wider investigation was needed.

The press release issued by the Vatican made it clear that the Visitation would home in on the abuse crisis, its interest was broader and deeper: it was, rather, ‘intended to assist the local Church on her path of renewal’, and would also have to ‘identify the explicit problems which may require some assistance from the Holy See.’

Following in the Footsteps of Giants...

Just over a month back, a summary of the Visitors’ report was published. It’s an extremely condensed version of a much larger document, which has been given to the bishops, which cannot be understood unless we read between the lines and recognise that it merely points towards things which will have to be worked on.

The essence of the document is that a renewed Church needs a renewed clergy and a renewed laity. In a sense, of course, this is always the answer. Here’s Westminster’s Archbishop Vincent Nichols, for instance, in his recent introduction to his four decades’ old study of the sixteenth-century bishop St John Fisher:

‘It is again popular to criticise the clergy. Has it not always been so? Of course now as then some of the criticism is justified. But its generalisation is not. Now as then there is much evidence of the untiring work of the majority of priests and those who assist them. There is ample evidence of the on-going formation of priests, of the resources and opportunities available to them. There is a need today, as then, to look at the facts of parish life rather than the popular impression.

‘It might also be a consolation to recall that in the fourteenth century too the question of clerical celibacy was contentious and its abolition proposed as a solution to many of the failings attributed to priests.

Fisher’s main effort in support of the clergy was in the area of education. He wanted a clergy that was better educated, thereby better able to inform and form itself for its important ministry. And in that ministry the task of teaching the faith was uppermost in his mind. He wanted his priests to be able and ready to study. He wanted them to bring the fruits of that study into their preaching. He wanted a laity that understood their faith and not be led astray by erroneous opinion and error.’

A well-educated laity wasn’t just something that was needed as error and confusion ran amok in the blaze of the sixteenth century. In his 1851 study, Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England, John Henry Newman famously wrote:

‘I want a laity, not arrogant, not rash in speech, not disputatious, but men who know their religion, who enter into it, who know just where they stand, who know what they hold, and what they do not, who know their creed so well, that they can give an account of it, who know so much of history that they can defend it. I want an intelligent, well-instructed laity; I wish you to enlarge your knowledge, to cultivate your reason, to get an insight into the relation of truth to truth, to learn to view things as they are, to understand how faith and reason stand to each other, what are the bases and principles of Catholicism and where lies the main inconsistencies and absurdities of the Protestant theory.

I have no apprehension you will be the worse Catholics for familiarity with these subjects, provided you cherish a vivid sense of God above and keep in mind that you have souls to be judged and saved. In all times the laity have been the measure of the Catholic spirit; they saved the Irish Church three centuries ago and they betrayed the Church in England. You ought to be able to bring out what you feel and what you mean, as well as to feel and mean it; to expose to the comprehension of others the fictions and fallacies of your opponents; to explain the charges brought against the Church, to the satisfaction, not, indeed, of bigots, but of men of sense, of whatever cast of opinion.’

Newman, famously, was a great believer in the consensus fidelium, that idea that the view of the faithful was crucial for the maintenance of Christian truth. His thinking on this is often misrepresented, however, as though the consensus fidelium is a crude matter of opinion polls. In his 1859 work, On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine, he argued that it had been the collective mind of the faithful who had maintained the truth of the Nicene Creed during the fourth century when legions of bishops and priests had fallen into heresy. But this, he made clear, wasn’t a simple matter of Christians sticking to what they believed to be right:

‘For I argue that, unless they had been catechised, as St. Hilary says, in the orthodox faith from the time of their baptism, they never could have had that horror, which they show, of the heterodox Arian doctrine. Their voice, then, is the voice of tradition...’

In other words, for the consensus fidelium to be worth something, the faithful must have been catechised thoroughly, and this point is something that the Visitation hammers at.

The Visitors Speak...

If we work our way through the visitation summary we see, after all the stuff that obviously addresses the problem of clerical abuse and its mishandling, that a straightforward theme is apparent: that both clergy and laity need to up their respective games.

Look at the massive emphasis placed on the improvement of seminarians’ selection and formation, the urging of religious orders to focus on their scriptural and other sources, the hint at diocesan restructuring, and this:

‘It is vitally important that, at a point in history marked by rapid cultural and social transformation, all the components of the Church in Ireland hear in the first place a renewed call to communion: communion among the Bishops themselves and with the Successor of Peter; communion between diocesan Bishops and their clergy; communion between Pastors and lay persons; and communion between diocesan structures and communities of consecrated life - communion that is not attained merely through human agreements or strategies, but above all by listening humbly to God’s Word and to what the Holy Spirit gives and asks of the Church in our day. Only a united Church can be an effective witness to Christ in the world.

Among the pastoral priorities that have emerged most strongly is the need for deeper formation in the content of the faith for young people and adults; a broad and well-planned ongoing theological and spiritual formation for clergy, Religious and lay faithful; a new focus on the role of the laity, who are called to be engaged both within the Church and in bearing witness before society, in accordance with the social teachings of the Church. There is a need to harness the contribution of the new Ecclesial Movements, in order better to reach the younger generation and to give renewed enthusiasm to Christian life. A careful review is needed of the training given to teachers of religion, the Catholic identity of schools and their relationship with the parishes to which they belong, so as to ensure a sound and well-balanced education.

Since the Visitators also encountered a certain tendency, not dominant but nevertheless fairly widespread among priests, Religious and laity, to hold theological opinions at variance with the teachings of the Magisterium, this serious situation requires particular attention, directed principally towards improved theological formation. It must be stressed that dissent from the fundamental teachings of the Church is not the authentic path towards renewal.’

There’s a lot here, but look especially at that last paragraph, in light especially of the call to communion which the Visitation is intended to assist. That the there’s a widespread tendency in the Irish Church to hold theological opinions at variance with that of the Magisterium can hardly be disputed, especially in light of the results of the recent survey conducted by the Association of (800 or so) Catholic Priests.

It appears that the consensus fidelium in Ireland is out of step with the consensus fidelium of the global Church; it seems that we are slipping away from geographic and diachronic unity with the Church as a whole.

And it is that that brings us to the Passionist Father Brian D’Arcy, the Redemptorist Fathers Tony Flannery and Gerard Moloney, the Marist Father Seán Fagan and the Capuchin Father Owen O’Sullivan.

A Right to Leadership...

To listen to Fintan and others, with their hysterical talk of censorship and silencing, and with the unhelpful distinctions they draw between liberal and conservative clergy, it certainly looks as though there’s a massive clampdown going on in the Irish Church. This, of course, is hysterical nonsense.

Have any priests been laicised because of their views? Have any been excommunicated? Have any been denied their priestly faculties or in any other way suspended from ministry? Have any being denied whatever licenses they have to teach? Are any of them deprived of the incomes they’ve hitherto received through the work they do as priests?

Look at the case of Brian D’Arcy, about whom Fintan and Alison O’Connor and others are so exercised. In what way, exactly, is he censored? Put idle gossip aside, and ignore what journalists have written about this, just for a moment. Pay attention to his own words, as expressed to RTE’s Marian Finucane just the other day: It takes a lot of listening, as he does a lot of scene-setting and digresses a lot to charming effect, but at its core he describes how his ‘silencing’ has worked in practice over the last year.

‘I tried to work with it, in other words to do subjects that were non-contentious insofar as possible, and those subjects that were contentious, not to avoid them, but certainly if I was writing an article for the Sunday World that I would ask an appointed censor–’

 ‘Who appointed the censor?’

‘The Provincial – to read over them. The other man obviously didn’t want to do it, but he took it as his duty to do it. So if there had been articles that I thought needed that, they’d be passed to him, and he’d pass them back.’

‘Was any not passed?’

‘No, but I would have done that anyway, to be honest, you know? He was a good journalist. I would have done that if there was an area that – and I would still do it as a good journalist.’

Now, as a friend put it the other day, what this seems to consist of Father D’Arcy passing articles at his own discretion over to another priest, presumably within his own order and chosen by his superior, for the other priest to look over. This is something he says he would have done anyway, and is something that is normal practice among other orders. And, of course, not one of Father D’Arcy’s articles over the past fourteen months – on no matter how contentious the topic – has been blocked from publication, and despite his claim that he’s not supposed to talk about what’s happened, he’s evidently been talking about it to all and sundry over the last week or so.

If this is censorship, I can’t see what Orwell was so bothered about. Talk of Father D’Arcy being ‘gagged’ is clearly rot.

Granted, other priests seem to have had somewhat sterner fates, though again, none have been denied their priestly faculties, their incomes, or whatever licences they have to teach. Even Father Tony Flannery’s enforced six-week retreat is best understood as medicinal, for want of a better word: a chance for him to take a sustained period of time to reflect and pray and see if he could in conscience bring his heart and deeds into union with the mind of the Church.

Whatever else they may be – journalists or whatever – Father Flannery and Father D’Arcy and the rest are priests first and foremost. That defines them. As priests they have a privileged position, in that they’re given a pulpit from which to speak, but they have responsibilities to that position, one of which is that they much speak not merely from the heart but in accord with the Church. They don’t have days off from being priests; they’re always priests and are always called upon to represent Christ and his body the Church.

It’s not good enough to say that they subscribe to the Nicene Creed; plenty of Protestants subscribe to the Church’s historic creeds, but devout though they may be as Christians, they’re certainly not Catholics. There are, after all, Catholic and Protestant ways of understanding the ancient creeds, and there’s more to Catholicism than the Creed. The Creed never mentions the Eucharist, and it never mentions the Priesthood, to take two obvious examples.

The faithful are entitled to orthodox leadership, to priests who will teach in accord with what the Church teaches. That’s not to say that there’s not room for legitimate dissent on loads of things, but there are a fair few topics on which Rome has spoken and the case is indeed closed.

As Benedict said in a homily back in 1979:

‘To say that someone’s opinion doesn’t correspond to the doctrine of the Catholic church doesn’t mean violating their human rights. Everyone should have the right to freely express their own view, which the Catholic church decisively recognized at Vatican II and still does today. This doesn’t mean, however, that every opinion must be recognized as Catholic.’

That’s the key thing. Aquinas used to argue that hypocrisy was a worse sin than heresy, and while people are fully entitled to disagree with the teaching of the Church, if in conscience they cannot accept the teaching of the Church, then this has consequences. Certainly, if one disagrees with the Church on an important issue, then one can hardly stand as a priest, an ordained representative of the Church who acts in persona Christi, and teach something which the Church does not believe.

Irish Catholics are entitled to be led into their faith by people who hold to all the Catholic Church teaches. It’s as simple as that.

So is this why there’s a clampdown?

It’s far from clear that there is a clampdown going on. It seems that there were at least a handful of priests whose names were sent to the CDF for one reason or other a while back, but we need to be wary of assuming that just because all the stories are breaking at once, this means that there's a frenzy of anti-dissident action going on in Rome.

After all, the abuse stories started to break from the mid-1990s on, but they reflected abuse that had taken place in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.

It's more than likely that there are those in Rome who are watching what's going on in Ireland with a very keen eye, largely due to the abuse crisis, which as the two Murphy Reports so ably demonstrate, was almost wholly concealed from Rome.

Rome has taken plenty of steps over the past twelve years or so to try to eradicate the problem of sexual abuse within the Church, but it's clear that this can't be enough: the best policies in the world don't mean anything if those charged with implementing them are lax about doing so, and so Rome has been forced to step in. It's been encouraged by the fact that the Irish Church has been in the main handling the abuse issue well over the last decade or so; although this is terribly, tragically, heartbreakingly late, it nonetheless is happening. 

However, it's evidently become clear that there are other problems in the Irish Church, problems that are in dire need of being seriously tackled, and an open climate of ‘undeclared heresy’, as Diarmuid Martin has put it, is central to this. So, having belatedly tacked the abuse issue, it makes sense that the Church start to tackle those priests who teach people that certain unCatholic things are fully compatible with the faith.

That said, Rome is hardly putting the boot in. A handful of priests have been – in practice – either cautioned or had their writings restricted in the most lenient of ways. Nobody’s been excommunicated, or expelled from the priesthood, or deprived of a livelihood or an income, or even suspended from ministry for a while.

And there's a serious school of thought that even this is to paint too hysterical a picture. It may simply be that Cardinal Levada, head of the CDF, is about to retire and move back to America, and has been clearing out his desk so his successor has a fresh start. I'm not just saying that because my editor says so, though he does; John Allen says so too, pointing out that this is normal practice for heads of Vatican offices as they approach retirement, and Cardinal Levada will turn 76 on June 15.