In his monumental tome from 2007, A Secular Age, Canadian philosopher
Charles Taylor sets himself the task of accounting for the dramatic departure
of modernity from the clarity and cohesiveness of a God-governed cosmos.
Time was, religion was everywhere – was, as Taylor puts it, ‘interwoven with
everything else’. It was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to share in
a cosmic and social imaginary that made sense of everything in terms of God’s
pervasive presence and providence. But then came the ‘disenchantment’.
God ceased to be, for many people, even ‘an eligible possibility’, and where
a religious outlook did survive it provided merely one explanation among
others. Whatever its merit, it was now purely a private matter; there was no
room for it in the public sphere.

There can be no doubt that Ireland lies near the endpoint of the process
Taylor describes. Here, as in most developed world countries, transcendental
values tend not to feature in the dominant perceptions of human flourishing;
the facts and values of the world do not require reference to anything beyond
it. Hence, the ‘immanent frame’, with all its subjectivities, is sufficient. It
follows then that religion has become a private thing, and the public sphere
reflects instead what Taylor calls a culture of ‘expressive individualism’. It
took only a few decades for this to happen. As historian Crawford Gribben
recently put it, Ireland has undergone ‘sudden-onset secularisation’, a
bewilderingly swift transformation of its religious, political and social
culture. The past, even the relatively recent past, is a strange country.
How is this to be understood or explained? Taylor’s grand-theory
description – his charting of the ‘inward turn’ in both religious practice and
the exercise of reason, as well as his account of how transcendent humanism
appeared increasingly problematic – helps explain the conditions which made
the dramatic shift in Ireland’s self-understanding possible. Many Irish people
felt ‘cross-pressured’ (to use Taylor’s term) in the face of the conflict between
Christian orthodoxy and other systems of meaning. The outside pressures
offered by purely immanent perspectives helped to ‘fragilise’ their Christian
beliefs and present them with multiple possible ‘third ways’, intermediate
stances between belief and unbelief.

But what about the pressures from within? What about the fragilisation of
Christian belief in Ireland caused by another kind of disenchantment – the loss
of trust in the Irish Catholic Church as a force for good, the sense of betrayal
as the sordid history of clerical sexual abuse, the collaboration of religious
congregations in oppressive state institutions, and the mendacious cover-ups
by church officials became apparent? A different kind of explanatory model
from Taylor’s is needed to make sense of all this. What is required in the first
instance is a more micro-level scrutiny of Irish society and culture during the
decades of the transformation and a more concrete inspection of how Irish
people today have come to understand what happened to them and where it
has left them. Derek Scally’s recent book The Best Catholics in the World
(Dublin: Sandycove, 2021) is a thoughtful and honest effort to address this
need, not indeed as an academic venture but rather as a journalistic bid to put
together a credible account of a seismic upheaval in Irish society and culture.
For Scally the bid is also personal. The Ireland of his youth was
unquestionably – and no doubt unquestioningly – Catholic, but that identity
and its legacy seem deeply problematic to him now. He writes from the need
to understand how things happened the way they did.
I want to understand how my Catholic past went from rigid reality to
vanishing act – now you see it, now you don’t. To do that, though, I
need to understand how Catholic Ireland rose to glory and shrivelled
up in shame. Until I do that, I cannot have a proper parting. (9)
The answer to the question of how the Church went from glory to shame is
complex, of course, and requires looking at Irish life well beyond the walls
of Church houses and institutions. Scally covers this well. The prevailing
culture, as he depicts it, was indeed one of ‘clerical coercion’, ‘unforgiving
rigidity’, and Victorian values that had been ‘retooled’ by the Catholic
Church; but it was also one of ‘social snobbery’, where the state – and indeed
the population at large – was content to have ‘shame-containment’ facilities
for ‘fallen’ and troubled women, where the moral probity of clerics was taken
as given, and where, when suspicions arose, ordinary people failed to rise
above a culture of deference, conformity, and silence.

The pressing question is how we should, in the present, address this toxic
past. Scally looks to Germany, his home now for more than twenty years, for
guides to the complex business of coming to terms with the past and ‘with
everyone’s role in it’. ‘It took decades,’ he writes for Germans to realize that engaging with their society’s past –supplementing guilt and blame of the actual perpetrators then with
a wider narrative of personal responsibility to remember – improves their society’s present. (284)

He cites the judgement of German thinkers such as Walter Benjamin,
Theodor Adorno, and Jürgen Habermas that ‘owning our past and how we
remember it is a prerequisite for meaningful engagement with past wrongs,
and that critical reflection on a nation’s past is the normative basis for a
healthy democracy’. We could say that, mutatis mutandis, the same holds for
the Catholic Church, both in Ireland and elsewhere. For the sake of a healthy
future, the Church must reflect critically on its past. If it doesn’t succeed
in remembering the injustices it has perpetrated or permitted, in owning
them and keeping the memory of them alive, bearing ‘ethical witness’ to
the victims through reconciliation, restorative justice, and appropriate
memorialisation, it cannot expect to be in a position to prevent comparable
injustices happening in the future.

This judgement, this insight into the critical significance of historical
suffering and injustice, lies at the root of the theological work of another
German thinker, Johann Baptist Metz. Metz engaged extensively with
Habermas, Ernst Bloch, and other critical theorists associated with the
Frankfurt School, and he addressed similar questions to theirs, but in a
theological register. His highly influential political theology, which for him
constituted a ‘practical fundamental theology’, is an elaborate working out
of the theological significance of memory, most especially the memoria
passionis, the memory of the suffering of others:
The whole of my theological work is attuned by the specific
sensitivity for theodicy, the question of God in the face of the history
of suffering of the world, of ‘his’ world. What would later come to
be called ‘political theology’ has its roots here: speaking about God
within the conversio ad passionem.
At the heart of the issue of historical injustice, for Metz, is what Walter
Benjamin called ‘anamnestic solidarity’, a resolute remembrance of those
who have suffered in the past – remembering them against the dominant
narratives, against what Metz calls ‘the conversation of the victors’.
Theology, understood in this way, is always a form of interruption – as of
course was the life and death of Jesus Christ. And it is Christ’s suffering that
signals the emancipatory and redemptive potential of the memoria passionis.
Christ’s redemption cannot be separated from his passion and death. The
future is embedded in the past. The eschatological hope of the Church rests
firmly, then, in the memory of the suffering of Christ, hence in that of all
victims. And so, the memory of Christ is, in a term Metz borrowed from
Herbert Marcuse, a ‘dangerous memory’ – – dangerous because it gives pride
of place to the narrative of an innocent man suffering torture and death at
the hands of those in power, and so keeps alive a commitment to justice and
change. It is, he writes, an anticipatory remembering; it holds the anticipation of a specific
future for humankind as a future for the suffering, for those without
hope, for the oppressed, the disabled, and the useless of this earth.
Christian hope for the future, in sum, lies in remembrance of the victims
of the past and service to victims in the present. A necessary corollary of
this is that Church authority ought not to be exercised as a form of power,
but only, as Pope Francis has repeatedly said, as a form of service. Metz
cautions against ‘locating’ and ‘enthroning’ the ‘God of the passion of Jesus’
politically, whether by a party, a race, a nation, or indeed a church. This must
be opposed and unmasked as idolatry, or mere ideology.

The Catholic Church in Ireland, of course, has been well and truly
‘dethroned’ when it comes to relations with the state. In his epilogue, Scally
recognises that the context for his book is the present-day ‘reinvention of
Ireland’ after it has flipped from a religious to an increasingly secular society.
New terms of engagement have still to be defined, but, Scally writes, ‘if it is
to be successful, it needs to be more inclusive and generous to all – to people
of faith and non-believers – than it was in the past’. More generous too, as
both Scally and Metz would have agreed, to the historical victims of its own
abuse of power.

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the removal by referendum
of the mention of the special position of the Catholic Church in the Irish
constitution. In a sense the amendment was largely symbolic, as Ireland
never was strictly a confessional state and the surrounding articles in the
constitution showed a firm commitment to liberal democratic values. Yet
the result did indeed mark a significant shift in Irish attitudes: the Catholic
Church, just like any other Church or faith, would henceforth be a beneficiary
of the secular values enshrined in the constitution, but its teaching would have
no formal bearing on how they were to be interpreted. Most Catholics now
would see this decoupling of Church and state as a positive and necessary
thing. We find in Metz, as indeed we do in Charles Taylor, a sense that the
secularity of the world in recent centuries is not fundamentally opposed to
Christianity, that it is in fact originally a Christian event that has arisen, as
Metz puts it, ‘not against Christianity but through it’.

There are grounds for hope here. There is a common humanistic discourse
that Christians, other people of faith, and those without any faith can enter
into on equal terms, and if good discursive habits are developed Christians
can make an invaluable and decisive impact in a culturally polycentric world
– not by any means free of discord but protected from the worst injustice and
violence by a common regard for human dignity and a respect for positive
political and social norms. For this to happen, though, neither the Church nor
the state can afford to allow the past to be forgotten. Scally finishes his book
with a cautionary tale from Germany. Erich Maria Remarque’s harrowing
novel about the First World War, All Quiet on the Western Front, was a
searing condemnation of the old conservative elite and the utter indifference
of military commanders to the suffering of their soldiers on the front, and
as such it was suppressed by the Nazis. ‘A society blinded by the trauma
of one war,’ Scally concludes, ‘walked into another’. And in July of this
year Pope Francis sounded the same note when he asked forgiveness of the
indigenous peoples of Canada for the sorry history of abuse in the residential
schools: ‘Without real indignation, without historical memory and without a
commitment to learning from past mistakes, problems remain unsolved and
keep coming back’.

Metz is just as admonitory, but his summary of what there is to be gained
by not turning our backs on the past rings a welcome note of hope:
What the memory of suffering brings into political life… is a new
moral imagination with regard to others’ suffering, which should
bear fruit in an excessive, uncalculated partiality for the weak and the
voiceless. But this is the way that the Christian memoria passionis
can become a ferment for that new political life for which we are
searching, so that we might have a human future.
***
The contributors to this issue of Studies were asked to write in response to
Derek Scally’s book, either engaging with it directly or holding it in mind
while developing a related theme. Some of the articles take a diagnostic
approach, examining the nature of the damage and the root causes behind
it, while others look forward to the ways in which the Catholic Church can
address its past and build up a healthier culture for the future.

In ‘Home Truths: Irish Neoliberalism’s Eclipse of Irish Catholicism’,
Kevin Hargaden takes his cue from Scally’s observation that ‘historic,
economic and social circumstances made us subjects of a very particular
type of Catholicism in Ireland’. What specifically set Irish Catholicism
apart? In Hargaden’s view, the Irish Church took its shape from the anxiety
over ‘societal legitimation’ and therefore the ‘pursuit of social and political
influence through economic attainment’, which were inseparable from the
‘devotional revolution’ and Church reform of Cardinal Cullen in the midnineteenth
century. ‘If the capitalist ambition of the emerging middle class
played a central role in explaining the rise of Irish Catholicism’, Hargaden
asks, ‘why would it not play a part in its downfall?’ Applying the insights
of Australian sociologist Melinda Cooper concerning the unlikely alliance
between neoliberalism and neoconservatism, he argues that the sense of
‘family values’ that was enshrined in Irish Catholic life was traceable to
the ‘moral vision’ of neoliberal technocracy. One way to continue Scally’s
work, he suggests, would be to ‘consider the ways in which neoliberalism
has stepped into the space that had been occupied by the church’. That this
transition from the moral legitimation of Catholicism to that of neoliberalism
occurred so smoothly is due to the fact that ‘Irish Catholicism had already
cultivated and cherished these commitments over generations’.
In ‘Surviving the Secular: Faith, Grief, Parody’, Michael Kirwan is
ultimately sanguine about what he calls ‘the Church’s survival into a post-
Christendom future’. The issue, as he sees it, is that it is not just the Church
that is in crisis, but the secular state too. With Charles Taylor he rejects the
‘subtraction model’ of the secularisation thesis: ‘[I]t is simply not the case
that stripping away religion reveals a fully coherent and autonomous (ovenready?)
secular social order’. Rather, secular society lacks the resources to
provide a governing moral vision that establishes binding ideals – the kind of
vision that religions can provide, as exponents of postsecularism affirm. So,
there is an opportunity here for both religion and the secular order. Kirwan
invokes Pope Francis’s image of a ‘polyphonic’ resolution, ‘emphasising
harmony and complementarity’. As for the Church specifically, if it can learn
once again to ‘parody’, to ‘re-work and re-dedicate what it finds to hand in
the surrounding culture’, it may ‘survive and even flourish’.
Whatever shape future relations between Catholicism and the Irish state
takes, it is certain that the priest will never again hold the status that he did
in decades past. John Littleton writes of his own experience of priestly life,
spanning nearly forty years, in ‘The changed Reality of Being a Catholic
Priest in Today’s Ireland’. In the early years of his ministry, the priest enjoyed
social centrality and an extraordinarily high level of deference; but in more
recent years that has all evaporated, and priests have had to learn to be ‘happy
in their irrelevance’ – a phrase which Littleton sees as wise and helpful. Still,
he insists, priests need to remain convinced that they have an important role
in both the Church and in society.

The image of the priest has another significance, however. It lies at the
heart of a perception of injustice in the Church which is still in critical need
of attention. Gráinne Doherty’s essay, ‘Women’s Prophetic Voice for the
Church’, notes a striking disconnect between the lived experience of women
and the Church’s language about them. Specifically, Catholic talk about the
ontological difference between women and men, or about complementarity,
or about ‘feminine genius’, all of which have appeared in the texts of the
last three popes, don’t resonate with women of faith in Ireland. Women are
spoken about as if they were central to the life of the Church, but they are
treated as if they were merely peripheral. Where this shows most starkly is
in relation to sacramental ministry, particularly concerning the Eucharist. For
many women, Doherty observes, the Eucharist is marked by ambivalence:
‘[O]n the one hand, it proclaims a Gospel of justice and equality, but on
the other it is a site of exclusion for women’. She finds grounds for hope
in the Irish Church’s recent experience of the synodal process. This has
given the Church an opportunity to remember that ‘not only is it called to be
prophetic, but it is itself challenged to listen to the prophetic voice of its own
marginalised’.

Two members of the Irish synodal pathway steering committee, Bishop
Brendan Leahy and Gerry O’Hanlon SJ, express careful optimism here that
Pope Francis’s implementation of synodality can succeed in setting the
Church on a new footing, one that would leave little room for the abuses
of power that have blighted the Church in the past. The point of synodality
is to ‘invert the pyramid’, as Francis has frequently said – to undermine the
older power structure by implementing the ecclesiological vision of Vatican
II. The ‘base’, the People of God, are set above the clergy and holders of
ecclesiastical office, whose function it is to listen, to support and to serve.
Francis doesn’t see this as one option among others, or as a tactic for the
present time. Synodality, he has said, ‘fundamentally expresses “the nature
of the Church, its shape, its style and its mission”’. It is a fruit of the renewal
of ecclesiology in Vatican II, and so it is a cause for concern for the Pope
that it is dismissed or disparaged frequently by traditionalist Catholics –
‘restorers’, as he calls them in the conversation he had with the editors of
European Jesuit journals last May, which is published in this issue. ‘[T]
he current problem with the Church,’ he remarked, ‘is precisely the nonacceptance
of the Council’.

In Part I of his essay, ‘Going Deep, Going Forth, Going Together’ (Part II
will be published in the winter Studies), Bishop Leahy sees Pope Francis as
building on the work of his post-conciliar predecessors, taking the next step
in implementing the ‘renewal movement’ by promoting its central themes of
communion, mission, and participation. All of this Francis sees as aspects of a
‘pastoral conversion in the Church’s way of seeing and acting’, instigated by
the council and bearing fruit now in the synodal path. The Church in Ireland
has had to confront the dark chapters of its own history, Bishop Leahy says,
and this has shown clearly both ‘the need to go deeper’ and the importance
of change from below.

For Gerry O’Hanlon (‘The Future of the Catholic Church in Ireland:
Synodality and the Wounds of Abuse’), Derek Scally’s book is of ‘central
relevance’ to reform and renewal of the Irish Church, which is the agenda of
the synodal pathway. Scally warns that if the Church fails to reflect deeply on
the sexual abuse scandal it runs the risk of ‘repeating, unconsciously and in
new forms, the structural flaws of the past’. O’Hanlon concurs. How can the
Church tackle the serious issues of the day, he asks, ‘if we do not understand
what caused the trauma that was clerical sexual abuse in all its forms?’ He
also endorses Scally’s suggestions of practical steps in coming to terms with
our past – setting up museums, institutes of remembrance, memorials, and
the like, but most of all the implementation of some kind of process like a
citizens’ assembly. For O’Hanlon, the synodal pathway performs within the
Church much of the function which a citizens’ assembly would perform in
the state at large. By opposing the clericalism that has often led to the abuse
of power and by inviting all the Church’s faithful to enter into a free and open
dialogue, the synodal pathway presents the Church with an opportunity to
conduct a proper ‘reckoning’, an appropriate coming to terms with abuse in
the Church’s past.

In ‘Christianity for Grown-ups’, Kieran O’Mahony also sees The Best
Catholics in the World as essential reading for people involved in faith in
Ireland. It requires them to try to understand from their own experience what
it was that brought about ‘the cultural collapse of the Irish Catholic Church
as a voice in society’. This, in fact, is something which O’Mahony believes
the synodal pathway has facilitated effectively. It has brought to the surface a
range of views from parishes and dioceses across the country and displayed,
he believes, ‘a powerful desire for further adult faith formation’. Key to the
atrocities perpetrated in the Church and to its general decline, O’Mahony
contends, is the longstanding failure of the Church to provide thorough
catechesis – to give people an adult faith when they were no longer children
– and to help them develop a deep prayer life and ‘a grown-up frame of
reference for what we believe’. Sources of hope for him include the collapse
of Cardinal Cullen’s church and ‘the powerful awakening and ownership
triggered by the Synodal Pathway’.

Br Emmaus O’Herlihy’s essay to accompany his extraordinary painting
of the Samaritan woman at the well, which hangs on the wall of the church in
Glenstal Abbey and graces the cover of this issue of Studies, was not requested
as a response to Scally’s book. It is included here, however, because it holds a
message that is germane to our theme. That is, as Emmaus O’Herlihy puts it,
‘that Christianity is founded not on a set of creedal formulations or a logical
system but on the person of Jesus Christ’. What we see in the painting is an
encounter, a deep engagement with Christ at the well. Cor ad cor loquitur,
as St John Henry Newman’s coat of arms has it – ‘One heart speaks to
another’. That it shows a woman leaning in on Christ, not reticent or passive
but forward and almost pushy, also conveys a valuable object lesson. It both
rejects a stereotype which historically has impeded efforts to combat the
exclusion and unequal treatment of women in the Church and it displays
the kind of parrhesia – courageous outspokenness – which Pope Francis has
encouraged and which is essential to the success of synodality.