No more power, no more glory

The economy is booming, the culture is booming ... everything is booming, it seems, in the Irish Republic, except the Church. There's even a phrase for it. Ireland, they're saying, is now a `post-Catholic' country.

The fashionable phrase in Dublin these days is "post-Catholic Ireland", as in "We are living in post-Catholic Ireland." It is much favoured by the Finance Minister, Ruari Quinn, and very much put into practice by the Equality Minister, Mervyn Taylor, who, having successfully introduced divorce to post-Catholic Ireland, is now bent on taking over the Church's former role of teaching compulsory virtue to the Irish electorate.

Once the Church preached that all were cherished equally by God: now the state, having taken over the Church's role, seeks to enforce virtue by law. Mr Taylor's new Equality Bill is draconian in its proposals. It will restrict trading relations and such matters as private club rules, for no one will be permitted to exclude anyone else on grounds of sexual orientation, gender, family or marital status, age, race creed, colour or membership of the travelling community, which means that if I wish to set up a women's club for the over-40s, the Irish state (if Mr Taylor has his way) will enable 35-year-old males who are thus excluded to sue me.

How do we know that Ireland is "post-Catholic?" Because the opinion polls indicate that most Irish people in the Republic have in effect become Lutherans: they judge issues according to their private consciences, rather than as the magisterium guides them, with the exception of some older folk who still anxiously look towards the Church's authority. In any case, you only have to look around you, or pick up the newspapers and publications in Dublin now. Popular magazines such as Hot Press and In Dublin run some of the most explicit sexual adverts I have seen outside of a London's telephone booth ("Housewives' sex offer: every variation available! Ring now!") and of course pour scorn and bile upon Catholicism at every turn.

You don't have to hold a Marxist conspiracy theory to realise that (a) the politicians and (b) the sex-and-consumerist industry are keen to emphasise that Ireland is now post-Catholic, because they are seeking to occupy the Church's place in the social order. The politicians criticise the Church for being "authoritarian" - but they want that authority. The sex- and-consumerists criticise the Church for being "repressive" because they want the market to respond to their ceaseless urgings towards the pleasure principle.

Individuals fancifully believe that they judge each issue on their conscience, but in actual fact, most people now judge each issue on their conscience, but in actual fact, most people now judge each issue according to what Oprah Winfrey or Rupert Murdoch's executives or the latest soap operas tell them. With great respect, most people do not reach individual judgments on most issues - I know I don't; I'm influenced by other voices. You only have to measure this proposition by the power of advertising. Individual judgement is weak and easily influenced by cultural elements.

So "post-Catholic" Ireland is not just something that is happening: it is something in which particular groups have a direct interest in making happen. Lenin was right when he said that the crucial question in politics was "Who whom?" - which means "Who benefits?" Who has the power? Who kicks whom in the teeth?" The advocates of "post-Catholic Ireland" are those who see themselves replacing Catholic Ireland. `They will be the Whos who have seen off the Whoms.

A key aspect of the "post-Catholic" Ireland agenda is the insistent blackening of every element of Catholic Ireland's past. The entire history of our country is now painted as though darkly governed by a cowled Inquisition of priests and crozier-bearing bishops who treated politicians like puppets, regarding the populace as moral serfs and dominating everything they touched by a form of terror. It will be noticed that De Valera is demonised at every turn - the portrayal of Dev as a devious hypocrite and probable assassin of Collins was very deliberately crafted by Neil Jordan, a strong "post-Catholic Ireland" man - because Dev is now assoicated with that Catholic Irish past in which everything was so grim and "repressive".

The true picture of Catholic Ireland in the past - that the Church was most ardently, most passionately, and most fiercely supported and defended by the people: that the politicians curried favour shamelessly with bishops whenever they could for the same cynical reasons that they now curry favour with Brussels - because they reckoned it meant votes, and thus power and revenue, and that such "repressive" aspects of the past as literary censorship were not led primarily by priests, but by little old ladies on library committees who, in their thousands, submitted books to the Censorship Board demanding that these not be available in the public realm.

In fact, liberal priests such as Fr John Kelly and Fr Peter Connolly, through campaigns carried out in periodicals such as The Furrow, and on public platforms elsewhere in the early 1960s, were prime movers in relaxing the Irish censorship. The late Brian Lenihan, who, as Minister for Justice in 1967, dismantled the fiercest elements of the censorship laws, told me that he was greatly influenced by these liberal and cultivated priests who had argued for more personal freedom in the right to read.

One of the commonest calumnies about Catholic Ireland in the past was that the Church was so obsessed with sexual prohibitions that it preached on nothing else. This is utter baloney. An examination of the themes underlined in the Catholic devotional and ecclesiastical magazines in the 1940s and Fifties shows that probably the most common theme for Church guidance was honesty. They preached vehemently against crime and behaving dishonestly, and ever underlined the importance of acting justly in trading and working exchanges. They were dead hot on restitution. Sins of dishonesty (or of calumny) could not be pardoned until restitution was made.

Not coincidentally, I think, one of the most salient aspects of "post- Catholic Ireland" now is an alarming rise in crime - and murder - and the disappearance, in the countryside, of that trust and openness which used to be characteristic of rural Ireland.

Spirituality among the Irish is always strong, but it is a free-floating spirituality now, settling on everything from Buddhism to Scientology to New Age crystal-gazing and tree-hugging. Whether the Catholic Church in Ireland can compete with these new forms of faith - let alone compete with the consumerism and the political power that has taken its place - must, I suppose, depend upon the Holy Spirit eventually. But sociologically speaking, no system which has lost its confidence can survive, and I think the saddest thing of all is that Catholicism in Ireland has totally lost its confidence, its nerve, its belief in itself and its affirmation of its own values

This article first appeared in the `Catholic Herald'. `Goodbye to Catholic Ireland' by Mary Kenny is published on 24 March by Sinclair-Stevenson.