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89 5 Contemporary Irish Catholicism: A time of hope! Vincent Twomey So-called traditional Irish Catholicism is largely the product of historical and cultural processes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as I have tried to point out in The End of Irish Catholicism? (Twomey 2003). It had many weaknesses. However, it also had many strengths. New religious orders, such as the Irish Christian Brothers, the Presentation and Mercy Sisters, were founded in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by remarkable men and women such as Blessed Edmund Rice, the
53 3 Dethroning Irish Catholicism: Church, State and modernity in contemporary Ireland David Carroll Cochran In his essay A Catholic Modernity?, the Canadian Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor reflects on how modern secularism’s process of ‘dethroning’ Catholicism, of gradually disentangling the Church from the dominant institutions of societies where it long held political and social power, has paradoxically extended many of Catholicism’s core commitments and liberated it to find a new and creative voice within modernity. Taylor is reacting to a general
This book engages with the spectacular disenchantment with Catholicism in Ireland over the relatively short period of four decades. It begins with the visit of Pope John Paul II in 1979 and in particular his address to young people in Galway, where the crowd had been entertained beforehand by two of Ireland’s most celebrated clerics, Bishop Eamon Casey and Fr Michael Cleary, both of whom were engaged at the time in romantic affairs that resulted in the birth of children. It will be argued that the Pope’s visit was prompted by concern at the significant fall in vocations to priesthood and the religious life and the increasing secularism of Irish society.
The book then explores the various referenda that took place during the 1980s on divorce and abortion which, although they resulted in victories for the Church, demonstrated that their hold on the Irish public was weakening. The clerical abuse scandals of the 1990s were the tipping point for an Irish public which was generally resentful of the intrusive and repressive form of Catholicism that had been the norm in Ireland since the formation of the State in the 1920s.
Boasting an impressive array of contributors from various backgrounds and expertise, the essays in the book attempt to delineate the exact reasons for the progressive dismantling of the cultural legacy of Catholicism and the consequences this has had on Irish society. Among the contributors are Patricia Casey, Joe Cleary, Michael Cronin, Louise Fuller, Patsy McGarry, Vincent Twomey and Eamonn Wall.
of Irish Catholicism purely in terms of the sexual abuse crisis would be, of course, to overlook the broader secularising societal changes in the west, affecting both Catholics and Protestants. The influential Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, thinking from the perspective of what he calls north Atlantic civilisation, has provocatively asked, ‘Why was it virtually impossible not to believe Irish identity and the future of Catholicism 367 in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable?’34
, who had been secretary to Pope Paul VI, Pope John Paul I and John Paul II, resigned as a result. In 1979, all had seemed well in Irish Catholicism, and the enthusiasm surrounding the Pope’s visit would have conveyed that to any outside observer. A comprehensive survey of values and attitudes in the mid- 1970s recorded that 91 per cent of Irish Catholics attended mass weekly (Catholic Communications Institute of Ireland 1975: 71). But cracks were beginning to appear as early as the 1950s and certainly in the 1960s. However, the period addressed here, 1979 to 2011
Irish Catholicism, in essence this visit marked the end of an era’ (Littleton and Maher 2010: 7). Vocations had already begun to decline in the 1970s, and the gradual permeation of the BBC and ITV channels across the country, as opposed to just the eastern seaboard, meant that orthodox opinion was no longer the only voice heard in the media. By the 1980s and 1990s, these channels were now becoming more widespread across Ireland. People now had an element of choice in terms of forming their attitudes, and where heretofore the voices they heard were almost univocal
nationalism had many tensions. Two concerned the ‘Catholic Whig’ project, associated with higher-class Catholic schools and the upper clergy, of creating an Irish Catholic professional class to participate in the administration of Ireland and the wider British world; and relations between Irish and English Catholics. The prestige and influence of the English Catholic revival was a source of strength to Irish Catholicism, while English Catholic apologists often cited Irish popular Catholicism as shaming British unbelief. At the same time, Irish Catholics were widely
the Catholic spectrum. The thinking of CORI diverged from that of the Catholic hierarchy in Ireland on this subject. CORI Justice and Irish Catholicism In the Irish Catholic context, the radical positions of CORI Justice stand out even more than they would if viewed in a comparative context. In Ireland, for historical reasons, ‘Catholic social teaching’ has been attenuated by liberalism while Catholic moral teaching and the social power of the Catholic Church, paradoxically, have been stronger than in continental heartlands (Carey 2007; Fahey 1998; 2007). Esping
understanding Nietzsche Even as this attention to Nietzsche’s writings exhibits a shared concern with the emergence or reemergence of a vibrant national culture, it also evinces the conflicts within and around the Revival movement – especially, as we saw in the Introduction, the debate at this time about the interrelations among international modernism, Irish Catholicism, and cultural
This chapter provides a fascinating account of the life and career of the Co. Mayo-born Patrick Browne, author of The Civil and Natural History of Jamaica. It situates him in the overlapping transatlantic worlds of Irish Catholicism and British colonialism, detailing his French education, periods spent in Jamaica, Montserrat and Antigua, and his pursuit of medicine and botany. The chapter depicts an individual who adapted himself readily to a variety of settings in England, France, Irish-speaking Connacht and the West Indies. The importance of Browne’s writings as well as their circulation in print and manuscript are also explored.