Collapse of Irish Catholicism: A Self-Induced Crisis?

My sincere thanks to Peadar Laighléis, President of the Latin Mass Society of Ireland, for kindly allowing me to repost his excellent article, appended below, concerning the crisis in the Irish Catholic Church. It was first published in the Sunday Business Post in 2001.  He also sent me this helpful bit of background to the article:

I wrote this piece nearly ten years ago and at the time, I was annoyed I left one major source of discontent out.  In the mid-1990s, the Bishops of Ireland transferred the feasts of Ascension Thursday and Corpus Christi to the nearest Sunday.  This was calculated to please the laity and was greeted by the greatest outpouring of lay anger than anyone could anticipate which resulted in the dropping of the second phase of the programme fast (ie the transferance of the obligation to hear Mass on feasts falling on a Saturday or Monday to the Sunday – a ‘two for the price of one’ arrangement).

The bishops were surprised as they were led to believe that that was what the faithful expected.  This was done through a process of consultation enthrusted to the clergy.  The respondents were specially selected and they gave the correct responses.  The problem was that these responses were totally unrepresentative.  This attracted more correspondence to the Irish Catholic than any other single issue in David Quinn’s editorship.

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A Convert in a Changing Church (1969)

Iota Unum Now Online

 
Angelus Press have made several chapters of Romano Amerio’s Iota Unum freely available online. (hat/tip to the ever knowledgeable Mundabor)

Multiculturalism and Disbelief

by Brendan Clifford,
Labour & Trade Union Review, No. 11

If Britain had, like the United States, citizenship tests for immigrants, the basic test as to whether an immigrant had caught the British spirit should be the answer to the question: Do you accept that the right to blaspheme is an inalienable human right?

Societies flourish in connection with their communal piety. Britain is the first society which has flourished through impiety.

The Revolution Triumphant: Irish Hierarchy’s June Meeting, 1966

The following press release was issued by the Irish hierarchy following their meeting at St. Patrick’s Maynooth on the 21st-22nd June, 1966:

THE DEVELOPMENT OF MAYNOOTH

The Second Vatican Council has called for the development of Catholic University facilities, especially in the sphere of philosophy and theology, in order to show the harmony of Christian teaching with true human culture and scientific development, and to provide all priests, religious and laity with the fullest opportunity of Christian formation.

The Irish bishops at their June meeting have had under consideration how this development could be secured in this country, and propose to develop Maynooth as an open centre of higher studies, and to extend its facilities and courses so as to meet the requirements, not merely of priests, diocesan and regular, but also of brothers, nuns and laity.

The Revolution Triumphant: Irish Hierarchy’s June Meeting, 1965

The following press release was issued by the Irish hierarchy following their meeting at St. Patrick’s Maynooth on the 22nd-23rd June, 1965:

Among the matters discussed were:

SACRED LITURGY

In addition to proposals for more extensive use of the vernacular, draft texts of the “Prayer of the Faithful” and of the funeral service also were considered, and were referred to the Episcopal Liturgical Commission for revision.

A number of decisions also were taken to ensure the proper formation of the students of Maynooth in the doctrine and principles of the Constitution on the Liturgy. A Professor of Sacred Liturgy has been appointed and will pursue special studies at a liturgical institute before taking up his duties.

Liturgical actions in the college are to be carried out in conformity with the new liturgical norms. One of the oratories in the college is to be remodelled with an altar facing the congregation in order to familiarise the students with the new structure of the ceremonies.

Irish Society and Catholicism in the 1940s and ’50s: An Austrian Perspective

Despite the prevailing (and extremely inaccurate) conception of Irish society in the 1940s and ’50s as closed and insular, the Irish Catholic press in that era always kept up an intense interest in their foreign counterparts. In The Furrow’s regular roundup of the continental Catholic reviews, Fr. Seán O’Riordan C.Ss.R. made note (February, 1950) of two articles about Ireland published in its Austrian namesake. The following is an extract:

Actually, Die Furche published two articles about Ireland in the early months of 1948 by two Austrians who had been here on a visit independently of each other. What then did they say about us? Nice things? Alas, much too nice!

Frida Hajek began her article (“Erin,” April 10, 1948) almost as if she were going to write a fairy-tale. “On the edge of Europe, on the edge of our world, beyond England, lies an island: Ireland. There are many people who know a good deal about England; there are a good many people who know next to nothing about Ireland. Except perhaps that she has again sent tons of foodstuffs to Austria or some other famine-sticken region in Central Europe.”

Those tons of foodstuffs were obviously good propaganda. Miss Hajek needed no propaganda to make her conscious of Ireland; she had been there.

“I do not believe that any European has ever visited Ireland and been able to forget her. I do not believe that any European has ever lived in Ireland and not learned to love her with his whole heart. And yet Ireland is a poor, a very poor country, if we measure wealth by raw materials; oil, coal, iron, cotton, grain. The wonderful thing about Ireland, her riches, the source of all her giving, is the spirit of her people, their nature, their outlook. It is something that has grown out of this gentle land beside the Gulf Stream, blossomed out of St. Patrick’s teaching, been nurtured by the mystical power of an age-old indigenous Catholic way of life.”

Miss Hajek, who describes herself as “a busy, bothered Central European,” was at first puzzled and then fascinated by certain qualities of Irish life: our refusal to be hurried, our refusal to take things too seriously, and of course our hospitality. She thinks she can put her finger on the mainspring of the Irish way of life: its “sense of eternity.” Der Begriff der Ewigkeit: the quality which, in its theological and prophetical expression, fascinates the Germans in Newman.

She concludes: “Since the days when St. Patrick lodged the Christian sense of eternity in the hearts of the Irish people as in a living shrine, Ireland and the Irish constitute an unchanging unity. The Patrician age is still near, still living for the people of to-day. Nearer and more living than our present age of wars and conferences.”

Fr. Franz König saw Ireland from the point of view of an Austrian priest during the autumn of 1947. The unforgettable experience for him was a big game at Croke Park [named after the GAA’s first patron, Archbishop Thomas Croke of Cashel – shane] during which he was less interested in the match than in the close fellowship between priests and people all round him. “I saw priests everywhere,” he wrote (Die Furche, February 28, 1948): “there were priests young and old in front of me and behind me, mixing and talking with the crowd. The young chaplain in front of me and the two older men behind me knew all the names of the players; they were just as well up as the two Dublin clerks on my right and the road worker on my left.” The ball was thrown in by a bishop; two other bishops and an archbishop were among the spectators. Fr König points out for his Austrian readers:

“The Irish clergy live in the closest contact with their people. During the centuries of subjection to England they were the leaders of the people for economic, national and religious freedom. To-day it is still the glory of every Irish family to have a son ordained to the priesthood…

I could not help feeling rather sorry for ‘Catholic Austria’.”

Animosities In A Vacuum

 
by Brendan Clifford,
Church and State; Third Quarter, 2008

 
Oxford University was appealed to by Raymond Crotty (founder of the Irish Sovereignty Movement) to take Ireland in hand intellectually, because the Irish were unable to think for themselves. It has now published a volume on Ireland as part of its Oxford History Of Modern Europe. But, alas, it farmed out the work of writing it to a Stickie academic, who was a political adviser to David Trimble during the years when Trimble was leading the Ulster Unionist Party to disaster, and who has now joined his leader in the House of Lords.

The Jesuits In America: Life Magazine, October 11th, 1954

Click here to read (for an index of the priests mentioned see: Good Jesuit, Bad Jesuit)

Click here to read the inaugural issue of America magazine, April 17th, 1909

Vatican II and the Crisis of Confusion in American Catholicism

Donald J. Thorman: “It seems to me that if labels are useful, the one I’d have to pin on today’s laity: The Uncertain Catholic. The characteristic note of today’s American Catholic is confusion, indecision; we are treading water, waiting, wondering what is going to happen next. This is the age of the question mark. We no longer feel certain we have all the answers to all of men’s problems. We are no longer certain if we know all the right questions.” (America, Jan. 14, 1967, p.39)

Celledoor Miscellany has reposted these historic articles from back issues of Life magazine, which I highly commend to your attention. They give a vivid insight into the collapse of the ecclesiastical ancien régime following the Second Vatican Council and the internal turmoil facing the Church in the United States. Overall they make for very depressing reading.

I recently happened upon a succinct but comprehensive little booklet, concerning the same theme, entitled Keeping Your Balance in the Modern Church by Fr. Hugh J. O’Connell, C.SS.R., PhD. It was published in 1968 by Liguorian Pamphlets and bears the imprimatur of the Archbishop of St Louis, John J. Carberry. (Interestingly my pamphlet is also signed in pen by the conservative Archbishop John Charles McQuaid of Dublin.) It is a must read for any Catholic who has ever asked himself: ‘How did everything that was so good get so bad?’ While Fr. O’Connell’s pamphlet is largely specific to the American situation, it seems to me that strong parallels existed between all the churches of the English-speaking countries. All these local churches were dominated by Irish immigrants or their descendants in countries which had remained unconquered by Nazi Germany during the Second World War, and where there existed no serious prospect of a communist takeover. None of these characteristics hold true for the countries of the Rhine basin, whose prelates led the push for change in the Church at the Second Vatican Council. Furthermore all the English-speaking local churches were known to have exhibited comparatively less enthusiasm for the pre-conciliar ressourcement and liturgical movements while (or perhaps because) they were still able to boast of high levels of Mass attendance, vocations, popular catechetical knowledge and devotional practice.

Fr. O’Connell contends that the American Catholic Church was caught off guard by the Second Vatican Council:

The Church in North America — laity, priests, nuns and even bishops — was almost completely unprepared for the way things turned out at Vatican Council II. This was the result of a number of factors.

1) Americans had remained relatively untouched by World War II. They experienced little of the ferment and unrest, the need to reassert the value of the individual person, which in Europe flowed from the struggle against Nazism and Fascism.

2) Americans, including theologians and bishops, had little or no acquaintance with the new personalist and existentialist philosophy. This had been developed in Europe, chiefly outside the church. Introduced by certain European theologians, this philosophy exerted a powerful influence on the deliberations of Vatican II and on Catholic life and teaching since the Council.

3) American Catholics were for the most part unaware of the writings of Protestant theologians, both orthodox and liberal. The ecumenical temper of the times brought these ideas to the attention of Catholic theologians, particularly in Germany, France and Holland.

Fr. O’Connell believes that the breakdown of theological censorship has facilitated doctrinal dissent and spread confusion among ordinary lay Catholics:

A good many of the religious problems of the average Catholic laymen, priests and nuns, who make no claim to be specialists or scholars, stem from the new air of freedom of theological thought and discussion resulting from Vatican II.

[…] The great danger, as every reasonable man must recognize, is that freedom brings with it the possibility that it will be abused. In the days before Vatican II, there was actually a very considerable amount of theological speculation and innovation; there were battles quite as heated as those going on today. The only difference was that such ideas were quietly presented in theological journals, and were subjected by experts to analysis and investigation, to weighing of reasons pro and con, to a more or less general acceptance or rejection by qualified theologians before they ever came to public attention.

Moreover, among Catholics the shock of new religious ideas on the minds of those who were not experts was cushioned by the censorship of books and articles and by the index of prohibited books. Before a book treating on religion could be published by a Catholic, it had to be submitted for censorship in order to obtain an imprimatur. If the book was considered to contain opinions contrary to Catholic doctrine, to the decrees of the Holy See, or even too wild and revolutionary, permission to print would be denied. To the liberal, who claimed the right to make up his own mind about religious truth, such censorship was intolerable. To the person who felt no competence to judge between truth and error in complex religious questions, it was a comfort.

Fr. O’Connell is convinced that the actual documents of the Second Vatican Council are capable of an orthodox interpretation, though a tinge of regret for their formulation is easily discernible. He likens the conciliar Fathers’ critical adoption of personalism to St. Augustine’s critical use of Plato or St. Thomas Aquinas’ blending of Aristotelian philosophy with Christian revelation.

Then came Vatican II. We have described how the North European group of bishops, headed by Germany and France, exerted a dominant influence in the Council. Moreover, their theologians wrote the revised versions of the more important schemas which served as basis of discussion in the Council. As a result, these schemas reflected a strong tone of personalism.

Of course, as was mentioned before, these documents were debated by bishops of every caste of mind. Some of the schemas were sent back for correction four or five times. The final version blended both the new personalism and the traditional acceptance of objective truth.

Liturgical Reform in Ireland

Many thanks to Jaykay for recounting his experiences of the post-conciliar liturgical reforms:

The new version came in from the first Sunday in January 1970 – at least in Armagh Archdiocese. That would have been Sunday 4th January. I clearly remember that the church was packed. We kids had got our new books just after Christmas (probably again in Woolworths!) and I recall that it was quite confusing as we hadn’t done any of the preparatory stuff in school before Christmas. Even the priests made loads of “mistakes” (and at that time it was still common for older priests to lapse into Latin if they got distracted e.g. to say “Dominus vobis… erm, eh… The Lord be with you…”). Nobody laughed in those days, of course! We had to learn the new versions of the confiteor and Domine non sum dignus (we were still told to strike the breast at the correct places – something me and some people of my generation still do) but otherwise the Ordinary was unchanged – until 1975.

Cardinal Conway was in charge and was quite conservative, so there was very little, if any, “creativity” on the part of priests.  Most of the older priests were also quite conservative so we still had loads of Latin Benedictions, 40 hours, confraternities etc. It really didn’t change until the 80s. It’s still not too bad in my neck of the woods, but the banality is everywhere  e.g. no incense at the main Mass on Easter Sunday and the usual flat, boring “let’s get it over with” attitude. No wonder the average age is about 50+!

The Rise and Fall of the Catholic Church in Ireland

The following is an editorial from Church and State magazine (the organ of the old Campaign to Seperate Church and State), January, 2010:

“The Age Of My Craven Deference Is Finally Over.” That was the headline on Professor Ronan Fanning’s article on the Murphy Report (Sun. Independent, 6 Dec.). Well, it was almost the headline. Fanning used the collective “our” rather than the personal “my”. But in the case of the Professor of Modern History at the chief College of the National University the personal and the collective merge. The Professor (singular) determines in great part what characterised the plurality of those who went through the educational system to its highest level.

It became well known to us long ago that the paid intelligentsia of the state were craven in their attitude towards the Church. They were sceptics in private but were cynically respectful in public, because they were craven.

LMSI AGM Mass

photos here on flickr (H/T verbumpatris)

TLM Workshop in Co. Donegal

The Latin Mass Society of Ireland are holding a seminar for priests interested in learning to celebrate the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite or who would like to do a revision course in the basics of liturgical Latin and formation in the rubrics. The seminar will be conducted by Fr Simon Leworthy, FSSP, in Ards Capuchin Friary, Cresslough, Co. Donegal on Wednesday 20th – Friday 22 October 2010.

The cost is €110, which includes full board.

Those interested are requested to contact Pronsias at 074 97 37307.