The Irish have come to scapegoating the Irish Catholic Church for everything dissatisfactory about Irish society.
Ireland has one established journal for contrary thought, The Dublin Review of Books. In it, the Jesuit Fergus O’Donoghue finally broaches the subject of how the Irish have come to scapegoat the Irish Catholic Church for everything dissatisfactory about Irish society, as if the institution were alien to it, rather than something it produced. To put on display the kind of commentary about the church that has become commonplace in Ireland is to instantly reveal a kind of hysteria that seems extravagant to outsiders:
A strange entity haunts contemporary Irish commentary; hardly a day passes without it being cited in some, almost invariably negative, context. It’s “The Catholic Church”. It is “to blame for everything wrong with Ireland”. In the 1940s and 1950s, it created an atmosphere that can be described as “Stalinist” and in the industrial schools “The Catholic Church” created “our Holocaust, our Gulag”. It “grievously abused its position for too long”. It was responsible even for the closing of Merrion Square Park to the public, as part of the plan to build a Catholic cathedral on the site (a decision made by one archbishop, not by all Catholic clergy or “the Church”). According to the Financial Times, the Catholic church in Ireland is “a shrivelled entity, discredited by scandal and left behind by a diverse population”. There is a consensus among commentators, and even amongst some academics (normally suspicious of generalisations), that Irish Catholicism consists of ageing clergy, who mourn lost power and past glories, and ageing laity, who hope that the clergy will survive long enough to bury them.
Along the way, O’Donoghue gives a capsule history of the church in Ireland, getting at the broad outlines of how it was that the church found herself in the position she did in post-independence Ireland, subject to the unique demands of that society:
Post-Reformation Europe had inherited the medieval conviction that only one form of Christianity could be permitted in any territory and that the government should not only assist it, but should harass, if not actively persecute, all dissenters. That was the basis for the exclusion of Presbyterians from the Church of Ireland after 1660 and it was the thinking behind the framing of the Penal Laws against Irish Catholics in the reign of Queen Anne (1702-14). William III had ended the policy of Dublin Castle actively persecuting Catholics, but restrictions on their landowning and their political activity made them less powerful in every succeeding generation. They were excluded from the judiciary and the legal profession, from the craft guilds and from official medical positions.
Most Irish Catholics were wretchedly poor. Their landlords were not interested in converting them to Protestantism, which would have given them rights. By 1730, the Irish hierarchy had been restored once more, marking the third rebuilding of Irish Catholic structures since the early seventeenth century. The 1787 conversion to Protestantism of John Butler, the Catholic bishop of Cork, when he became Lord Dunboyne, ended the tradition of appointing Munster nobility to local dioceses. The proportions of Catholics and Protestants (about 75 per cent and 25 per cent) were fixed by the early eighteenth century and have changed little since then. Catholics were inferior in law and in fact. Catholic worship was permitted, but muted. Catholic recovery in Ulster was slower than elsewhere. The Irish Catholic inferiority complex took root in the Penal Times and has yet to disappear, its most subtle effects being found amongst lapsed Catholics, who often feel a “non-specific” inferiority, because they don’t know the reason for constantly measuring themselves so negatively in comparison with other social groups and other countries.
I quibble a bit with the most modern history. I think Vatican II as it was realized tended to help struggling Catholics make peace with losing their faith, and no amount of changed implementation could shift this. I tend to side with the perspicacious Father Desmond Fennell, who, writing in 1962, foresaw the secularization of Ireland underneath the new prosperity that was just coming into it. Or, as the commentator John Waters put it rather sharply:
Because Irish Catholicism developed through centuries of poverty, and offered Christ as a comfort to those who had little else in their lives, the link in the Irish imagination between faith and consolation became almost absolute. Although nobody had actually expressed it like this, it naturally followed that, when we became more prosperous, Christ could be allowed some time off.