A Pope on a Neoliberal Island

Abstract

A Pope on a Neoliberal Island Kevin Hargaden Introduction It is a year since Pope Francis visited Ireland. Various explanations can be offered for the relatively small numbers who attended the official ceremonies, although it should be remembered that these events represented the largest public gatherings anywhere in the state last year. The lashing rain and gusting wind on the Sunday of the Mass in the Phoenix Park most certainly would have deterred the fair-weather Catholics! What cannot be disputed is that Francis arrived to a society with a remarkably different attitude towards his office than received John Paul II. In this essay, the gap between the two papal visits will be explored in terms of the collapse in the shared trust in Christianity and the growing commitment to an alternative narrative about human flourishing, which will be described as neoliberalism. This shift in allegiance will be considered in terms of the concrete details of Francis’s trip – his vehicle, his route, his flight-path – so as to demonstrate that neoliberalism is not a mere set of policy proposals but a totalised worldview. In conclusion, the work of theAmerican moral theologian William Cavanaugh and the Irish translator Michael Cronin will be adapted to suggest ways forward for Ireland’s churches after Francis’s visit. Collapsing and Constructing Plausibility Structures Considering that all conversations about the state of Christianity in Ireland eventually get around to referencing that visit of Pope John Paul II in 1979, it is a curious fact that there is so little evidence of retrospective reflection in the Church’s major pastoral journals. Thumbing through the archives of Doctrine and Life and The Furrow in 1989, 1999, or 2004, you find very little evidence of a Church marked by this most momentous visit. Interestingly, at the time we already find notes of discontent about the dangers of the visit being framed in triumphalist terms. Louis McRedmond, the former editor of the Irish Independent wrote in The Furrow in October 1979 that ‘it would be an unrelieved disaster’ if the visit was positioned as a moment of victory for the ‘old-style faithful’. If the Pontiff was not properly briefed on the diversity within the local Church, Redmond worried that ‘the young, the thinkers, the Kevin Hargaden Studies • volume 108 • number 430 172 apathetic would be further and most seriously alienated’. He closes his piece by declaring: ‘I believe that we are capable of such an act of self-destruction. … We need to have honesty to show ourselves as we are, not as any one of us thinks we should be’.1 Four decades later, McRedmond’s prescience is striking. Serious alienation is an excellent description for how much of Irish society, especially in younger age-groups, relates to the Church. From every angle, there has been a cataclysmic decline in religious participation over the last generation. Fewer people attend religious services. More people choose to opt out of Catholic rites of passage. Fewer people consider themselves Christian. Vocations have dwindled. Religious authorities have a much smaller part to play in public discourse.2 While the memory of Christianity lingers in Irish culture – we can think of recent masterpieces like John Michael McDonagh’s 2014 masterpiece, Calvary – many of the recent generation of artists seem largely uninterested in theological themes.3 The particular social circumstances and institutional arrangements that made Christianity seem like common-sense in 1979 have evaporated today, in 2019.4 The plausibility structures around Christianity, and particularly Roman Catholicism, have collapsed. The package of practices, institutional forces, and shared values that rendered Christian faith coherent, and at times even compelling, have disintegrated to a large degree because of failures within the churches. The impact of abuse revelations is chief among the sins of commission and omission that have led to the discrediting of the Gospel. But a recounting of the Church’s failings is not enough (although it still must continue) to account for this transition. It is not simply that the credibility of the Church took a hammering, but that an alternative narrative went from strength to strength, winning the deeplevel allegiance of many people, especially the young. Call it individualism, or globalisation, or...