An Abrahamic Journey: Ireland, Faith and the Papal Visit

Abstract

An Abrahamic Journey: Ireland, Faith and the Papal Visit Michael Kirwan SJ Introduction A year after the visit of Pope Francis to the World Meeting of Families in August 2018, it would be stretching things to describe Ireland as ‘transformed’. While we can remain hopeful that those who turned out for the mass gatherings in Knock, Croke Park and the Phoenix Park, as well as those watching on television, have been encouraged and strengthened by Pope Francis’s presence among us, the visit seems nonetheless to have been more an opportunity for reflection than a turning-point for the Church. Still less has it brought about the glorious restoration of a previous epoch of faith. Memorable as it was, it has left no apparent disturbance or alteration of the trajectory we are getting used to: that Ireland is a secularising, if not already secularised, society, in which Christian faith is increasingly marginal. We might contrast the papal event with the arrival of Queen Elizabeth II in Ireland in 2011 (a state visit, admittedly, and therefore more important symbolically). This was clearly a significant moment of recalibrating a historically fraught colonial relationship. Especially striking, of course, was the Queen’s presence in Dublin’s Garden of Remembrance. It is interesting, in retrospect, to note the anxiety of some Irish politicians at the time, that the Queen’s visit was ‘premature’! In hindsight, it was anything but; rather, this was a beautifully timed recognition of the political, social and economic progress that has allowed the troubled history of two nations, finally, to be brought into healing perspective. Francis’s visit did not represent any such moment of catharsis or historic reconciliation. It would have been unwise to expect it to do so. Was his visit ‘premature’? Perhaps the wounds are still too open, the crisis of Irish ecclesial suffering still too present and pervasive. Nevertheless, I wish to ask about what may be happening beneath the surface: whether the strained nature of the visit goes deeper than just its Michael Kirwan SJ Studies • volume 108 • number 430 162 timing; and whether the exchange of speeches at Dublin Castle between Pope Francis and the Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, gives important clues. In this article I note the event as a moment when, for many people, Ireland’s status as a ‘post-Christian’ nation was evident. But I will also offer thoughts as to what happens when another penny drops: that at the same time, Ireland is, or is going to become, inexorably ‘post-secular’. The limits of the secular A thinker who will help us is the French Jesuit historian of spirituality and sociologist, Michel de Certeau. Here is how he begins an intriguing essay entitled ‘Believing and Making People Believe’, which he wrote at the time of the political upheavals of Paris in 1968: ‘Leon Poliakov once said that Jews are Frenchmen who, rather than no longer going to Church, no longer go to the synagogue. In the humorous tradition of the Haggadah, that joke relegates to the past beliefs that no longer organize practices. Today political convictions seem to be following the same path. One becomes a socialist to have been one, without going to demonstrations, without attending meetings, without paying dues – in short, without cost.’1 This minimal expression of belonging and participation is shown by the voice, that leftover of a word: one vote a year. The party lives on a kind of ‘trust’, claiming a spurious legitimacy on the basis of ‘the relics of ancient convictions’. Spurious, because what usually unites a party’s adherents is not their explicit attraction to its programme, but a lack of attraction to any of the alternatives. The binding force is not conviction but inertia. We shall return to Certeau, for now, we need to register the importance of what he was suggesting all of fifty years ago. The cankerous deterioration that has hollowed out Catholic Christianity in the modern West – beliefs that ‘no longer organize practices’; conviction giving way to passive indifference; the desire for a ‘cost-free’ belonging; the reliance of the institution upon a ‘ghostly remnant’ for its survival – is under way in our political system as well. For Certeau...