Another Beginning?

Abstract

Another Beginning? Brendan Hoban The thrust of this article is three-fold. One, ongoing change is now a permanent reality for the Catholic Church. A first step is to accept this reality. Two, dealing with change means ‘living in the grey’, that’s accepting and embracing difficult questions that have no ready-made ‘black and white’ answers. It’s about dealing with ambivalence in a culture of modernity. An example is offered.Three, in a very different dispensation, Church governance and pastoral practice require that a ‘respectful listening’ to the People of God be sewn into our perception of what the Church does. A template is offered. Change Change is a difficult sweet to suck on. Everyone seems to recognise its pervasive presence and experience its impact yet so many, in modern parlance, seem ‘not to get it’. Nowhere is that more true than among Irish Catholics. While we give due deference to the concept, we hesitate to name the reality. That’s understandable, of course, for a Church that prides itself on continuity and tradition but unhelpful in terms of responding to it. Change just is and life, as we have known it, is over. That’s a general principle but it applies specifically to the Catholic Church – if we can bear that reality. While most smile wistfully at the oft repeated words of the late Archbishop John Charles McQuaid on returning from the Second Vatican Council, that ‘no change will worry the tranquillity of your Christian lives’, fifty-plus years later many still imagine that change can be ‘managed’. All the evidence is that it can’t. For the Irish Catholic Church, the tectonic plates really have shifted. While we are much given to listing some of the indicators of that change – decline in Church attendance, ageing clergy, apathy to religion, a loss of institutional authority and such like – and can be proactive in attempting to respond to them as best we can, effectively we’re trying to build a scaffolding around a house that has already collapsed. All the targeted parish programmes, all the parish councils in the world, Another Beginning? Studies • volume 108 • number 430 151 all the experts sitting in offices with secretaries and computers, all the prayers in Christendom, won’t put the old Church back together again. Its day is done. And the question is not whether the substance of this paragraph is depressingly ‘negative’, but whether it’s true. What is certain, Louise Fuller wrote recently, ‘is that Catholicism as we know it is now an anachronism’. This is more than what might be described as ‘Ireland’s Catholic twilight’. We can actually see it for ourselves. We can measure it variously in the rolling back of Catholic influence in society, in the disappearance of religious artefacts, in media hostility to all things Catholic and in comments of politicians like Bríd Smith TD, who two years ago told the Dáil that ‘the Catholic Church should be put in the dustbin of history’. We can see it in the casual implication on the television evening news that religious Sisters (after lifetimes of unpaid service to the poorest of the poor with minimal training, under resourcing by the state and working in situations of extreme emotional distress) may well be accused of murder in regard to the deaths of babies in mother-and-baby homes, if only those who know would come forward – an example of a commentariat cheerleading the popular tide of demonisation by judging the past through the lens of the present. And we see it in Pope Benedict’s recent intervention that the ills of the Church can be explained by the unvarying mantra – ‘It was the Sixties that done it!’ – the embarrassing equivalent of a schoolboy’s excuse, ‘the dog ate my homework’, or the politician’s explanation of surplus funds ,‘I won it on the horses’. But most of all we can see it in our churches, as we survey a biblical remnant holding grimly to a mix of community custom, familial loyalty and an ever-diminishing dividend of social respectability. ‘I’m not sure why I’m here’, a parishioner told me once, ‘but I turn...