Catholicism in Modern Ireland – Ellen Coyne's Are You There, God? It's Me, Ellen

Abstract

Catholicism in Modern Ireland – Ellen Coyne’s Are You There, God? It’s Me, Ellen Greg Daly Signs of the times Few phrases from the Second Vatican Council fall more readily from the lips of those familiar with it than ‘signs of the times’. Christmas 1961 saw its first use in a conciliar context, when in his message convening the Council the following year, Pope St John XXIII reminded people that Christ has not left the world he redeemed, and recommended ‘that one should know how to distinguish the signs of the times’.1 Anybody serious about the Church’s mission and identity in modern Ireland should already have taken on board the jolts of recent years’marriage and repeal referendums, with Dublin’sArchbishop Emeritus Diarmuid Martin famously having said in May 2015 that the 62% vote to redefine marriage showed the extent to which the Church needed a ‘reality check’ in terms of understanding and responding to what he described as a cultural revolution.2 The 2018 repeal referendum underlined this reality with an even more decisive headline figure of 66.4% voting to remove Ireland’s constitutional protections for unborn human life. Far from being seen as signs of the times, pointers to a cultural revolution that demanded understanding and creative responses, some too easily decreed these two-to-one defeats as evidence that the tide could be turned. If constitutional protections for the unborn could be installed with a two-to-one vote in 1983, and overturned by a similar two-to-one vote in 2018, maybe in a generation it would be possible to restore the totemic ‘Eighth Amendment’. Aside from an arguably misplaced focus on the constitutional amendment itself, rather than on what the amendment was intended to help achieve, such analyses tended to miss how referendums are blunt tools, and how the real devil in these matters tends to be in the details. RTÉ’s exit poll from the 2018 vote should have banished any naïve hopes about the likely stance of Irish society a generation from now. Studies • volume 110 • number 438 191 Yes, 66.4% of voters overall had opted to repeal Ireland’s constitutional protections for the unborn, but among the two youngest groups of voters, those aged 25–34 and 18–24, support for repeal stood far higher, at 84.6% and 87.6% respectively. What’s more, when asked what factors were important to these voters in making their decisions, just 27% of those aged 25–34 said they thought the right to life of the unborn was a significant factor in their calculations, with this dropping to a mere 20% among those aged 18–24. Further, just 5–6% of voters in these age groups said their religious views had been important to them when considering how they should vote.3 Desperate figures, especially given how many of these voters would have gone through Catholic schools, one might think, and truly alarming ones for a Church that has described itself as an expert in humanity and decisively teaches a duty to cherish the dignity of every single human, a duty of solidarity with our fellow humans, and a duty to work for the good of humanity as a whole. For all that, though, further excavation of the data uncovers faint signs of hope. These groups still largely identify as Catholic – 65% in the older cohort and 63% in the younger one – with worship rates, though low compared to the practice of recent decades, still being surprisingly high. 12% of voters aged 18–24 attended services at least weekly, with the number of those worshipping rising to 23% when those attending at least monthly were factored in, and 54% when those attending just a few times a year were taken into account; the figures for those in the 25–34 group are higher again, with 13% attending services at least weekly, a total of 26% attending at least monthly, and 62% attending at least a few times a year.4 One indisputable reading of this, as with the overall national figures, is that plenty of those who clearly supported the decision to repeal the Eighth Amendment were practising...