The Challenge for Catholic Schools in Contemporary Ireland

Abstract

The Challenge for Catholic Schools in Contemporary Ireland Damon McCaul The post-modern setting In St John’s Gospel (Jn 18:37–38), at his trial, Jesus says, ‘Everyone on the side of truth listens to me’. ‘What is truth?’ Pilate retorts. This ageold philosophical conundrum is at the core of the challenge facing us in contemporary Irish Catholic schools. In Irish society we see strong currents of relativistic thought. In a deviation from centuries of Western thought and philosophical tradition, we are faced with questions about whether there is any knowable truth or rather just a series of opinions. There is even a fundamental disagreement in our society about what counts as good or in the public good. All around us we experience the promotion of legitimate, albeit often conflicting, individual liberties. It is a question we face every day in our schools as we attempt to reassert the relevance of the Catholic school in modern Ireland. Socrates once proposed, as against Heraclitus, that human beings can come to know certain things, which are always the same in the same way (Plato, Phaedo,74–76). This ancient concept is regularly challenged in contemporary Ireland, but the conflict in human discourse is not new. In the ancient world Protagoras and Heraclitus argued, respectively, that ‘man is the measure of all things’ and ‘everything is in flux’– which amounts to arguing that what every person believes, is what’s true for them, and that nothing is invariably true. Our schools are faced with relativistic thought which amounts to arguing that what every person believes, is what is true for them, and that nothing is invariably true. This clearly has a very modern ring to it and runs counter to what we in Catholic schools instruct, and to nearly two millennia of our philosophical tradition. We have come through a post-modern period in Irish society where traditional belief systems have been shattered by this kind of thinking. It has been a fast catch-up with a wider European post-war movement. In modern Damon McCaul Studies • volume 108 • number 429 64 politics, we regularly experience attacks on the objective reality of facts with concepts such as ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’ becoming ubiquitous. Nietzsche contended in Beyond Good and Evil (1886, §34) that we can never access a reality independent of our beliefs and this has become a received and accepted conviction in the modern world. The question often asked of an opinion is, ‘Who is to say he’s wrong?’ Authority, particularly that of institutions, has been rejected and replaced by authenticity as the bellwether of belief, but without the necessary metric to establish its veracity. A Church struggling to respond In Church terms this has been significant. We had a male dominated, widely supported and pyramidal social structure with strong group identity. Morality was received and accepted from above, but this has been rendered impotent by the experiential and relative subjectivity in Ireland today. We now live with many subjective meta-narratives, each given equal weight and brought into our schools by students, teachers, media etc. These tend not to be deferential or respectful of tradition but are horizontal, egalitarian, person-centred and discursive. If nothing is true, then the only voice that has a right to be heard is the loudest and most insistent. The seemingly endless revelations regarding the abuse of young people and society’s most vulnerable have contributed to the widespread loss of the Church’s moral authority and its rejection by many. John McGahern, in an essay published in the The Guardian (8 April 2006) shortly after his death, sums it up succinctly: ‘When a long abuse of power is corrected, it is generally replaced by an opposite violence. In the new dispensation all that was good in what went before is tarred indiscriminately with the bad’. This clearly reflects the current paradigm for the Irish Church and our schools. The influencers, the writers, the broadcasters subscribe almost universally to a subtraction theory, in the phrase of Charles Taylor in A Secular Age (2007), drawing largely on the idea that as society advances and reason increases, the need for faith and faith-systems will...