Studies • volume 106 • number 421 39 The End of Irish Catholicism? Fifteen Years On D Vincent Twomey SVD My book, The End of Irish Catholicism?, began as a contribution to a seminar in Fordham University on the state of the Irish Church in 2001.1 I was on sabbatical in Boston at the time, and had the motivation and the leisure to read and reflect at a distance, as it were, on the situation back home. My objective was simple: to try to explain, to myself in the first instance, why the contemporary Catholic Church in Ireland seemed unable to face the many profound challenges posed by contemporary Irish society, and to propose a way forward in response. The reception of the book was quite remarkable and overwhelmingly positive. The first letter I received, from a married woman living in Terenure, reassured me that my effort was not entirely futile: [Y]our recent book … left me feeling more light-hearted and positive than I had felt for a long time. I think the key thing lay in your approach. Firstly, you ranged widely both over the preVatican II Irish Church and what happened since, but all times with a breadth of vision, referring back constantly to the central eternal truth. Suddenly things that had loomed large took their place in the calm perspective of a wider picture. Second, you spoke like someone who has not lost his nerve. It seems to me that many of our poor bishops and priests are paralysed with fear and from some of them the faithful are being served with defeatist language. It was great to hear a bugle blowing… I hope and pray you cause an explosion of debate and action. The book did cause considerable discussion. The number of people, mostly strangers at home and abroad, who contacted (and still contact) me about it was extraordinary. What action, if any, it produced, I am unable to assess. One of the more radical actions I proposed – namely the restructuring of the dioceses by reducing them from twenty-six to twelve, or even six – was rejected. This proposal was so self-evident that it caught the imagination of The End of Irish Catholicism? Fifteen Years On 40 Studies • volume 106 • number 421 the media.2 It was also debated in the Bishops’ Conference, and in Rome, where, I gather, it was taken seriously. The Irish Bishops rejected it. They dissuaded Rome, arguing that, if the diocesan boundaries were now changed, they would in future always be associated with the stigma of the clerical scandals.3 Fundamental weaknesses Unfortunately, the discussion surrounding the structural changes distracted from discussion of the more fundamental issues, namely the weaknesses of traditional Irish Catholicism and how they could be overcome. I had reached the conclusion that what is commonly understood to be traditional Irish Catholicism was, for all its extraordinary achievements (as in education and healthcare), neither fully Catholic nor fully Irish. Consequently, it was not only life-defeating, but, as many of our best writers such as Frank O’Connor and Edna O’Brien have protested, intellectually suffocating. It contained within itself the seeds of its present demise. Living among the debris of a distorted cultural expression of Catholicism, the worst expression being the scandals and cover-ups, we are, as the Church, experiencing the end of a cultural phenomenon. My primary concern, then, was to ask: what must be done to forge a new one? To that end, I made various suggestions as to how we might begin to work towards a living, more vibrant Church in Ireland in the future, whose cultural expression would be more authentically both Catholic and Irish. The greater part of the book is devoted to that discussion. When I wrote the book, the clerical scandals were at the forefront of public discourse. I only treated of them in passing, since I was – and still am – convinced that, though they exacerbated the crisis facing the Church in Ireland, they were but a symptom of that crisis, not its cause. Roy Foster, in his Luck and the Irish: A Brief History of Change from 1700, cites the book as evidence that prominent Irish clerics...