After the Visit: Re-learning Our Past Stephen Collins There is a general consensus that the visit of Pope Francis to Ireland last summer failed to make any serious impact on the country. In the face of continuing controversy over abuse, general hostility from the media and a poor turnout of the faithful for the Mass in the Phoenix Park, it is hard to argue that the visit made an enduring mark. Yet history shows that great public events which are hailed as a triumph can often with time turn out to be hollow. The opposite can sometimes be true; events that appear to have little impact can, with hindsight, come to be regarded as significant milestones. Remember the acclaim and excitement generated by the visit of Pope John Paul II in 1979 and the rapturous reception he received from the highest to the lowest in the land. Millions of people turned out to see him, the media coverage was gushing and those in positions of authority in the Irish Church felt confident that the future looked rosy. Yet the apparent success of that visit masked a range of serious problems already well advanced. They included the failure to recognise and deal with the problem of abuse in the Church, the collapse in vocations and the inexorable drift towards a secular society. All of these were already eating into the foundations of the Church’s position in Irish society but the Pope’s visit not only encouraged the hierarchy to ignore them but to continue to behave as if it still had the power to impose its will on the political system. The exercise of that power in a range of controversies during the 1980s, including the pro-life referendum, the debate over contraception and active involvement in the divorce referendum were all serious misjudgements, which did lasting damage to the credibility of the institutional Church and in the long run produced the very outcomes they were designed to thwart. It can be argued that the success of the Pope’s visit in 1979 encouraged the Church to take the wrong path in the years that followed. The question today is whether the disappointing reaction to the visit of Pope Francis will prompt an honest assessment of the problems facing the After the Visit: Re-learning Our Past Studies • volume 108 • number 430 195 Church and promote a programme of renewal that will enable it to survive in an increasingly hostile environment. Reasons for failure The reasons why the visit last August turned out to be a damp squib are many and varied. One was the misjudgement by the authorities of both Church and state of the likely turnout for the Mass in the Phoenix Park. Preparations were put in place for a congregation of a million people when there was never the remotest prospect of such a crowd. In fact the health and safety arrangements put in place for a crowd of that size ensured that many people who would have liked to attend the Mass did not do so. The ludicrously early arrival times and the long walks involved in getting to the venue meant that tens of thousands of older people decided against attending. And it should have been no secret that the age profile of those who wanted to hear the Pope’s Mass was always going to be at the upper end of the scale. Of course, there were deeper reasons for the failure of the visit to ignite the kind of response that greeted John Paul II in 1979. The shocking litany of abuse cases which have dominated the headlines for the past two decades has shaken the faith of so many people and undermined respect for the Church in the wider community. The media framed the entire visit around the abuse saga, but it was naive to expect anything else. The media has an inbuilt tendency to focus on the negative and in this case it had plenty of material to exploit. As the British politician Enoch Powell famously remarked, ‘The politician who complains about the media is like the sea captain who complains about the sea’. In the current climate the Catholic...