A riveting piece in today’s issue of The New York Times Magazine about how the Irish church’s sex-abuse scandal has led to a reevaluation of Irish national identity.
Politics at the beginning of the century centered on two debates: British rule and religion. There were those — like the playwright George Bernard Shaw and the poet William Butler Yeats — who thought that the potential break with England constituted an occasion for Ireland to cut the strings to the Catholic Church and to embrace a progressive, international sensibility. Others wrapped Irish patriotism together with Catholicism, agrarian traditions and the Gaelic language, and they won the day. Eamon De Valera, the political leader, drafted a constitution side by side with the all-powerful archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid, which gave the Catholic Church a special role in state affairs and which to this day begins with the words, “In the name of the most holy trinity.”
Even before the scandal, secularism was challenging Irish identity, at least, as it has been understood since the first decade of the 20th century.
Between 1974 and 2008, regular Mass attendance dropped by some 50 percent. The situation today highlights a problem that is looming for the Vatican, especially in the West, as the global sex-abuse crisis, coupled with the increasingly conservative rule and top-down control that have prevailed since the 1970s, is contributing to the departure of populations the church once considered foundational.
A 1997 letter from the papal nuncio to Ireland, which surfaced last month, has only complicated matters. The nuncio informed Irish bishops that the Vatican harbored “serious reservations” about requiring mandatory reporting of clergy sex-abuse cases to the police.
