Crumbling church, rudderless leadership

Crumbling Church, rudderless leadership

Fr Kevin Hegarty
a keynote address given Oct. 4, 2011 in Dublin at the first annual general meeting of Ireland's Association of Catholic Priests.

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Loving the sea air, as I do, a few days after our last meeting in Portlaoise I walked Cross Beach near my home. It was the 7 June, the thirtieth anniversary of my ordination. Beside Cross Beach is Cross Abbey, a fragile, elegant, medieval ruin, tottering precariously on the edge of the Atlantic, a reminder that all things pass. It looks out on the wondrous island of Inis Gluaire where according to legend the bell for St Brendan's Mass freed the children of Lir from their feathered imprisonment. My thought strayed to a poem of Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach, where I reflected on the following lines:

"The sea of faith was once too at the full and round earth's share,
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd,
But now I only hear its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating to the breath of the night wind down the vast edges
Drear and naked shingles to the world"

The words struck a chord with me. Substitute Cross Beach for Dover Beach and Catholicism for faith. In my 30 years as a priest the sea of Catholicism has receded. I have heard its long, withdrawing roar.

As a priest I have worked in a crumbling Church. In 1981 it seemed as if it might be different. Ordinations were still frequent enough not to inspire any great excitement beyond a photograph and a paragraph of purple prose in the local newspaper. Our bishop Dr McDonnell ensured that the four of us to be ordained did not lose the run of ourselves. To put it mildly he was not noted for liturgical enthusiasm. He had made the economic use of words into an art form. He introduced the ceremony thus: "This is a great day for the diocese of Killala. Four young men are to be ordained to priesthood. Now let us call to mind our sins."

In retrospect 1981 was a placid time for Irish Catholicism. The golden glow of the papal visit still enveloped the institution. Now we recognise it to have been the last Ard Fheis of traditional Irish Catholicism. It induced a sense of complacency mixed with hubris - a deadly combination, as many sports teams have reason to know. The Irish people, it seemed, would remain semper fidelis, always faithful, without the complications of fresh thinking and renewed structures.

So, what happened? The historian George Dangerfield once wrote of the strange death of liberal England. We have witnessed the slow and sometimes strange last agony of traditional Irish Catholicism. Basking in the reflected glow of papal adulation and believing that the words of that awful hymn - a title for which there is much competition - He's got the whole world in his hands also applied to them, Church leaders left out of their calculations the effects of social change. In the age of the sat nav they hung on to antiquarian maps.

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Despite the promise of the Second Vatican Council to dialogue respectfully, imaginatively and generously with a changing world, the Church in Ireland failed to evolve a strategy that could learn from and contribute to the new consciousness.

The nature of the Church's structures was a barrier to productive conversation. For the institution that had evolved over the previous two centuries - notwithstanding its considerable achievements - was authoritarian in structure, destructively clerical and obsessed with a narrow sexual morality. It is out of sync with the creative impulses of modernity. In its heyday it was impervious to dialogue.
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There is torpidity about the Catholic Church in Ireland today. Take the preparations for the forthcoming Eucharistic Congress. Whatever else can be said about the Dublin Congress of 1932, and much can be said, it was a festive fusion of triumphant Catholicism and Irish nationalism that engaged hearts and minds. Now earnest emissaries from the Congress office are travelling throughout the countryside valiantly trying to drum up some enthusiasm. I am reminded of the observation made of Willie Whitelaw, when he was making a tour of constituencies as deputy leader of the Tory Party that he was going around "stirring up apathy". Or the exhortation of a now deceased Bishop of Meath, who in advance of the canonisation of Oliver Plunkett in 1975 asked the prosaic priests of his diocese "to horse up some piety" for the event.

The Church's official theology of sexuality fails to resonate with the actual experience of human intimacy. Most Catholic couples ignore Humanae Vitae's prohibition on contraception. I believe that Dr Garrett Fitzgerald was right when he claimed that this encyclical was crucial in the undermining of the Church's authority. People began to lose confidence in an institution whose teaching on this matter was so out of sync with their experience. Its insistence on compulsory celibacy for clerics is of the same ilk. Its teaching on homosexuality has been heavily criticised, understandably, I suggest, for its insensitivity. And then there have been the scandals of the sexual abuse of children by priests and religious, followed by obfuscations, cover-up, and carefully worded apologies. Howard Bleichner wrote in A View from the Altar: "By any measure the sexual abuse scandals have struck the Catholic Church in the US with the force of a tsunami, dealing the Church the worst blow in living memory."

Equally so in Ireland. The Ferns, Ryan, Murphy and Cloyne reports, in their cumulative and compelling detail, highlight the acute level of dysfunction in the Church. I don't sense that the majority of Catholic leaders in Ireland have actually got the extent of the breakdown in trust that these reports have engendered. The reports may not now dominate the daily headlines, but their effect has not gone away. I reckon that if Irish Catholics had a democratic way of reflecting their feelings on the subject, Church leaders would suffer a defeat as cataclysmic as that administered to Fianna Fail in the recent general election. Church leadership now seems divided and rudderless. Not since the nineteenth century has there been such public disagreement among the bishops. Cardinal Cullen's Tridentine temple has come tumbling down. For those of us whose lives were shaped by the influence of free speech, democracy, accountability and respectful academic dialogue, the Church has been a cold house for the last 30 years. For those of us who believed in the Vatican II-style Church - and its prospects influenced my decision to study for the priesthood - there has been lots of disillusion.

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Graham Greene has written of the door which opens in childhood and lets the future in. In the sphere of religion that door for me was the Second Vatican Council. It promised a Church which would engage positively with the human condition in the modern world. It would contribute to the dialogue out of the wisdom of its lengthy tradition, but also learn from contemporary insights. I long for a Church in this mould. We need a new Council of the Church if only to recall for us the insights of the last one. As Seamus Mallon described the Good Friday agreement as "Sunningdale for slow learners", so might the new Council be.

As the theologian Edward Schillebeecx has written:
"I do not begrudge any believer the right to describe and live out his belief in accordance with the old models of experience, culture and ideas, but this attitude isolates the Church from any future and divests itself of any real missionary power."

Such a Church would open its doors to married priests and women priests. It would benefit from secular insights like, for example, on human intimacy and democracy. It would work at developing a healthy and an holistic theology of sexuality.

Unfortunately this is not happening. The glad, confident morning of the Second Vatican Council was a short one. In the aftermath hope was choked by the Vatican curia. For over 30 years the Church has recoiled from reform and returned to the incense-filled ghettos in defence of its traditional hierarchical structure. Its procedures are archaic and cumbersome and precious, utterly out of sync with the ways of the democratic world. It is suspicious of lay involvement. Only those who are seen to conform to its narrow views are admitted to the temple. So bishops are chosen on the basis of being in favour of compulsory celibacy, adherence to clerical dress, docility to papal teaching and above all against contraception and the ordination of women. Loyalty is defined in old narrow terms. And it is so fearful of the feminine. Misogyny is dressed up in theological abstractions.

......... he kept the door open to the future. Perhaps that should be the central imperative of the Association of Catholic Priests. Who knows where it might lead. As Leonard Cohen sings: "there is a crack in everything; that is how the light gets in

The entire talk is at The Tablet