I think this is an interesting article about the decline of Catholicism in Ireland. Of course it totally ignores all the scandals involving priests and nuns abusing children physically and sexually, the Bishop of Galway hiding a child and supporting him and paying off his mother with Church funds, etc. that also drove the Irish from the hypocrisy of many Catholic role models:
timesonline.co.uk
The Sunday Times - Britain
April 03, 2005
Even he couldn’t halt the slow drift of Catholic Ireland
We like our religion but we like shopping more, says Tom Inglis
I WONDER whether the Pope’s death will be covered in Hello! People love to read about the stars, about how they do the same things we do, like getting married, getting pregnant, having babies, furnishing a new home. But death is different: the stars don’t tell us how to die. Death and dying are not sexy subjects and people want to hide away from them. Pope John Paul II has become an exemplary prophet of death. He is a reminder of the fragility of the materialist consumer bubble in which we live.
It will be a brief reminder. The world will consume his death in the same way that it consumes other media messages. Like distracted lemmings, we will continue to charge down the hill towards the shopping malls and town centres that now dominate the Catholic island of Ireland. Unfortunately, there is little that Pope John Paul II could have done about this. He has shown us how to deal with deathly disease, pain and suffering, how to die gracefully. But his attempt to show us how to live our lives has fallen on deaf ears.
The Catholic Ireland that the Pope came to visit and revive in 1979 was already dying. It revived a little in the aftermath of his visit; there was a small increase in vocations. But then the inexorable decline continued. Now the priests, nuns and brothers who once dominated the towns and villages of Ireland are dying out.
Of course, people still go to Mass, they still like being Catholics. But they don’t really listen to the Pope and his bishops any more. Priests, nuns and brothers may be holy people living exemplary lives but for many their moral advice, especially regarding sex, is past its sell-by-date.
Sex, as much as materialism, was the downfall of Catholic Ireland. Too many young women could no longer toe the strict moral line about artificial contraception. They refused to be like their mothers. They did not want a clatter of unwanted pregnancies. They wanted to control their fertility and their lives.
The young women of Ireland did not turn their backs on Pope John Paul II, they simply stopped listening to him. To make matters worse, they were encouraged by their mothers — the mothers who had given birth to Catholic Ireland. They created the Catholic homes in which the faith was embodied. They taught their children prayers, got them out to Mass and put them on their knees to say the rosary. But they no longer fostered the vocations on which the church depended. They allowed their children to worship Madonna rather than Our Lady.
A culture of hedonism and narcissism — fed by the market and the media — began to seep into Ireland. The Pope may have been a great spiritual and moral leader, but he had no idea what it was like to live in the modern world. The world of spending, working and commuting, and getting to the top, is out of sync with the spiritual and moral order advocated by Pope John Paul. How, in a world of self-fulfilment, can people be expected to practise self-denial, to surrender themselves to God? From the 1960s, the plain people of Ireland began to abandon the idea of living in frugal comfort in cosy homesteads. They no longer wished to be an island of saints and scholars. They didn’t want to save anyone. They wanted the comfort and mod-cons of life — televisions, fridges, washing machines, cars, central heating, foreign holidays, fancy food.
And so the plain people of Ireland gradually removed the statues and pictures of Our Lady, the Sacred Heart and all the Catholic icons that adorned their homes. Instead they put up modern pictures, and images that looked wonderful but said nothing. They took down the crucifixes and, as in Dublin, they put up spikes that said everything and nothing. The Catholics of Ireland took up the anchor and began to drift on the sea of materialism.
Pope John Paul II knew what was happening. It grieved him deeply. He wrote some wonderful encyclicals, but they no longer inspired most Irish Catholics.
And so the faith began to drain out of homes, and from social, political and economic life. People no longer understood their everyday lives as Catholics.
It was the media that put the first nail in the coffin of Catholic Ireland. The church preached against materialism but it had no command over radio and televison, which relentlessly told people to go out and consume. The message was simple and consistent: you have to have, you really need. Instead of self- denial the young people of Ireland were taught to be selfish, hedonistic, liberal individuals. The church never learnt to deal with it.
The battle for Catholic Ireland was fought out in the 1980s. They lost the fight over contraception, but victories in the abortion and divorce referendums were encouraging. Still, the signs of decay were everywhere. Young people were voting with their feet. Going to Mass became more of a lifestyle choice than a moral imperative. Politicians had to respond to the mood of the people. They, and the state, became more daring.
In the 1990s it all changed. Sex was no longer confined to marriage, contraceptives were sold like sweets, single women could have babies without being sent to the Magdalen Laundry, and gay men and women came out of the closet. When the Irish people voted in divorce in 1996, they also voted for an end to the marriage between church and state.
While traditional, holy Catholic Ireland may be dying, it is far from dead.
Ireland is still one of the most religious and Catholic countries in Europe, after Poland and Malta. The vast majority of Irish people identify themselves as Catholics. Up to half still attend Mass once a week.
Most children are still baptised into the faith and go on to attend Catholic schools. Like their parents they will probably get married and be buried within the church. They like being Catholic; it is part of their heritage. But like the Irish language, it is something they support without practising.
They also liked Pope John Paul II. He was a good guy. But, hey, life goes on. Someone has to do the shopping.
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