Interesting Stuff Thread

Examiner wrote:

Some 20 years after predictions were made of a ‘Catholic restoration’, the Church finds itself lost in modern Ireland [...] When Mary Kenny published her book, Goodbye to Catholic Ireland, in 1997, even she didn’t have any real sense of how dramatic the flight from the faith would be in the years to come. [...]

In the six years since the publication of Empty Pulpits, those trends have accelerated, so much so that the headline over the front-page lead story in the November 13, 2014, edition of The Irish Catholic said: “Church has ‘lost the battle’ with secularism — archbishop”. The archbishop in question was Michael Neary of Tuam. The paper reported that, in his homily at the Mass for the Association of Papal Orders in Ireland at McKee Barracks in Dublin, Dr Neary said the Church in Ireland found itself “at a rather bewildering crossroads”.

Warning that the Church was regarded with apathy by many people, Dr Neary said: “This is because the whole society, like an Irish village of 50 years ago, knows and is tacitly acknowledging something that hardly needs to be said — that a great struggle, social, political, intellectual, and profoundly cultural, has been fought. And that we have lost.”

The crisis besetting Irish Catholicism will undoubted be greeted with schadenfreude by some. We shouldn’t blind ourselves, however, to the awful repercussions of the fracturing of the social cement that religion provided for so long. The restoration of Catholicism in Ireland that Mary Kenny seemed to envisage in 1997 is now so remote a possibility as to be off the board. The best hope for a renewed Catholicism may lie in the rediscovery and promotion of the Social Gospel, something Pope Francis appears to envisage in his desire to see “a Church that is poor and for the poor”.

A deeper problem concerns the place of religion in the public square. Cardinal Gerhard Muller, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, told officials at the recent US Conference of Catholic Bishops that the voice of the Catholic Church must be heard in the public square. In Ireland, that voice used to have not only a guaranteed place in the public square, but for a very long time it had a pre-eminent place there. That’s no longer the case. The Church’s voice has become increasingly peripheral. Henceforth, it will have to make its case for a right to be heard in the public square. The days when it could take things for granted are gone.