ANY notion that the days were over when Irish politicians were hand-in-glove with the Catholic Church should have been dispelled a few weeks back when the education minister, Niamh Breathnach, led an eleven-strong parliamentary delegation to Rome for the beatification of Edmund Ignatius Rice, the founder of the Christian Brothers. Perhaps we hadn t realised just how deeply the hand is, again, snuggled into the glove.
The delegation was formed from members of all parties represented in Leinster House. The costs of the trip were met from State funds. As far as I know, no TD or senator has complained about this, nor has any of our newspapers raised a fuss. It seems that the trip to the Vatican is not to be recorded as an occasion of controversy. Which is, on the face of it, strange, and worth pondering for deeper significance.
Edmund Ignatius Rice was a slightly controversial choice for beatification, even among dutiful Catholics. While it is possible to argue that the Brothers in the past played a positive role in the education of an unmonied layer of young Catholic males (it s not an argument I accept, but there is a perspective in which it can be made to seem plausible) it is also now generally acknowledged that the Order attracted as recruits many damaged young men with a penchant for violence, and that brutality in many of the schools and other institutions where they served reached levels which should have been unacceptable then and would certainly be held indefensible now.
It has also emerged that in a significant number of cases boys in the care of Christian Brothers were sexually as well as physically abused.
In Australia, the Order now faces ruin as hundreds, literally, of former pupils come forward to testify to the physical and sexual savagery inflicted on them by Rice s followers.
Among the former pupils with the most appalling stories are many who were transported to Australia from Catholic orphanages in Ireland and placed in institutions controlled by the Brothers. They were ten thousand miles from their home-place and with nobody in the world to appeal to. Many didn t even know their own real names. Traumatised by abandonment and completely at the mercy of Christian Brothers, the cumulative effect of the stories they tell is physically sickening and devastating to the spirit.
All this was widely reported before plans for Rice s beatification were announced, and led to some questioning by Catholics, expressed in letters-to-the-editor and so forth, of the advisability of his promotion . But the tax-funded Oireachtas delegation to Rome signalled that, for its part, the State had no reservations in the matter.
The Minister and her fellow-parliamentarians joined thousands of other Irish in St Peter s for the ceremony: in effect, the Irish State joined in a somewhat controversial Catholic pilgrimage, without, as far as we can see, rippling the surface of political tranquillity.
This hints at something which is also detectable in two significant recent policy announcements by Labour ministers the decisions of Ms Breathnach to copperfasten Catholic Church control of much of the State-financed educational system, and the associated decision of Equality Minister Mervyn Taylor to exempt Catholic schools from key provisions of new anti-discrimination legislation. (The two ministers have, separately and together, tried to argue that this is an unfair account of what they are proposing but have succeeded only in confirming the accuracy of the account.)
There were clues to what is afoot here during the closing stages of the divorce referendum, in which all of the Leinster House parties officially urged a Yes vote. It was argued then by the anti-divorce side that the legalisation of divorce would lead on to further liberal reforms, that it was merely one element of a much more elaborate liberal agenda , a staging-post on the road to a fully secular society.
What was most interesting about the campaign was that instead of joining battle on this basis and arguing in favour of a secular society, the mainstream parties urging a Yes vote, instead challenged their opponents delineation of the battle-line and denied that they contemplated any further reforms or future moves towards secularisation.
Health Minister Michael Noonan, the effective leader of the government campaign, was forthright and explicit during a Questions And Answers programme before the vote and on an RTE results programme afterwards that this was the last item on the government s liberal agenda .
Give us this and we ll call it quits, ran the message. We have no further demands.
These assurances must have come as a considerable relief to leaders of the Catholic Church at the time, following the series of seismic disturbances arising from revelations of sex-abuse by priests, unspeakably cruelty in orphanages (not just or even primarily run by Christian Brothers), the exposure of well-known priests as frauds and hypocrites, the flight of bishops from scandal and so forth.
The authority of the institutional Catholic Church was at its lowest ebb since the foundation of the State. And yet it was at this moment that politicians, including those of Labour and Democratic Left supposedly committed to the separation of Church and State, backed off from any further confrontation.
AND not just politicians. A few weeks ago I chanced on a radio discussion of the appeal of the Faith Of Our Fathers album and heard Nuala O Faolain suggest that the tone of this hymn-fest was in tune with the placid atmosphere in the land these days, now that issues like divorce and abortion have been disposed of.
Of course, the abortion issue has not been disposed of at all. Abortion (in the circumstances of the X case, for example) has been made legal in Southern Ireland through referendum vote of the people. But no provision has been made for this legal procedure actually to take place. Every week, women now travel to Britain for abortions not because it would be illegal for the abortion to be carried out in Ireland but because, although perfectly legal, it just can t be done. The issue is more tangled and, viewed from any angle, surely more unsatisfactory than ever. And yet a commentator as closely associated as Ms O Faolain with advocacy of progressive reform in general and with women s issues in particular, can casually suggest that there s no need to grapple with it any longer. What s going on?
I think that unease at the collapse of the Catholic Church s authority in the South has by no means been confined to the Church itself. Facing a future fraught with political and economic uncertainty, and with no coherent ideological system of their own, many who might have little time for the Church in their personal lives have felt a frisson of alarm at the fraying of the main source of moral authority in the land since the foundation of the State.
They looked into a future in which secular authority alone would be available to hold society together, and shrank back in fear.
On this view, it wasn t just run-of-the-mill Labour cowardice which led Breathnach and Taylor to renew the bishops franchise for controlling the State s schools: it s rather down to a confession of their own political and ideological bankruptcy.
On the same view, Breathnach s leadership of a State contingent on the Edmund Rice pilgrimage was a signal to the Church, and to Irish society at large, that notwithstanding the unease and even anger of a large number of citizens at many aspects of the Church s role in education through the years, the State was resolved to make no issue of it.
What we are witnessing is not a continuing process of separation of Church and State but the making of a new concordat between Church and State, on terms highly favourable to the Church in its present condition and indicative of great weakness and lack of confidence on the part of the State in its present condition. n