From Saints to Secularists
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The dramatic transformation of Ireland from the land of saints and scholars to one of the most secularized countries in Europe was exposed recently by the publication of a religious survey. The poll revealed that the Irish people, particularly members of the younger generation, betray a shocking lack of basic religious knowledge.
The first of its kind in Ireland, the survey was carried out by a new Catholic think-tank, The Iona Institute, and Ireland's Evangelical Alliance. Here are some of the key findings of the poll:
- Only 5 percent of 15-24 year-olds can name the First Commandment versus only 25 percent of the total population.
- Only half of 15-24 year-olds can name the four Gospels versus 66 percent of the total population.
- Only 38 percent of 15-24 year-olds can correctly answer that the Catholic Church has seven sacraments. Only 50 percent of the total population can give the correct answer.
- Only 10 percent of 15-24 year-olds can define what the Immaculate Conception means, and only 19 percent of the total population can give the correct answer.
- A third of 15-24 year-olds cannot say where Jesus was born and a third cannot say what the Church celebrates at Easter.
- Only half of 15-24 year-olds and half of the general population can correctly identify Genesis as the first book of the Bible.
David Quinn, director of The Iona Institute, told CWR that "the findings of the poll will be of concern to all the Churches, to parents who want to raise their children in the Christian faith, and many teachers as well."
He added that "the poll deliberately asked very basic questions, the 'ABCs' of Christianity, and a few of the ABCs of Catholicism, and found that levels of knowledge are alarmingly low. This seems to be especially true of those who are either still in school or have only recently left school, which is probably the opposite of what you would expect."
But is this lack of knowledge unique to religious education, or is it just another sign of a wider crisis in education? David Quinn said that "of course, you might find that knowledge of history and politics is also in decline, and therefore the decline in religious knowledge might not be an isolated event . . . However, even those who are not Christians should raise an eyebrow at these results. Some knowledge of Christianity should be part of general knowledge because Ireland has such a deep Christian heritage."
"Christianity is part of our history. From a Church point of view, there is obviously a correlation between knowledge of the faith, and practice of the faith. When one declines, so does the other. We, starting with the Churches, need to examine the reasons why knowledge of the faith is in such sharp decline," he said.
Seán Mullan is director of the Evangelical Alliance, a group which represents Ireland's 35,000-strong (and growing rapidly) Evangelical community. He commented that "this poll shows that the notion of Ireland being a Christian culture is becoming a thing of the past. The notion that Christianity can be transmitted through the culture from one generation to the next is clearly no longer valid. These findings present a challenge to all those who believe that the message of Jesus Christ needs to be heard in Irish society."
The results will provide little comfort to those involved in religious education in Ireland. Opponents of modern trends in Irish catechetics have suspected for many years that the state of religious knowledge was in crisis.
Martin Daly, president of the John Paul II Society who has been a frequent critic of the Irish Church's catechetical program Alive-O, expressed no surprise at the results. "It confirms everything that we've been saying for years," he said to CWR.
"It's now time for each and every bishop in the country to take responsibility for the disaster that is religious education and stop abdicating responsibility to national agencies," he said. "There has been a failed approach for at least 30 years now, these results make this obvious. It's now time to think outside the box, to look to other parts of the world where religious education is successful and follow that model."
Daly said he would "like to see Church authorities admit that there is a problem, take an innovative approach, and appoint well-qualified and orthodox people with a proven track record in Catholic education."
Fine-tuning the current catechetical programs is not enough, he insists. "Tinkering with Alive-O will do nothing to improve the situation, there needs to be a new program. In any organization when the message is not getting through you have to take dramatic action to redress that." But he is quick to point out that "many teachers themselves are victims," as "they've been let down by the system and trained in an inadequate method."
A Marginalized Church
The lack of religious knowledge displayed by many Irish people points to a much-wider cultural shift. Over the last fifty years the Church in Ireland has gone from the center of culture to its margins. In the 1950s, there were more Irish priests and religious working abroad than in Ireland itself. Today, many parishes are without priests and religious sisters and brothers have handed over many of their once-cherished hospitals and schools to the state.
The decline of the Church has undoubtedly been exasperated by the steady trickle of clerical sexual abuse scandals. Public confidence in Church leaders is low and Ireland is now served by a group of bishops beleaguered from dealing with a range of scandals for almost twenty years now.
Perhaps more damaging to the faith in Ireland has been a secularist juggernaut that first began to emerge in the early 1980s with moves to amend legislation on a host of controversial moral issues, culminating in challenges to the ban on contraception and the constitutional prohibition on divorce and abortion.
Garrett FitzGerald was elected Taoiseach (which means Prime Minister) in 1981 and immediately embarked on what he described as his "constitutional crusade." FitzGerald steered his center-right Fine Gael party away from its Christian democratic roots and toward the cultural left. He argued that by liberalizing legislation the Republic of Ireland would appear less Catholic and thus be more attractive to Protestants in Northern Ireland who opposed the reunification of Ireland.
What FitzGerald failed to realize was that, if anything, Northern Irish Protestants were even more conservative than their Catholic counterparts in the Republic of Ireland. The Fine Gael Government failed to win a referendum that would legalize divorce in Ireland, but FitzGerald's government was successful in liberalizing laws restricting contraception. A previous relaxation of the law had lifted the outright ban on artificial birth control and made contraception available to married couples. Now, contraception was to be available on demand.
The constitutional crusade suffered a bruising defeat in 1983 when the ProLife Campaign (PLC) successfully lobbied to have a clause inserted in the Irish Constitution that explicitly recognized that an unborn child had an equal right to life as that of the pregnant woman. Despite this setback, the tide was turning. The clerical sexual abuse scandals provided an opening for opportunistic secularists to challenge the Church's moral authority, and the Church has singularly failed to regain this lost ground since.
By the mid-1990s, the Irish people had narrowly voted in a referendum to legalize divorce. Simultaneously, Ireland's Legislature decriminalized acts of homosexuality. Although abortion is still illegal in Ireland, the core doctrines of the constitutional crusaders had been achieved in less than twenty years. For the first time in Irish history, people (including many priests and at least one bishop) were openly opposing the Catholic Church on a broad sweep of moral issues.
Church / State Relations
The current Fianna Fáil Government, led by Catholic Bertie Ahern, has endeavored to defend the Church against criticism. Under Ahern, the Department of Education negotiated a controversial deal with religious orders stating that the Government would accept full liability for claims arising out of alleged abuse in industrial schools and penal reform institutions managed by religious orders. As part of the deal, the Church offered land valued at up to €128 million to cover thousands of claims of sexual and physical abuse against the institutions. However, the final total for compensation now stands at more than €1 billion, a significant embarrassment for Ahern's administration which had long been accused of hatching the deal to save the Church from going bankrupt.
But the role of the Church in Irish life has been bolstered by a recent announcement of a form of "structured dialogue" between the Government, churches and faith communities. While the dialogue includes representatives from all the Christian churches as well as the leaders of the Jewish and Islamic faiths in Ireland, it is seen as an important step in restoring the importance of religious faith to the center of Irish life.
Speaking at the launch of the dialogue, Ahern attacked the influence of what he described as "aggressive secularism," noting
. . . there is a form of aggressive secularism which would have the State and State institutions ignore the importance of this religious dimension. They argue that the State and public policy should become intolerant of religious belief and preference, and confine it, at best, to the purely private and personal, without rights or a role within the public domain. Such illiberal voices would diminish our democracy. They would deny a crucial dimension of the dignity of every person and his rights to live out his spiritual code within a framework of lawful practice, which is respectful of the dignity and rights of all citizens.It would be a betrayal of the best traditions of Irish Republicanism to create such an environment.
Ahern went on to outline the "importance of understanding the beliefs and values which have shaped our institutions, customs and values and which provide the key to the overall sense of identity of so many of our people." He pointed out that "Ireland shares in the inheritance of over two thousand years of Christianity. This heritage has indelibly shaped our country, our culture and our course for the future. We are home too, to people of other faiths and it is a special feature of the past decade that we have welcomed, what in a historical context, are relatively large numbers of non-Christian people."
The "New Irish"
The emergence of these non-Christian people accounts for the growing ethnic diversity in Ireland. The latest figures from the Central Statistic Office indicate that 10 percent of the population were born outside the State, forming a group called the "new Irish." This unprecedented wave of immigration has not been without its problems. The fact that the immigrants are largely confined to traditionally working-class areas has the potential to raise racial tensions. At the same time, however, it means that working-class people are more inclined to be tolerant of diversity and have friends who are from immigrant backgrounds.
Multiculturalism has become a prominent issue in the minds of voters. Senator John Paul Phelan, who at age 29 is the youngest member of the national Legislature, said to CWR that he hopes Ireland can avoid the immigration-related problems affecting other European countries.
"If one looks to Britain and France where racial tensions have frequently led to street violence there's a common thread — failed immigration policies," he says. "Britain and France decided to go the multicultural route and this has failed them. We need to work harder to integrate immigrants."
Ireland must balance tolerance and common sense, he said. "Immigrants who wish to come to our shores and enjoy our economic prosperity, and enjoy our democratic way of life, must engage with us and respect our values. We're a Christian and a Celtic people, I wouldn't like us to lose our identity in a rush to become multicultural."
Political Contradictions
The role of faith in the life of the current Taoiseach has provoked much debate in Ireland. Bertie Ahern makes no secret of the fact that he is a devout Catholic. He even interrupted key negotiations in the Northern Ireland peace process to attend Mass on more than one occasion. Ahern is a frequent defender of the Church, making a point of criticizing commentators who use clerical sexual scandals as a pretext to attack the Church's teachings.
Complicating matters, however, is that Ahern is separated from his wife and has had a number of high-profile relationships since his separation. His relationship with one woman in particular caused extreme embarrassment for Church leaders in 2001 after Ahern and the woman jointly hosted a State Reception to celebrate Archbishop Desmond Connell's elevation to the College of Cardinals. A number of high-profile members of the Anglican Church of Ireland boycotted the reception to protest what they described as the Taoiseach's hypocrisy.
Ahern's Government has also been criticized for doing too little to uphold the right to life of the unborn. In 2002, the Government established the Crisis Pregnancy Agency (CPA) as a strategy to reduce the number of women traveling abroad for abortions. While the numbers of Irish women seeking abortions in nearby England and Wales has dropped from 6,673 in 2001 to 5,585 in 2005, pro-life activists insist that the CPA must become more overtly pro-life.
The agency has courted controversy since publishing a leaflet entitled Positive Options. The document offers contact details for abortion referral agencies and effectively encourages women to see abortion as a legitimate alternative to motherhood.
"A lot of pro-life people are very unhappy with the CPA. We're calling on the Government to reform the agency and make it a pro-life organization," said John Smyth, a spokesman for the Pro-Life Campaign.
The CPA has also come in for sharp criticism from a number of high-profile Government senators over a controversial dispute with the Church's crisis pregnancy advisory service, Cura. Currently Cura receives €600,000 in State funding annually. However, the condition that Cura distribute a leaflet providing abortion referral information was attached to the funding. In a decision that has since come back to haunt them, Cura initially decided to distribute the leaflet. But when the issue of the leaflet was brought to the attention of the Irish Bishops' Conference, the bishops ordered Cura to stop distributing the leaflet immediately.
The revelation embarrassed Bishop John Fleming, the president of Cura who initially gave his permission for the offending leaflet to be distributed by its counselors. Meanwhile, the decision to withdraw the leaflet has angered the board of the CPA and they are now threatening to remove funding from the Church-run agency.
Senator Martin Mansergh, a Fianna Fáil legislator and member of the elite Council of State that offers advice to President Mary McAleese, criticized the actions of the CPA. "It's been long established that faith-based organizations should never be asked to operate in a way that would jeopardize their ethos," he said to CWR. "Cura, and other faith-based organizations must continue to be allowed to cherish their Catholic principles and still receive Government funding."
Ahern's Fianna Fáil Government has also sent out mixed messages on embryonic stem cell research. While Dermot Ahern, the powerful Minister for Foreign Affairs, insisted that the Government would "never support experimentation on embryos," his ministerial colleague for Enterprise, Micheal Martin, used Ireland's vote at the European Union to fund embryonic stem-cell research. Martin defended his decision by arguing that the vote "did not permit embryonic stem-cell research in Ireland, only in other European countries."
The vote caused much disquiet in Government circles with a number of high-profile ministers, including the Minister for Arts, John O'Donoghue, and the Minister for the Environment, Dick Roche, objecting to the vote. But a Government spokesman says that there are "no plans" to reverse the vote.
Unresolved Issues
Pro-family campaigners have been successful in making so-called tax individualization an issue again for all the main political parties. Tax individualization was introduced in 1999 in a bid to encourage more women to participate in the workforce. The policy shift eliminated the once-cherished married couple tax allowance and meant that a single-income married couple would be taxed by up to €6,240 more than a family in which both parents work.
Now all the main political parties are promising to increase the "home carer's tax credit" so that stay-at-home mothers will not face financial hardship for choosing to give up work to raise their children.
John Byrne, a Catholic barrister who has written a policy paper challenging tax individualization, told CWR that recent proposals "are improvements on the approach formerly taken by the Government since they do not widen the gap between married one-income and married two-income families and seek significantly to raise the home carer's credit." But they still don't "go far enough."
Homosexual activists in Ireland have been increasing pressure on the Government to pass legislation allowing civil unions and marriage-like benefits for same-sex couples. While the Government successfully defeated legislation proposed by the minority Labour Party, the Gay and Lesbian Equality Network (GLEN) has vowed to campaign on the issue with all the main political parties.
Since civil unions came into force in Northern Ireland under British legislation on January 1st, pressure has been mounting in the Republic of Ireland for the Government to follow suit. Homosexual activists argue that if the Government will not permit gay marriage, they must give same-sex couples benefits such as inheritance rights and the right to adopt children.
The Archbishop of Dublin, Dr. Diarmuid Martin, has been working to broker a compromise. Dr Martin, who spent more than two decades in the Vatican's diplomatic service before being called home to head Ireland's largest diocese in 2003, has proposed that partnership legislation could be approved to include all people living in "caring and dependant" relationships, including non-conjugal relationships. Advocates of this approach point to the example of elderly brothers and sisters who live together and are dependant on each other.
The homosexual lobby in Ireland, while small, has a powerful platform in the country's mainstream media. Few, if any, columnists or media commentators dare to dissent from the view that homosexual couples ought to be allowed to get married and adopt children.
As Ireland becomes more religiously diverse, the Catholic Church's dominant role in education is increasingly challenged. Currently the Church manages 96 percent of the country's elementary schools. The schools are funded 100 percent by taxpayers, but the management of the schools, including the hiring and firing of teachers, is the responsibility of the Church.
Teachers unions are calling for the Church to take a "back seat" in education. John Carr, General Secretary of the Irish National Teachers Organisation (INTO), has called on the Government to open more faith-neutral schools.
Critics of the Church's engagement in education contend that the traditional model is outmoded now that Irish society is made up of people from almost 180 countries. Archbishop Diarmuid Martin has responded sharply to such criticism.
"One could get the impression from some pundits that the principal problem with Irish education was Catholic schools. The facts tell us the opposite," he recently told a gathering of priests. "Let us be clear. It is parents who choose Catholic schools. They want to send their children to Catholic schools. Our Catholic schools have been welcoming to people of different cultural and religious backgrounds who come to them, not as some second best option, but precisely for the values that come from the Catholic identity of our schools."
Meanwhile, the opposition Labour party has vowed to reduce the role of the Church in schools. The party has also said it would require the Church to abide by all equality legislation. This would likely force the Church to employ teachers hostile to Catholic teaching. At present the Church is exempted from provisions in the equality legislation that bans discrimination on the grounds of religion.
For the first time in living memory, Northern Ireland is no longer a central issue in day-to-day Irish life. For several generations Irish people grew up with the shadow of sectarian violence never far away. Now, despite some predictable troubles, the region has a power-sharing government agreed to by once-hardliners on both sides. The ultra-Protestant Democratic Unionist Party, led by the firebrand cleric Reverend Ian Paisley, has agreed to share power with Sinn Fein, political representatives of the region's formerly powerful paramilitary organization, the Irish Republican Army (IRA).
A seemingly intractable dispute about whether Northern Ireland should remain part of Great Britain or join with the Irish Republic to form a single united Ireland has, for the time-being, been solved. All parties to the dispute have committed themselves to accepting the principle of consent. If there is to be a change in the constitutional position of Northern Ireland, it will be by agreement and brought about by purely peaceful means. Few could have envisioned such a remarkable turn of events.
The Future
In less than ten years Ireland will celebrate the 100th anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising that eventually led to independence. It's hard to imagine what many of the men and women who fought for Irish freedom would make of Ireland today. Economic prosperity has, without a doubt, brought a great deal of benefits to Ireland. But being one of the world's wealthiest countries has introduced a whole new set of challenges to the culture. Ireland is in rapid transition and the new Ireland is casting some dark shadows.
Suicide rates in Ireland are amongst the highest in the world, more than 50 percent of young people regularly binge-drink and religious faith is fast becoming a relic. Whether or not Ireland will continue to be a country of faith is an open question. Let's hope that Ireland can recover the spirit of the land of saints and scholars — the zeal that drove Irish missionaries to bring the life-giving message of the Gospel to a broken world.
Michael Kelly is a religious and social affairs writer and broadcaster based in Dublin, Ireland.
This item 7671 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org
