How Catholic are the Irish?

"Dia duit" ("God be with you") is the traditional greeting in the West of Ireland among the hardy few who still cling to the ancient Irish language. The standard reply is "Dia agus Mhuire duit" ("God and Mary be with you"). Does this lovely greeting still reflect the mind of a deeply religious people or have the words lost their meaning through habitual use? To put the question in more general terms, is the Catholic church in Ireland really in crisis, as we so often hear, or do most of the Irish still "keep the faith"?

As a "returned Yank," I recently spent a month in Ireland seeking the answer to this question in conversations with friends and in Irish publications. Despite the mixed impressions I received, I came away more cheered than I had expected to be.

Most American Catholics, whether of Irish descent or not, probably think of Catholicism and nationalism in Ireland as almost synonymous. In the six Northern counties now under British control this has remained largely true--with implications too complex for me to touch on here. But in the Republic of Ireland, which was estimated to be 95 percent Catholic when it gained its independence seventy years ago, a new generation has grown up that has no recollection of colonial status.

Once independent of the English, it was not surprising that the largely rural and conservative Irish incorporated Catholic principles into their 1937 Constitution. This document even specified that the church should have a "special position" in the young state although church and state were entirely separate. The phrase rankled with many in both the Republic and the North and was removed from the Constitution two decades ago, the first of a series of constitutional revisions which reflect the enormous changes that have transformed Irish society in the current generation.

The position of Catholic bishops in the new Irish Republic was delicate since their appeal was supposed to be only to the consciences of voters and politicians. In fact they did occasionally exert direct pressure on the government. One such case was the ill-fated "Mother and Child" scheme in 1951 when the government backed down from its intention to provide free medical care for expectant mothers and children because the hierarchy declared that such action on the part of the government would interfere with family and individual rights.

However, this was an exceptional case. Although bishops in the Republic possess no real political power, they are widely perceived as authoritarian. Such a view is especially embraced by Irish journalists, many of whom have been giving the hierarchy a very bad press. Because Irish laws that reflected Catholic teaching concerning contraception, abortion, and divorce have become the subjects of heated national debate in recent years, the bishops frequently publish statements concerning the moral aspects of these issues. Such statements are often resented, not just by the media, but by Ireland's large group of sophisticated, urban, young adults.

These articulate young people, mostly born during Ireland's era of prosperity in the '60s, are well educated. Their schooling, mostly under Catholic auspices--Protestants attend their own schools with equal tax support--is of a high standard and has produced citizens with lively minds, inclined to question all authority. The government is singled out for their special ire because of its failure to provide jobs, but church and family are also flouted in the swinging life-style of many young adults, a style which follows closely on American and European models. In their tastes in music, entertainment, fashions, and above all, in their sexual morality, the departure of many young people from traditional Irish norms is strikingly apparent.

Again and again, friends of my generation resignedly described their adult children's broken marriages, unbaptized children, or live-in arrangements. Several spoke of grandchildren born out of wedlock, a rare occurrence among middle-class families twenty years ago when both church and society would have expected such infants to be quietly placed out for adoption. The large families of the '60s have been replaced with families of one or two--a third child is considered a "status symbol" because its arrival means the mother can rarely go on working outside the home. The trend toward small families can be traced directly to the gradual relaxation of the government's ban on the importation and sale of contraceptives. The fact that the Catholic church has never relaxed its prohibition of contraception is so generally ignored as to appear almost irrelevant.

Not only in this matter but in its over-all influence, the authority of the hierarchy has been steadily eroding. In 1992 it dropped to its lowest point when Annie Murphy exposed her affair with Bishop Eamon Casey. I was surprised by the generally tolerant and forgiving attitude which members of my generation expressed toward the bishop. His many years of dedicated work for Irish emigrants in London, for the poor of his own diocese, and as head of Trocaire (Mercy) overseas have not been forgotten. Whatever his faults may have been, they reminded me, the bishop of Galway has paid dearly. He has been banished by his peers, hounded by the press, and exploited by the mother of his son, yet he has been given no opportunity to tell his side of the story.

Young adults, on the other hand, seemed more shocked, not so much by the bishop's sexual immorality as by his apparent fiscal impropriety and what they saw as his hypocrisy. Now that the affair has cooled down somewhat, my own impression is that the faith of practicing Catholics remains unshaken by this scandal although they could not have failed to see that a member of their hierarchy had been made to look like a fool. Casey, in fact, has become the butt of much wicked Irish wit, and, as a result, the authority of church leadership in Ireland has suffered still further erosion.

In 1983, a national referendum led to another amendment to the Constitution, this time by the addition of a ban on abortion. In 1992, the notorious "X" case, in which a fourteen-year-old gift had been made pregnant by her friend's father, became a test for this abortion ban. I was told that this was a case of statutory rape since the girl was a minor, but she did not claim there was any element of force in her on-going relationship with the older man. When her mother realized her daughter was pregnant she took her to England to procure an abortion.

Every year an estimated four thousand Irish women quietly travel to England for this purpose. In the "X" case, however, publicity concerning her intention led to a court injunction to prevent her from traveling abroad to end an unborn life that was protected by the Constitution. Her threat to commit suicide then led to a reversal of the court decision and she had the abortion in England as originally planned.

Other factors enter into this complex case, including a citizen's freedom to travel, but the upshot appears to be that a new drive to permit abortions in extreme cases (threatened suicide probably would not be acceptable) may eventually lead to a weakening of the ban. Throughout the controversy, church leadership stressed the equal rights to life of mother and child and that Irish obstetricians are renewned for their skill in saving both lives. Recent polls, however, indicate that most Irish Catholics have come to accept the idea of legal abortions under very limited circumstances.

Irish Catholic couples, like married couples throughout the industrialized world, are increasingly likely to divorce and there has been much discussion of removing the constitutional ban on divorce, at least for cases where no real marriage has existed for five years or more. In 1986 a divorce referendum was initiated by the then leader of the Fine Gael government, Garret FitzGerald. In the antidivorce campaign that followed, there was little reference to the biblical injunction against putting asunder what God had put together. On the contrary, the possible loss of property rights for the ex-wives and their children, as well as the disruption of society, were the principal arguments used to bring about the proposal's overwhelming defeat.

However, six years later, when a Fianna Fail government brought out a white paper which broached the possibility of divorce, the whole topic caught fire again, and Prime Minister Albert Reynolds vowed to bring the matter to a vote this year. Friends to whom I spoke about the prospects of at least limited divorce in Ireland seemed divided, with most older Catholics still strongly opposed. Whether some form of divorce will be allowed, despite church opposition, is anyone's guess. If the strong Irish women's movement has its way, I suspect that divorce with freedom to remarry--not just the legal separation which is now available--is not far off.

The vigor of Irish Catholic feminism has been the greatest revelation to me during recent trips to Ireland. The Ireland I first encountered in the 1950s was very much a man's country. Social life, except among well-to-do urbanites, was limited to one's own sex, with the men meeting the "lads" in the pub or heading for the football field or the racetrack. Women socialized with family members and neighbors while shopping or churchgoing but never in a "licensed premises." For women of this period, marriage nearly always meant enforced retirement from professional employment and the care of a large family with few household conveniences.

In recent years, an educated and emancipated breed of Irish women, with small families, "all mod cons," and paid employment has revolutionized Irish society. Ireland's president, Mrs. Mary Robinson, is a prominent spokeswoman for these new women and in spite of her outspoken feminism has remained a practicing Catholic. Many Irish feminists, however, have either left the church or are openly critical of its treatment of women. Feminist journalists rail against Catholic beliefs or personalities---even Mother Teresa was attacked after a recent visit--in articles which would never have been printed in the national press a few years ago. Often those women who express their anger most openly against the church are the very ones who support the idea of women's ordination.

The present open availablity of contraception is almost entirely due to women who insisted that this was their right as free citizens, yet they have avoided the position taken by so many of their American sisters of seeming to support unlimited abortion, If the Constitution is ever amended to permit limited abortion and divorce, this radical social change will have been largely the work of Irish feminists. oes all this turmoil, political and moral, mean that the Catholic church in Ireland is in deep trouble? Again, my answer can only be based on my superficial observations. Every Mass I attended was packed, but I only attended church in middle-class suburban parishes or in country churches. I was told that attendance is way down in working-class areas where anger over unemployment has alienated many workers from the "establishment," both church and government. In north Dublin city especially, crime is rampant and the evident poverty contrasts sharply with the conspicuous expenditure of the fortunate few in Dublin's more fashionable south side.

Though dwellers in poorer neighborhoods often sound cynical, their need for spiritual nourishment--or at least reassurance--is apparent in their lively interest in such phenomena as moving statues and weeping images. Before the present troubles in the former Yugoslavia, they stretched their slender budgets so that they could join the frequent flights to Medjugorje. I spoke to many who returned to Dublin with their faith renewed. Middle-class intellectuals, especially the media, have little patience with this form of piety but I suspect this devotionalism is the expression of a hunger which perhaps is not being satisfied by the low-key style of the Irish Catholic church.

The backbone of Ireland, the farming community, appears as loyal to the faith as ever. In Donegal, my Irish-speaking hostess, a mother of nine, had just returned from the rugged penitential pilgrimage at "Saint Patrick's Purgatory" on a bleak island in Lough Derg. In tiny Kilkieran in Connemara the church was thronged with students who sang like angels in the ancient language. Even in worldly Dublin, most of my fellow bus passengers crossed themselves each time we passed a church. On Irish national television the Angelus rings at 6 o'clock while a painting of the Virgin and Child is displayed.

What, if anything, do such outward signs say about the inward disposition of Irish Catholics? The troubled times have surely forced most traditional Catholics to examine their commitment to their faith. No doubt many, especially the young and those who attended church largely from a sense of social obligation, have drifted away. Yet I got a sense that those who remained did so now from conviction rather than from unquestioned convention. Judgments appear less narrow. Former harsh attitudes toward unwed mothers, for example, have been replaced by real compassion and a removal of the old stigma against them. Relations with Protestants have become far more relaxed. A retired barrister told me how relieved he was now that he no longer was required to stand outside the door of a Protestant church during the funeral of a non-Catholic friend.

This same wise friend seemed to me to sum up neatly the position of many in today's Irish Republic when he said: "Perhaps we Irish are not as 'Catholic' as we used to be--but I think we may be more Christian."

RUTH L. O'HALLORAN is writing her dissertation on the National Council of Catholic Women for her doctorate in church history at The Catholic University, Washington, D.C. She also currently teaches courses in Irish history and Western civilization.