Diarmuid Martin: Catholic Church needs to undergo a reality check

The Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, is right — the Catholic Church now needs to carry out a reality check, especially in regard to young people and their beliefs. And after the outcome of the referendum on same-sex marriage, he won’t find the result of such a check very comforting.

Mon, 25 May, 2015 - 01:00

TP O’Mahony

In fact, the reality check should have happened much earlier. It has been evident since 1979, when the razzamatazz surrounding the visit of Pope John Paul II to Ireland withered away, that the Irish Church had lost the allegiance of many young people.

That papal visit was a watershed, but not of a kind that the Irish bishops and the Vatican had hoped for — it didn’t lead to a regeneration of Irish Catholicism, it marked instead a last hurrah for a pre-Vatican II Catholicism seriously out of tune with modern society.

Nowhere was that more true than in the area of human sexuality, where the Church’s loss of authority has been catastrophic.

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As far back as 1977, the internationally renowned Catholic psychiatrist Dr Jack Dominian was warning about “worldwide disenchantment and concern regarding the Church’s attitude to sexuality”.

Writing after the publication of two Vatican documents — Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae on July 25, 1968, and the Declaration on Sexual Ethics from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on December 29, 1975 — he said these had left “most Roman Catholics, particularly the young, puzzled and frustrated”.

In his 1977 book, Proposals for a New Sexual Ethic, he said many people believed “that the whole basis of Christian thinking on sexual morality needs fundamental reconstruction”.

As Friday’s poll on same-sex marriage has dramatically shown, the need, nearly four decades later, for this reconstruction is greater than ever.

When Mary Kenny wrote her book Goodbye to Catholic Ireland in 1997, she saw a culture not just changing but passing, but even she could not have foreseen how rapidly and dramatically that “passing” would happen.

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If we ever doubted that Irish society, at least in socio-moral and socio-religious terms, has undergone radical transformation, then the evidence was unmistakably manifested in the referendum on same-sex marriage.

It demonstrated — to an extent that will have surprised many, especially those on the outside — that the Irish people have liberated themselves from the straitjacket of a narrow clerical authoritarianism which, even when buttressed by so popular a figure as Pope Francis, no longer holds sway.

There was no direct intervention by the Pope of course, but in the run-up to the poll, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin said in the debates around same-sex marriage in Argentina, Pope Francis was very clear that he was against same-sex marriage. That made no real difference here in Ireland. It would have one time, and not that long ago.

The signs have been there for quite some time, and the implications all along for the Catholic Church and its authority in the sphere of sexuality have been ominous. Friday’s result is further evidence of the yawning gap between what the Church teaches and what people actually believe.

Towards the end of the Marian Finucane Show on RTÉ on Saturday, the question was asked whether we now need a new Constitution. Article 41, dealing with marriage and the family, will now have to be amended.

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But it was already badly outdated, as are other articles of the 1937 document. Just recently in these pages, I outlined the case for a new secular Constitution, a document for the Ireland of the 21st century.

The case for such a Constitution has been immeasurably strengthened by the dramatic outcome of Friday’s historic poll.