Isn’t it time all church leaders showed true Christian spirit?
He announced that the gesture was “symbolic and once-off for the moment”.
“For the moment” was what might be called a pregnant phrase in the same sense as a pregnant pause. The Archbishop of Armagh Seán Brady has ordered an inquiry into the Mass, which he claimed was not held in the interest of “true ecumenism”. If he knows that why has he called for the inquiry? It looks dangerously like he has already prejudged the whole thing.
If he wants a useful inquiry, he should investigate the lousy leadership of the bishops over decades. The whole controversy is reminiscent of Mary McAleese receiving communion at Christ Church Cathedral less than a month after she was inaugurated as President.
It has been said that Irish bishops stand on ceremony and walk on everybody.
People used to kiss a bishop’s ring but the politicians thoroughly embraced them.
When former President Douglas Hyde died in 1949 he was accorded a state funeral. After all. he was our first President. and many people would argue that, in founding the Gaelic League and sparking the Gaelic revival, he did more for Irish independence that any individual. And he shot no one in the process! President Seán T O’Kelly, Taoiseach John A Costello, and Leader of the Opposition Eamon de Valera all funked attending his funeral service in St Patrick’s Cathedral, because the hierarchy would not have liked it. Instead they waited outside in their cars and joined the cortege after it left the cathedral. The only member of the cabinet who attended the church service was Noel Browne, who happened to be a Catholic.
The Republic had already been officially proclaimed in 1949, but President O’Kelly allowed Archbishop John Charles McQuaid to walk on him. The Archbishop upstaged the President in relation to the appointment of the new Papal Nuncio Archbishop Ettore Felici.
Archbishop McQuaid invited the new nuncio to a public reception before he presented his credentials to the President. In terms of protocol the Archbishop of Dublin was establishing his primacy over the President.
Seán T attended the mass that preceded the reception, but he then walked out in quiet protest. Bolstered by this symbolic victory, Archbishop McQuaid dictated to the government in relation to the Mother and Child Bill 18 months later. This was legislation designed to tackle our infant mortality rate, which was the highest in Western Europe at the time. The government betrayed the republic by surrendering to the hierarchy and sacrificing Noel Browne’s political career.
“All of us in the Government who are Catholics are, as such, bound to give obedience to the rulings of our Church and our hierarchy,” declared Seán MacBride. Browne observed at the time that members of the Government tended “to prove conclusively that Rome did rule, which I had already learned from my experience in cabinet”.
As leader of Clann na Poblachta it was MacBride who demanded Browne’s resignation, because he would not surrender to the dictates of the Archbishop. At a party meeting MacBride actually accused Browne of being politically naïve for allowing himself to “be photographed with the Protestant Archbishop of Dublin”.
Archbishop McQuaid did not give a damn about infant morality, and we now know that he and his colleagues were effectively facilitating child abuse. Their successors have tried to fob this off by saying they didn’t understand. If they didn’t, they shouldn’t have been in positions of authority.
When Archbishop Desmond Connell had the audacity to criticise President Mary McAleese publicly for taking communion at a Protestant service in Christ Church Cathedral, she had the exquisite audacity to announce that she would do so again. She had undertaken to represent all of the people and she clearly had the overwhelming majority behind her. A public opinion poll found that 78% of the people agreed with her. Through her Christian example people had finally stood up to the bishops.
It was during her first term, at the end of the century, that this country had the lowest infant mortality rate in the whole world. That was the real tribute to Noel Browne, because he was the one who really highlighted the need for action.
Maybe if Seán T had had the courage to take on Archbishop McQuaid in 1949 he might actually be remembered for having achieved something worthwhile in office, instead of presiding over the darkest period of Irish history since the Great Famine.
The 1950s was a decade of emigration, economic deprivation, and spiritual bankruptcy. It was the decade of the Mother and Child controversy, the Rose Tattoo affair, and the Fethard-on-Sea boycott, as well as the decade in which censorship reached its nadir with more than 5.000 books being banned, many on utterly ludicrous grounds.
On May 13, 1956, Fr Patrick Ryan, the curate in Clonlara, County Clare, led a group of 10 men in an attack on a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses, took their pamphlets, burned them, and then ordered the two men out of town, warning them never to return. This was Wild West justice, but the two men filed a formal complaint with An Garda Síochána. Fr Ryan and his gang were proud of their thuggish behaviour, which they pompously admitted. They were prosecuted and convicted.
District Justice Gordon Hurley let them go with the benefit of the Probation Act but punished the two victims in one of the most perverse decisions of any Irish court.
The two Jehovah’s Witnesses were only in court as witnesses to the assault, but they were essentially convicted of blasphemy and seeking to destroy the Catholic religion. They had not been charged with anything, but they were bound to the peace on their own sureties of £100 each and two independent sureties of £100 each, or three months in jail.
Bishop Joseph Rodgers of Killaloe, who had attended the court case, wrote to Taoiseach John A Costello to complain afterwards, not about the travesty of justice, but about the prosecution of Fr Ryan and the others.
“I find it hard to credit that the Attorney General, had he been fully aware of the pernicious and blasphemous literature distributed and sold in my diocese by these self-styled Jehovah’s Witnesses, he would have proceeded against one of my priests for upholding and defending the fundamental truths of our treasured Catholic faith,” the bishop wrote.
He demanded legal protection in future against such vile attacks on the faith: “We censor obscene literature, your Attorney General prosecutes one of my priests for doing what I, and all good Catholics here, regard as his bounden duty and right. The matter cannot rest.”
The Taoiseach replied that he fully appreciated “the just indignation aroused among the clergy and the people by the activities of the Jehovah’s Witnesses”.
Hopefully people have had enough of the lousy leadership afforded by too many of the bishops for too long. They are not the church. The great body of the people are the church, and it is about time we let the Hierarchy know that we have had enough bigotry on this island, and it is time they provided some good example by adopting a true Christian spirit.
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