Real priests can help us keep the faith

YOUR two page special investigation (Keeping the Faith, June 24) continues to roll out the 40-year myth which should never have happened.

Vatican II was never fully explained, taught, or properly understood. It also was never implemented and so ended up being both divisive and detrimental to the church, as the last four decades have more than proved.

To continue to hear the beat of the anti-celibacy drum, to listen to countless priests saying they have no problems with women priests and to read many comments made by bishops in the media makes one wonder “what if?” If these and other Vatican II items had been realised, would the Church have fared better?

The lasting legacy of Vatican II was to establish two contradictory schools of thought. This led to a polarisation between a pre-Vatican II and post-Vatican II mindset, a situation in which both schools wanted their views validated and accepted. This remains the case today. In the five years following Vatican II, a whole new liturgy — one could almost say ‘new church’ — was formed almost unrecognisable to many. A church, perhaps, built on sand.

The visit of John Paul II to Ireland in 1979 concluded with a clear message, “Do not squander the strengths and virtues of your national spirituality by replacing them with the false gods of materialism and secularism leading only to heartache and misery.” No sooner had the pope waved goodbye, than his advice was openly trashed by the politicians and media hacks who questioned what right this polish pope had to keep us as a backward and servile people denying so many their ‘human rights’. Now with such rights in the main granted are we that much more of a Christian people, a more caring society?

Perhaps it was possible even in the early 1980s to have steered a more neutral course, but the advent of the sitcom Fr Ted inflicted a blow of irreparable damage. When the post-Vatican II Church here accepted it as somehow harmless, they could not have been more mistaken.

No senior cleric over the years since its first showing has ever seen fit to denounce it for what it actually is, a harmful piece of work. So much so, that it effectively robbed the church, year after year, of very many vocations. To choose the priesthood became over three decades the most non-acceptable lifestyle for young men and, as the clerical sex scandals unfolded, one by one the twelve seminaries in the country closed their doors. It could be said that NUI Maynooth now has a “priesthood facility”, but only a minor one.

The lifestyles of celebrities, rock stars sports men, doctors, lawyers, army officers, artists are what attracts the youth of Ireland today and it is easy to understand why. On the other hand, as there are no young priests leading the heroic lives they were chosen to lead and no young men see the sense in following them.

As a nation which has all but lost its language, has without doubt lost its sovereignty, and is now in the process of finally losing its faith, the need for real priests has never been greater.

John Herriott

Dun Laoghaire

Co Dublin