State’s role must reflect Ireland as it is - Pope Francis to visit in 2018

AS the 1932 Eucharistic Congress, held to mark the 1,500th anniversary of St Patrick’s arrival on this island, fades from living memory, that celebration can only be judged as an historical event.

At this remove, it all too often looks like some of the other mass-participation rallies held across Europe in that darkening decade. The congress celebrated the unquestioning belief and absolute obedience that supported an Irish theocracy. That festival was a moment when the power of Catholicism in Ireland was impervious and imperial.

Some 22 years later, in 1954, Irish Catholicism celebrated a Marian Year. The grottoes dotted across this Republic are a legacy of the expressions of faith so freely made that year. A quarter of a century later — 1979 — the wonderfully charismatic Pope John Paul II got an ecstatic reception when he visited. Irish Catholicism celebrated with abandon and imagined John Paul’s inspiring visit would silence dissent, recall backsliders to the fold, secure its place at the epicentre of our society and copperfasten its authority for at least another generation. How unimaginably wrong that hope was.