Power surge in retrospect
BY THE early 1970s, the career of one of the towering figures of 20th century Irish Catholicism, Dr John Charles McQuaid, Archbishop of Dublin since 1940, was coming to a close.
The Vatican accepted his resignation in 1971 after three decades during which he had exercised extraordinary power over many areas, including health, education, industrial relations and social services.
He had cast a cold eye on some of the international initiatives of the 1960s to update the Church and emphasise it as an assembly of people, with a need for liturgical innovation and ecumenical advances, most notably the reforms agreed by the Vatican II Council, summoned by Pope John XXIII, which sat from 1962-5.
McQuaid famously asserted the council’s decrees and declarations would “not disturb the tranquility of your Christian lives”. There was stubbornness, denial and delusion at the heart of that assertion.
In truth, Irish Catholicism could not and did not remain immune from international debates about the status of religion and growing secularisation, and during the 1970s, there were vigorous debates about the place of religion and numerous challenges to traditional religious priorities.
A host of periodicals and journals aimed at those in religious life and educated lay Catholics turned their attention to what was often termed the “crisis” of religious identity. They debated the relevance to Ireland of Pope Paul VI’s warnings about “the movement of corrosive criticism towards the institutional church spreading from not a few intellectual centres of the West”.
While Mass attendance remained remarkably high by international standards, there were certain “danger signs” in relation to the religious commitment of young single males in Dublin, counteracting the “strength of the female subculture with regard to weekly Mass”.
The number returning “no religion” or “no statement” in census forms rose sharply from 0.2% in 1961 to 1.9% in 1971. There were references to the questioning of authority and the “collapse of the cherished beliefs and values of so many people”, and a report by the Association of Irish Priests on the departure of priests from the active ministry.
This, Enda McDonagh, Professor of Moral Theology at Maynooth, suggested, “has been... puzzling, painful and sometimes even shocking to Catholics, lay, clerical and religious”.
The first AGM of the National Conference of Priests of Ireland was held in November 1976, but “the young clergy were conspicuous by their absence. There was only one priest under 30”.
The undesirability of the priest having a life of religious involvement without a life of social involvement was emphasised; part of the “priests’ identity crisis” highlighted at various stages throughout the decade.
One contributor to this debate was moved to imagine a suburb in the year 2000 “where the number of Mass-goers has dropped from 100% to 25%”. It was acknowledged that priests were struggling with “the cult of the teenager”, while questions were also raised about the function and profile of more senior church figures.
One priest, who suggested it was unlikely “an Irish bishop ever lost a night’s sleep over his image”, insisted that the notion of the bishop as a remote administrator had to change. Another priest suggested that given the shallowness of religious education, there was a danger that the priest would “bore a young person into atheism”, a reaction to them being told “until they must be heartily sick of it that Ireland is a uniquely Christian-Catholic country surrounded by a sea of modern paganism... a little less emphasis on how Christian Ireland is and a realistic recognition of how far she is currently removed from qualifying for the title and we might have more deeply committed Christians and incidentally, a good deal less mediocrity”.
As historian John A Murphy saw it in 1976, anti-clericalism “of the negative, secular type” had not put down significant roots in Ireland due to the history of a “unique priests-people relationship”, but the priest of the future “may have to serve or to follow rather than expect to command”.
In light of Vatican II, priests were deemed to need further education in a society industrialising and urbanising: “The Irish church, though slow-moving, has a tradition of solid and serious approaches to pastoral problems. Nowhere is this more required than in the challenges of post Vatican II renewal.”
For all the enthusiasm about the visit to Ireland of Pope John Paul II in September 1979, it was actually worry about a perceived decline in religion’s status in Ireland that prompted the invitation to him in the first place.
Nonetheless, the visit created unprecedented interest and excitement, if not hysteria. In the autumn of 1979, the Literary and Historical society in UCD ran as its debate the motion that “the papal visit has reinforced our theocracy”.
A more considered historical verdict would make no such assertion about the Pope’s visit — but perhaps even the opposite. Tom Garvin notes that the visit was “a truly mythic event” which resulted in a brief upturn in Mass attendance and no shortage of babies born nine months after the visit that were christened John Paul, but it did not reverse trends in motion, such as birth rates moving towards the European average and the introduction of contraceptives: “The Irish had tried the traditional religious life one last time and found they really didn’t like it. The papal visit may actually have had the effect of destabilising an already fragile public-belief system.”
BUT there was no denying the fervour and national giddiness the visit created. Speculation about a papal visit was apparent in February 1979, but Taoiseach Jack Lynch told a TD “we have heard nothing from official sources”.
In April, Minister for Posts and Telegraphs Pádraig Faulkner wrote to Lynch to tell him that Fr John Magee, the Newry-born cleric who served as one of the Pope’s secretaries, and who was ill in hospital in Dublin, had spoken with the Archbishop of Armagh Tomás Ó Fiaich about a possible visit but “the fact is that the Archbishop does not know whether the Pope is coming or not. He has heard nothing in recent times”.
In May, the Department of Foreign Affairs had no knowledge of any planned visit and by June, newspapers speculated that a visit was unlikely.
But clearly there were other manoeuvres behind the scenes and an enthusiasm on the part of the Pope about visiting Ireland. In mid-May, the secretary of the Department of Foreign Affair’s embassy to the Holy See spoke to the rector of the Irish College in Rome, Monsignor Eamon Marron, suggesting the Pope had made it clear in speaking to him he wanted to go to Armagh, was aware of the political implications of such a visit and that, in the Pope’s own words “there are certain people in the milieu who don’t want me there”.
Marron felt the government had not done enough work in preparing for a visit and that it was up to it to take the initiative. The visit was announced towards the end of July and it was made clear to the government that it needed to move quickly to deal with what would be an extraordinary organisational challenge: “[A] massive crowd control operation; all the state’s resources will have to be mobilised.”
An official in the Foreign Office in London insisted that if the Pope wished to visit Northern Ireland “we will facilitate him graciously: How could we refuse?” The Taoiseach suggested a peace and reconciliation theme for the visit.
The SDLP’s Gerry Fitt insisted he needed to come to the North, as failure to do so would be seen as a victory for Ian Paisley.
Seán Ó hUiginn, a senior official in the Department of Foreign Affairs Anglo-Irish section, felt: “The political risks are not great. Paisley has not many worlds left to conquer in terms of Northern Ireland Protestant extremists.”
The Government wanted the Pope to visit the North and conveyed this to Ó Fiaich, who had been appointed a cardinal in June, but Ó Fiaich was not enthusiastic. In the event, the Pope only went as far as Drogheda.
News of the impending visit generated interesting but also some trivial and excessively demanding correspondence to the government and Cardinal Ó Fiaich, including a letter from Demot Kinlen, a senior lawyer and future High Court Judge, seeking to have the Pope say mass to mark the new law term. He emphasised the huge enthusiasm for this among the legal profession: “The Chief Justice, the Chairman of the Bar Council and the President of the Incorporated Law Society... are all extremely enthusiastic about the idea... the Holy Father might regard it as a suitable forum to speak of justice and human rights in the world.” It proved to be wishful thinking on Kinlen’s part.
Dreadful poetry was also flowing in to the Government, such as this verse:
‘As his plane touches down in Dublin
From every Church and Cathedral grand
The bells will toll to welcome the Pope
To the emerald isle of Ireland.’
There was also a request to pass on a letter to the Pope from a Maltese Catholic priest looking for a hurried dispensation to get married.
In the aftermath of the visit, there was much praise from the public for its smooth organisation and success. With close to one million people attending the Papal Mass in the Phoenix Park in Dublin, it involved the biggest public transport operation in the history of the State. There were emotional letters from Irish emigrants watching it on BBC. Unfortunately, the afterglow also generated some more risible poetic efforts, such as:
‘His papal robes and smiling face stood out amid the throng
Cheered and feted by the people, he knelt and kissed the soil
As he held his hands on high the crowd broke into song
The first Pope to visit Ireland, this man who knew what toil
And sweat was all about; but unto his faith was loyal
While in a forced labour camp it had stood the test of time
Today love shone deep from his heart, the setting was sublime.’
Even the statues of Oliver Goldsmith and Edmund Burke in front of Trinity College had received a polish for the visit and the Office of Public Works planted 6,000 shrubs in several parks, which were required for the 8,000 square feet of beds around the papal altar in the Phoenix Park.
One joke doing the rounds was that “if only those who ran the Papal visit could be allowed to run the country we would be all right”.
Just over 980,000 tickets were issued for the Phoenix Park Mass. Even some feminists cheered, including Nell McCafferty: “I saw absolutely no contradiction in opposing his daft policies on birth control and cheering the great day for the Irish. It was a cheerful fingers up to Cromwell.”
It was noted at government level that those who devised the Pope’s schedule demanded “more of him in terms of physical stamina than the fittest of men 20 years his junior could have endured”. But he did not stop, as apparently planned, in a working class area in Dublin, and a meeting with representatives of other Christian churches was truncated.
He referred in his homilies to ideologies and trends “alien to Irish society”, while his appeal in Drogheda for the IRA to abandon violence, according to Magill magazine, “will be remembered and quoted for centuries… the power of its appeal in its forgiving rather than condemnatory tone”, though it was considered unlikely it would have “any direct effect on those immediately engaged in violence”. which it did not.
But it was also maintained by Magill that the papal visit was about the Pope’s mission “to chastise the Irish bishops for failing to identify with the poor and repressed”, which he apparently did at a private address to bishops on the eve of his departure.
He reputedly criticised them for “remaining passive in response to 30 letters and communications from Pope Paul VI (who was in office from 1963 to 1978), asking them to take an ‘oppositionist’ position to the Irish establishment”. It was further observed: “While the Pope expects his influence will have a socially radicalising effect on the Irish church, it is by no means certain that this is what will happen.
“The implicitly, triumphalist nature of much of the festivities inevitably fosters the reactionary elements in the Irish church, the concentration on Mariology which is implicitly antipathetic to women’s rights and the assaults on materialism, also contribute to a strengthening of the conservative elements in Irish Catholicism.”
* Ambiguous Republic: Ireland in the 1970s by Diarmaid Ferriter. Published by Profile Books.
The possibility of an amnesty for certain prisoners was raised in the context of the papal visit, amid caution. 76 prisoners, described by the Department of Justice as “non-subversive” and “non-disruptive”, were freed but “it would be unwise to take the risk of releasing a large number of offenders during the first day of the visit when Dublin’s dwelling houses would be virtually empty”.
One senior civil servant in the Department of the Taoiseach was adamantly and piously opposed to any releases: “I would recommend against an amnesty because of public reaction. We have a serious level of crime. A very poor rate of detection, complaints regarding the ineffectiveness of pre-trial procedures and a serious problem of recidivism. The Pope’s visit should be a time of prayerful remembrance of the victims of crime in our society.”
In the run-up to the Pope’s visit, Charles Haughey as health minister was preparing a family planning bill to allow contraceptives on prescription to married women. It was one aspect of the trends, in the words of the Pope, that were “alien to Irish society”.
The Irish Family League wrote to the taoiseach’s wife, Maureen Lynch, about this issue, adding for good measure: “Communists have been allowed to insult the Pope on RTÉ.”
John Cunningham, writing to the taoiseach from the Presby-tery in Rathdrum, Co Wicklow, warned of armageddon for the State’s largest political party: “Of course, at the age of 72, I cannot expect to live much longer, but it is possible that I may outlive the Fianna Fáil party which, if it passes this immoral act, will sign its own death warrant.”
Others vilified Mary Robinson, who had been active in the Senate since the start of the decade in attempting to legalise contraceptives, as, among other things, “a descendant of the Protestant landlord class”.
Major Vivian de Valera’s (the son of Eamon and a Fianna Fáil TD for the Dublin Cabra constituency) putdown of a constituent who complained that the Fianna Fáil TD would not engage with her over the issue of contraception, as relayed to Jack Lynch, was brilliantly cutting: “I am being bombarded with all sorts of well-meaning but ill-informed representatives on contraceptives, very largely from virgins of both sexes, whether by design or default.”
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