Yes vote plunges Church deeper into mire

The Irish answer to the issue of same-sex marriage underscores Pope Francis’s isolation from the Western world and its people, writes John Lloyd.

Tom Inglis, a sociologist who specialises in the affairs of the Irish Church, opined that “the era of the Church as the moral conscience of Irish society is over.”

But not just for the Irish. As the effect of the April 29 referendum — gay marriage approved by 62% — sinks in, it becomes clearer it isn’t just the Irish Church that is trembling but the Catholic Church as a whole. To say, as Diarmuid Martin, archbishop of Dublin, did after the vote — “I appreciate how gay and lesbian men and women feel on this day. That they feel this is something that is enriching the way they live” — is to position the bishop well among liberals.

But it plunges the Church deeper into the mire. It is not a liberal institution. It’s an organised faith, with a pope elected to guard that faith. For centuries, the Irish Church had one of the most powerful grips on its population of any in the world. Hope for heaven and the horror of hell was strong. The 19th- and 20th-century republican movement, though often denounced as godless by the bishops, was motivated in part by Catholic revulsion against the schismatic, Protestant British.

And when, in the early 1920s, Ireland became an independent republic, education was handed over to the Church, as was moral guidance. Divorce was hard, abortion forbidden, censorship strict.

In the past few decades, the descent of the once-omnipotent Church has been swift. The writer Damien Thompson believes that, because of the many instances of priests engaged in pedophilia and because of its “joyless” aspect, “hatred of the Church is one of the central features of modern Ireland”.

Even if that’s an exaggeration — indifference is more likely — it’s obviously the case that fear and submission to clerical authority is confined to a tiny few. We may be hardwired for religion, as many behavioural psychologists believe, but we are not hardwired for Catholicism, or any other form of religion.

Polls in Europe, and increasingly in North America, show that many people believe in “something” supernatural but are not prepared to shape that vague belief into an organised religious practice. Revulsion against those who use their authority to violate minors is a much stronger public attitude, one that easily translates into a turning away from the Church, even when the priest is a good man.

Pope Francis is deeply wounded by the Irish vote. His remark about gay people who are Catholic, made to reporters in July 2013, on a flight back from Brazil — “Who am I to judge?” — was widely interpreted as a possible opening to approval of same-sex unions, and even the sanctification of these unions in marriage. But it wasn’t. It couldn’t be.

Most of his senior colleagues, cardinals and archbishops answered his rhetorical question by saying (beneath their breath): “You’re the pope, dummy!” And popes don’t sanction two men or two women marrying.

When he called the Synod on the Family in Rome last year, an early draft of the meeting’s report called for the “gifts and values” of gay people to be recognised. But the cardinals who organised the event removed any such language from the final document.

In behaving like this, the Church puts itself in the same league with Russia, India, and most of the Middle East, entities that suppress homosexuality either by law or encouragement of prejudice. In the world that has accepted homosexuality as neither an abomination in the sight of the Lord nor an unnatural practice deserving of punishment, earlier bigotry is being debated and confronted with an impressive amount of liberalism and maturity. Quite recent state-sanctioned discrimination against gay people is being revealed in all its casual cruelty, and people are recoiling at what they now see clearly.

In the liberal societies, the real debate is not whether gay people should be free to live, express themselves and marry; it is rather how to handle those who, for religious or bigoted reasons, or both, refuse to accept or serve them.

The pope goes to the US in September for another World Meeting of Families in Philadelphia. Francis has called the faithful Catholic family “the salt of the earth and the light of the world… the leaven of society”. But the issue is salty in a different sense, and bitterly so. The Irish answer to the issue of same-sex marriage underscores his isolation from the Western world and its people.

John Lloyd co-founded the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, where he is senior research fellow.

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