Almost 40 years on, Pope Francis is coming to a very different Ireland
FROM the visit of Pope John Paul II in 1979 to the visit of Pope Francis in 2018, a period of almost 40 years, we can trace the trajectory of the stunning decline of the Catholic Church in Ireland. There are many reasons for it: The general collapse of support for institutional religion; the culture wars that ended in bitter defeats in campaigns around contraception, divorce, same-sex marriage and, possibly soon, abortion; the child abuse scandals and the way they were dealt with; and, above all, a refusal or an inability to engage with the modern world.
After the extraordinary success of the 1979 visit, it seemed as if the Catholic Church in Ireland was at the start of a new golden age. Almost 90% of Catholics attended weekly Mass; in a country of 3.25m people almost everyone in Ireland turned out to see the Pope, with over 1m attending the papal Mass in the Phoenix Park; and, as well as a sharp rise in the number of babies being called “John Paul”, a temporary arrest in the decline in vocations augured well for the future. Catholic Ireland, for a short time, was “cool”.
