Rod Dreher's blog has a post/discussion on the Irish situation. Bear in mind that Mr Dreher is Eastern Orthodox and many of his posters are not Catholics or even Christians, but a couple of comments are from Irish posters and some of their comments make very sad reading. For example:
EXTRACT
Irenist says:
August 4, 2016 at 11:44 am
Rod, thanks for promoting my prior comment.
@gerry:
I think there were fewer devout Irish like your dad than it once appeared. Instead, I propose that the pederasty scandals were pushing on a door that was already open. Mass attendance was high, but much of that was because of the pressures toward social conformity that you mentioned–a few decades ago, the neighbors might talk if you weren’t at Mass. In this, Ireland was perhaps similar to certain parts of the U.S. before the Sixties hit. But like the Sixties here, the Celtic Tiger and Great Recession eras in Ireland have only served to show how many were going to Mass out of nothing more than social conformity (i.e., were CINOs or “ethnic Catholics” or whatever), and stopped as soon as they could.
To a certain extent, Irish secularization isn’t that different than French or Italian secularization then–a sociologically “standard” Catholic-majority nation’s reaction to modernity, more or less. In that case, the clergy child rape coverups and the Magdalen Laundries and all the rest would just explain why the Irish example was so precipitous.
But I don’t think that’s the whole story. A big missing piece is provided by Oakinhou, who notes how being forced to be publicly Catholic in Franco’s Spain (in a regime where the state’s abuses were facilitated by the Church, no less) led to deep resentment. In the Irish case, enforced Protestantism led to centuries of irrepressible, militant Catholicism. But then when that enforcement was taken away, it was replaced in Dev’s Ireland with a new pressure from the State’s new elites to embody some Republican idyll of Gaelic agrarianism and kitschy Catholic piety. So naturally, middle aged and younger Irish adults often resent the living heck out of the Church the way their (our) forebears resented the heck out of the Ascendancy. (And of course, just as plenty of Irish still nurse a grudge against Cromwell long after the issues of his day are dead, so plenty of young Irish adults hold a grudge against the Irish Church proportioned to the clericalist colossus that once bestrode the isle, and not to today’s haggard little husk.)
And that bit about the Brits brings up a point of MBD’s that usefully supplements Oakinhou’s about Franco: because Irish Catholicism was repressed by the Brits rather than the Irish themselves, it developed a nationalist, nigh-idolatrous clericalism akin to Catholicism in Quebec (which grew out of an analogous subaltern history vis-a-vis Anglophone Canada). Once neither the Irish nor the Quebecois are especially oppressed anymore, that external pressure holding our Catholicism together is gone–and it flies apart. (AFAICT, Polish Catholicism is very much on the same trajectory as the Irish Church, just delayed because the Soviet empire collapsed a few decades later than the British one; they’re still mostly in their proudly nationalist phase, only now beginning to see declines in devotion, etc.)
I don’t doubt the devotion of your father and thousands like him. I’ve known many Irish Catholics (and quite a few more Irish American Catholics) of similar kind. But I’ll match your anecdata with my own. By the 1980s, before the clergy abuse scandals were big news, most of the adults I met (other than the elderly) were already CINOs, or just indifferent non-attenders at Mass. By the 1990s, a Dalrymplean English-style culture of laddishness was the default for young Irishmen of my own age, a culture in which drunken, drugged promiscuity was the norm, and irreligion wasn’t argued for, but simply assumed. That’s the culture I observed in the urban Ireland of working class row houses and lumpenproletarian housing estates, anyway. My people aren’t rural people and only partially clawed their way into middle class jobs during the Celtic Tiger years, so that doubtless biases my own experience. But it’s not just my experience: this dichotomy is admittedly a bit of a strawman, but I’ll say that the films made from Roddy Doyle novels (or Patrick McCabe novels, if you prefer) strike me as much truer to midcentury and modern Ireland than ersatz Catholic arcadias of paddywhackery like “The Quiet Man.” And do the characters in, say, “The Snapper” (1993) strike you as especially devout? Heck, never mind Roddy Doyle novels. What about the Irish audiences who laughed along with Channel Four’s “Father Ted”?
Speaking of “The Snapper”: by 1993, IIRC, one in five Irish births was out of wedlock. IOW, by the 1980s and 1990s, well before the wave of scandals had crested, Irish working class life wasn’t suffused with Catholicism, but with the kind of dysfunction and despair that J.D. Vance spoke with Rod about w/r/t his “hillbilly” kinfolk.
(Of course, any observer of the Irish in 19th c. New York, say, would note that Irish working class life has been a chaotic mess for a very long time. But that just makes my point that the clericalist veneer of Catholic respectability in Irish society was a very thin veneer indeed.)
It would be comforting if Irish Catholicism had been devout and deep, only to be shaken or shattered by the sex scandals. But it was not so. Excepting devout souls like your father, much of Irish Catholicism was rotten to the core for a very long time. (Much of it was good, too. But we Irish American Catholics are apt to dwell on the medieval monks and Victorian missionaries, rather than on the darker, unromantic realities, so that’s what I’m emphasizing here.)
Besides my own personal connections with Ireland and her Catholicism, this is important to me because I’m a distributist and a seamless garment Catholic. My distributism was formed by Chesterton and Belloc, both of whom (as only well-meaning Englishmen could) idealized the Irish “peasantry” and inaccurately predicted a noble future for it. My seamless garment predilection for pro-life social democracy means that the Irish Constitution (with its invocation of the Holy Trinity); Irish legal history on divorce, contraception, and abortion; the Irish welfare state’s historic pronatalism; and the way the Irish educational system has been farmed out to private schools (especially but not only Catholic schools) in a way voucher proponents can only dream of, is more or less the closest I’ve seen to the kind of Anglophone Catholic nation-state I’d ideally like to live in: And. it. failed.
Dev built the kind of country I’d want to live in, and the Irish people have come to loathe him for that. Idyllic agrarian socially conservative social welfarism has been tried, and despised.
When I think of trying to build a BenOp, much of what I imagine building is rooted in the dreams of Chesterton and Belloc. And Dev tried to build an Ireland that, if not distributist (which it never was), still embodied quite similar Catholic values. And his descendants have rejected that society root and branch. The old Irish state and the old Irish Church are not where and how the young want to live.
It would be so much more comforting for me if all that beautiful hope for a gentle, ever-green Catholic landscape had borne good fruit, only to be sabotaged by clerical pederasty and coverup. Then I could imagine that a BenOp on similar lines could work, if only the dangers of clerical sex abuse could be avoided.
But I can’t let myself believe that, because it isn’t true. The problems ran far deeper than that. The Irish (and Irish-built American) Church had to be rankly, putrescently morally corrupt for the bare minimum human decency of the instinct *to stop child rape* to have been so completely obliterated.
To say that the child rape coverups made the Irish Church unpopular is like saying that the Shoah made Naziism unpopular. The important question is how Irish (or German) society got so stinking rotten that such things could happen in the first place.
And how to proof any BenOp against the same Satanic rot.
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We need to discuss and reflect on this sort of testimony.
www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/stalingrad-of-irish-catholicism/