An unhealthy obsession

Ireland still does not want a normal relationship with the Church, writes David Quinn

Hostile or negative headlines ahead of the Pope’s visit to Ireland next week have been mounting. The Irish Times ran three in the space of five days. One concerned a fear that homeless people will be ejected from emergency accommodation in hotels to make way for pilgrims here for the World Meeting of Families and the papal visit.

Two concerned the abuse scandals.  In one of these Mary McAleese recalled a meeting with Cardinal Angelo Sodano (now retired) at the Vatican in 2003 during which he raised the possibility of the Holy See reaching an agreement with the Irish State whereby Church documents would be protected from State scrutiny. The next day Dermot Ahern, the former Foreign Minister, remembered a similar meeting with Cardinal Sodano a year later in which Cardinal Sodano asked for the State to indemnify the Church against abuse claims.

Then we had stories in other papers about a temporary morgue being set up in the Phoenix Park in case people died at the papal Mass, and an official from the HSE warned that there might be an outbreak of disease at the Mass among the 500,000 expected to be present. No-one could recall similar warnings about the health dangers of big crowds getting this sort of coverage before.

Reminders

There have also been lots of reminders about the abuse scandals. This is fair enough. The scandals have done enormous damage to the Church and the Pope must and will address them when he is here. He must also meet victims of abuse.

At the same time, it has been interesting to contrast coverage of the pending papal visit with the visit of Queen Elizabeth to Ireland in 2011. There was far less negativity on that occasion, although it did exist, albeit almost exclusively in republican circles.

In the run-up to the royal visit there was little appetite in either our media or political establishment to remind the Irish people of the dark side of British rule or to bring to mind the worst episodes of the Troubles that the British were involved in, such as Bloody Sunday. The Troubles only ended in the 1990s, so it is not like they were a distant memory in 2011, or now.

On the day Queen Elizabeth arrived, The Irish Times editorial was headlined, ‘The Day has Come’.

The piece began: “President Mary McAleese has called the State visit of Queen Elizabeth II ‘extraordinary’ and ‘phenomenal’. Given that this is the first such visit in a century, such words are not out of place. Yet, the real significance of the event lies, less in being extraordinary, than in being pleasantly and properly ordinary. It is at last possible to say that the relationship between Britain and Ireland is simply normal. It is what it ought to be between neighbouring countries bound together by strong economic, political, cultural, social, sporting and personal ties.”

Further on, it criticised those striking a negative tone: “The diehards do this independent State some small service – they remind us of what Ireland as a whole has left behind. They still define Irish identity negatively – as anti-Britishness. Most of the rest of the nation, even in the midst of our current travails, has the self-confidence not to need a hatred of Britain to make it feel Irish.”

Is it possible that some people in Ireland are now inclined to gain a sense of identity through relentless opposition to the Catholic Church? Do elements of our media encourage this, including The Irish Times? What about the Government? Health Minister Simon Harris never seems to miss an opportunity to take pot-shots at the Church.

Education Minister Richard Bruton has spent his term in office paring back the rights of Catholic schools. Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has said he intends raising issues like women priests and same-sex marriage with the Pope when he is here. Other politicians have said the same.

Different 
tone

Mary McAleese herself has struck a completely different tone about the upcoming papal visit than about the visit of Queen Elizabeth to Ireland. Admittedly she is not our president now but here is what she said in May 2011 about the royal visit: “Her Majesty, the Queen, the Head of State of our immediate next door neighbours, the people with whom we are forging a new future, a future very, very different from the past, on very different terms from the past and I think that visit will send the message that we are, both jurisdictions, determined to make the future a much, much better place.”

Ahead of the papal visit she has been insistently negative. She continually attacks the Church, adding even infant baptism in her list of criticisms. She attaches the word ‘evil’ to the Church with regularity.

It might be said that a papal visit is different to a royal visit and a reigning British monarch has far less real power than a Pope, and that is true. Nonetheless, a British monarch is British Head of State and symbolises Britain itself and British history and British rule including in Northern Ireland. The Queen provided regular succour to the Unionist community and to the British army in the North during the Troubles by her visits there.

When the Queen was here in 2011 she visited the Garden of Remembrance to honour those who died for Irish freedom and in a speech at Dublin Castle she referred to the troubled historical relationship of our two islands. But there was no apology for British crimes against Ireland down the centuries.

So, is a double standard being applied to the papal visit compared with the royal visit? Why the eagerness in May 2011 to declare relations with Britain normalised compared with the present wish by our political establishment to call out the Church not simply over the scandals, but also over some of its teachings?

Perhaps this goes beyond the scandals. Remember, the State closed its embassy to the Holy See in 2011 in protest at them. It is now clear that the State also wants the Church to change its teachings in conformity with its own policies. This being so, it means relations with the Church will never be normalised until the State accepts that the Church is the Church rather than a mere extension and appendage of itself, to be moulded in its image.