It’s a Reckoning When There Is Only One Seminarian for the Whole of Dublin

When I was younger, Ireland produced so many Priests that I knew several in Kansas. Frs Sherlock and the Moriarity brothers all come to mind.

From the Catholic Herald

By the Editorial Staff

The maxim that the sins of the fathers are visited on the sons is true in a particularly grim sense in Ireland where, in the archdiocese of Dublin, there is only one man training for the priesthood, with another entering seminary formation in September.

Others are in the process of discernment but it is a dispiriting prospect for a capital where there are a million Catholics and almost 200 parishes. The vocations director for the archdiocese, Fr Seamus McEntee, observed that the situation was indicative of a broader “crisis of faith”.

By way of illustration of what this means, the historic parish of St Francis Xavier, run by Jesuits, has merged with the Pro-Cathedral. Its parish priest Fr Niall Leahy said, “you can give all the reasons why it makes sense for us no longer to function as a city centre parish, but the hard part is that it’s a community and an identity”. There will be other similar losses in the future.

It is not difficult to identify the reasons for the decline. It would take considerable strength of character to enter the priesthood in contemporary Ireland where a succession of clerical sex abuse scandals has tainted the reputation of the Church to the point where it is reflexively associated with abuse and cruelty, even though this obviously was not the lived experience of most Irish Catholics.

The clerical sex scandals were real, the abuse of clerical power was real, but there has emerged from the aftermath of the scandals a sense that there was nothing to be said for the Church in Ireland beyond the misuse of power.

Irish journalists talk about Catholicism in Ireland in terms of psychological abuse, of a darkness from which contemporary Ireland has emerged into the sunlight of secularism. That is itself a myth but it is a powerful one: a trope in public discourse which is almost wholly unchallenged. The surprise in this circumstance is that there are any men willing to become priests.

It is important to register the scale of the misuse of clerical power, however, before deploring the undiscriminating backlash. There was recently an RTE documentary about the late bishop of Galway, Eamon Casey, whose affair with an American woman, Annie Murphy, was the first great fissure in the edifice of the Irish church. It now appears from the documentary that the Church had received four separate complaints about his sexual abuse of children.

His own niece, Patricia Donovan, testifies that he abused her from the age of five. “He had no fear of being caught…I feel so absolutely and completely and utterly betrayed by the Church I was brought up in”. In 2007, the Vatican removed the already disgraced bishop from public ministry (though he flouted the restrictions). It was too late.

The 32 years since the fall of Eamon Casey has seen a succession of revelations about the misconduct of priests in Ireland and the willingness of the bishops, with an eye to the Vatican, to do anything except confront the horrors.

The revelations about mother and baby homes where women went to have illegitimate children and the Magdalene Laundries, where some of them were sent to work, compounded the sense that Catholicism was synonymous with control, sexual repression and cruelty.

The current Church, vilified as a kind of aberrant and abusive parent, is paying the price for the past sins of the hierarchy, and we do not need reminding that exactly the same phenomenon took place across the global Church. In Ireland, however, the Church had furthest to fall. 

The casualties of abuse were not just the disillusioned faithful, very many of whom have now rejected the Church outright, and the direct victims of aberrant clergy. The backlash fell also on innocent, hardworking and committed priests who did only good during their ministry and then found (and find) that ministry tainted by the corruption of others and the failure of the Vatican authorities to act on what they knew.

Catholicism has been deeply embedded in Irish culture and it has, for all its failures, overwhelmingly been a force for the good; for mutual kindliness, forgiveness, a sense of human frailty and a profoundly felt spirituality and awareness of the sacred. It was in the past a cohesive force which made for social solidarity at home and among the Irish abroad.

Any audit of Irish Catholicism must conclude that it has been an expression of the highest spirituality and the lowest lust for power and control. And now, to quote a Puritan poet: “the hungry sheep look up and are not fed.”

At present, the Church in Ireland is not just chastened, but demoralised and the vocations crisis is an obvious symptom of its condition. Asked how long the Church would be haunted by the abuse scandals, the Archbishop of Armagh replied, quite correctly: “Hopefully, forever.”

Attracting young men in these circumstances to give up their lives to the service of the Church and its people is a huge challenge. But we should always remember that the followers of Christ were once a frightened and demoralised little group in an upper room; and of the twelve men Christ called, one was a traitor.

The Irish Church is a vineyard with few workers, but which can, with God’s help, return to the service of the faithful. Contemporary secular Ireland is not a country at ease with itself; it is profoundly divided and disfigured by violence and criminality, for all its prosperity.

The Church has good work to do there. And that work will have to be shared by laity as well as priests. Meanwhile, our respect and prayers go to that solitary Dublin seminarian; we hope that God will send others.

Photo: Irish High Cross at the Rock of Cashel in Co. Tipperary, Ireland. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons.)