Catholicism in disgrace

In Canada, the United States, Australia and elsewhere, but especially in Ireland, the Roman Catholic Church stands in disgrace, following the plethora of revelations about the activities of paedophiles and other types of abusers among its clergy. Obviously the structure of the Church and the often uncanny power its priests and bishops have over a subservient laity must make it a target for paedophiles and sadists. But the real and utterly appalling shame of the Church was its subsequent treatment of the abused and its frenetic efforts to cover up by lies and other deceits the contemptible behaviour of its servants.

Was it purely coincidence that the greatest abuse outside Ireland took place in Canada, the US and Australia, in mainly Irish Catholic areas and under the tutelage of the Irish Christian Brothers and Irish priests? Here we look at the historic role of Catholic priests and of Catholic institutions in Ireland over the centuries and for the source of the awesome power and the cavalier attitude of a now-disgraced Church.

The Roman Catholic Church (and, to a lesser extent, its Christian derivatives) arrogated onto itself the role of arbiter in things appertaining not only to matters of what it called ‘morality’ but to all forms of human behaviour and even juridical practice. Canon Law was the ultimate determinant superior to all other legal forms.

As feudalism yielded to capitalism in Europe and modern nation states were freed from the political hegemony of the so-called Holy Roman Empire, the Popes and their cardinals were forced to concede to widening democratic forms which were historically anathema to Rome. Still, even in countries where Roman Catholicism had been politically and morally overshadowed by various forms of Protestantism, different Popes cautioned against democratic concessions to the people.

According to Pope Leo XIII (Encyclical, Immortale Dei ‘On the Christian Constitution of States’, November 1885) canon law is effectively superior to the civil law, having derived from Jesus Christ through Peter and the apostles to the Church:

“In very truth, Jesus Christ gave his apostles unrestrained authority in sacred matters together with the genuine and most true power of making laws, as also with the duplex right of judging and punishing which flow from that power.”

By then, of course, such nonsense was a fatuous Popish aspiration which was in conflict with the material conditions of life in most of Europe. The power to make and enforce laws and the right and the power to punish in pursuit of such laws was now in the possession of the bourgeoisie and its god was profit.

Ireland

Ireland nestled on the western flank of Europe, its natural development frustrated by its proximity to its powerful neighbour, England. According to legend, Ireland had been Christianised by St Patrick in the fifth century AD but, as in many other places, the Christian proselytizer appeared to have fashioned the new faith to suit the territory, or the native Celtic tribes adjusted it to suit their customs. Druidic Ireland might have accepted the Christian God but it did not give up its Druidic ways nor did it submit to the authority of Rome.

Effectively, the Celtic Christian Church was set within the organisational norms of the clan system. Each clan elected its own bishops and priests, which meant that there were a great number of clan-nominated bishops whose episcopal authority was the writ and the power of the clan.

Eventually in the 12th century Pope Adrian IV in a bull Laudabiliter gave authority to King Henry II of England to invade Ireland and “enlarge the bounds of the Christian faith to the ignorant and rude and to extirpate the roots of vice from the field of the Lord”. In the “Lord’s Field”, as perceived by Rome, the easy moral attitudes and forms of social organisation enjoyed by the Irish were proscribed and as the historian P. Beresford Ellis points out, “The Irish clergy had embraced feudalism (the social system underpinning Roman Catholicism) a system repugnant to the ordinary Irishman long before it was enforced in Ireland”. Whatever the wishes of the Church, the de facto imposition of feudalism in Ireland would take another five torturous centuries.

Outside that area of Leinster, known as “The Pale”, on the eastern side of Ireland, the native Irish clans resisted the incursion of English authority. Initially, within the Pale bishops and abbots, in accordance with the feudal system, became barons under the crown but later Anglo-Norman clerics were rewarded with appointments to Irish livings – inevitably to the chagrin of the native clergy.

In the centuries that followed ownership of land and other forms of property were increasingly denied to the native Irish. But England was still a Catholic country and thus priests and bishops in Ireland, while being denied the more influential positions within the Church, did not suffer any other forms of proscription from the government. Outside the Pale the power of the priest and the Church within the atrophying world of the clans prospered, especially within the province of education.

The war of the two kings

It is argued that it was this ‘prospering’, the strength of the Church and its priests in Ireland, that withstood the force of the Reformation when England became Protestant. Certainly, after the Reformation, and especially after the defeat of the English Catholic Stuart, King James II, in 1691, the Catholic Church and its priests were to suffer legal proscription and vicious persecution. Ironically, James’s defeat in Ireland was at the hands of the Central European powers organised under the terms of the Treaty of Augsburg, and the commander of the victorious forces was William, Prince of Orange, James’s Protestant son-in-law – the famous King Billy, who, despite the subsequent persecution of Presbyterians as well as Catholics by his government is immortalised in the folk memory of Ulster loyalists.

This persecution of Irish Protestantism’s largest denomination as well as Catholics ‘and other dissenters’ was the result of the Establishment of the Episcopalian Church, which made the practice of other religions illegal and subject to severe penalties, including confiscation of property. Later, in 1719 Parliament passed an Act of Toleration granting relief from the Penal Laws to Presbyterians but the Act made no concessions to Catholics. In the years following the formalisation of laws against the Catholic Church and its members some 5,000 Catholics became Anglicans, but the overwhelming majority of the native Irish were mere ‘tenants-at-will’ on smallholdings without either security of tenure or fixity of rents; in fact they were outlaws in the land of their birth.

It was in such conditions that the Catholic Church and its priests, not always speaking with the one voice, gained overwhelming influence over the minds of the people. All forms of agrarian unrest, inevitable under persecution, were roundly condemned by the Church. But the priests were close to the people, their only articulate ally and, almost in spite of the contempt of the hierarchy for the peasantry, their influence over the minds of the people became more telling. The English government was a brutal foreign power visibly persecuting priest and people. Inevitably the Church, in the form of its priests, became the powerful institutional stabilising factor in the bitter lives of an inarticulate, harassed and brutalised people...continued.next page 11