Spheres of Influence

Let me begin this post with a diagram, which I shall then explain:

Diagram 1: I had a much more complicated version with smaller writing and more arrows, but seeing as it’s the Year of Mercy I decided not to inflict that upon you all.

Now, to explain.

This diagram represents all of the various ‘spheres’ of our society that impact upon Irish society and culture. The size and relative position of the various spheres is not really relevant; I made some bigger to highlight them, and some are clearly attached to show an interdependency, but each and every one of those spheres impacts on society as a whole.

A few details that might need further explanation. The Catholic Church has a cross in its sphere. You’ll notice that there is also a cross beside those spheres where the Church has some nominal control over the sector. It’s not to say that this control amounts to anything. The only such spheres I identified were in primary education, secondary education, and healthcare.

As we’ve seen, the Church’s role in education has been a disaster, at least insofar as instruction in basic Catholicism is concerned. Likewise, its nominal patronage of numerous hospitals in the country doesn’t exactly count for much when Irish hospitals are happy to capitulate to the new abortion laws.

But it’s worth including, if only to show how many spheres the Church has no major influence in.

A second symbol is a blue triangle, which you can see in the Tertiary Education sphere. This triangle also appears beside all of the spheres which nowadays usually require a three-to-five year stint in Tertiary Education in order to actively participate. In other words, you don’t get to be a doctor, lawyer, teacher, or even in many cases a journalist or newsreader without having a Bachelor’s or perhaps Master’s degree. I highlighted this to show how absolutely crucial this sphere is. Access to most other spheres is mediated through this one sphere.

Of course, every sphere influences every sphere in some way. The Government, in all of its various listed forms, impacts upon every other sphere via legislation… and yet the makeup of governments in a democracy is down to the people, who are influenced by all the other spheres.

For example, the government just passed the legislation regarding same-sex marriage. But that campaign was influenced by almost every one of those spheres.

In the corner labelled ‘The Culture,’ each sphere played a part. The sphere of Sport played its role, with sportsmen taking public sides and using their popularity as a platform to weigh in. Traditional media such as newspapers and television as well as digital media played their role too obviously, and inevitably we had those from the ‘Arts’ weighing in to give their two cents.

But so too did other spheres, such as that powerful sphere lurking in the bottom right corner in which I attempted to jam all of the various institutions that deal with business and money, with companies donating to campaigns and putting up ‘Yes Equality’ stickers in shop windows and so on. Not to mention the involvement of the Gardaí, a sphere normally resolutely neutral, as it should be.

The same-sex marriage campaign is a very obvious example, perhaps a little too obvious for our purposes.

My point is that if a particular grouping, such as the Catholic Church, wishes to have any influence whatsoever on society (and I don’t mean that in a shadowy, Machiavellian kind of way; I don’t condone that type of thing) it needs to be putting itself out there in each of those spheres in order to be heard in society. It needs to be contesting these spheres. These are all of the areas of society that we need to be evangelising and putting forward the Gospel in if we want to reach hearts and minds.

The most critical and influential are the two I’ve separated into their own little grouplets: ‘The Culture,’ meaning broadly all the entertainment and news people consume and the things they do in their free time, and Education.

Now, think about each of those spheres. Most of them are nicely, neatly wrapped up by varying factions and groupings that are hostile to the Church.

You probably need little convincing that Traditional Media, bar a handful of Catholic newspapers, are hostile to the Church. I just recently wrote about our lack of influence online, at least in terms of Irish-based blogs and websites; much of the Irish internet is hostile to Catholicism.

In terms of Sports, well, there was a time when the GAA worked hand in hand with the Church, for instance. Now matches of all kinds are organised on a Sunday, clashing with Mass times.

In terms of business, one need only look at the amoral behaviour of many of our financial institutions during the boom years to know that not much Catholic teaching has made an impact there, although there are good Catholics involved in business here and there.

As for Tertiary Education, well, as has been noted many campuses are not exactly open to the idea of Catholic societies, for example.

And many of the homegrown and international NGOs and other bodies have been lobbying the government for some time to change laws regarding same-sex marriage and abortion.

We need to come up with strategies that take all of these spheres into account. We need to contest them. These are the areas in which power resides, and that power is being used against us, day after day after day. The questions we need to ask are:

How can we gain influence in each sphere once more? How are these spheres being used against us and how can we counter this?

Really, it’s not going to be a question so much of seizing control of these spheres (not really something I’m interested in; I did just spend my last post bashing Franco after all) so much as it is carving out a space in each where our voice might be heard, might not be silenced forever. Even if it is a voice crying in the wilderness, we have to try to become all things to all men that some might be saved.

I will attempt to develop these ideas further in future blog posts… for now ideas and comments are appreciated.

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On a side note, we must remember that the Church has something to say about each of these spheres. Somebody quite close to me, on seeing the first draft of this image, suggested that one could edit it and include the names of Church documents, Encyclicals and the like, that relate to each of these spheres. It would be a valuable exercise, and I might get around to it at some stage.

Centrifugal

One of the regular posters on the aforementioned Irish Catholic Forums often uses the term ‘centrifugal’ to describe the diffuse movements, groupings, and (dare I say it) factions within the Church today.

In other words, they’re all spinning away from the centre, the centre in this instance being rationality, orthodoxy, the leadership of the Church, balance, what have you. I suppose that this is what happens when centres cannot hold.

I bring this up because I experienced a microcosm of the diverse problems we face as a Church today.

This morning, on the feast of St. Charles Borromeo, the great reformer of the 16th century, I heard a homily in which he was described as being a good thing for the sixteenth century, but now the Councils of Trent had been surpassed and rendered obsolete by the Spirit of Vatican II and all these Latin-botherers should learn to give up and just follow the Holy Spirit into the new age of beautiful uncertainty and no priests.

When I came home, I logged onto Facebook to find a Catholic of a very different stripe reposting an article written by an elderly American reminiscing about his time in 1960s Spain. This gentleman was idolising (and I mean that in the most pejorative sense of the word) El Caudillo, General Franco of Spanish fame.

This man’s piece ran along the lines of: ‘if only we could go back to an era when bikinis were banned, the state inspected women’s swimsuits to make sure that they were acceptably modest, police would arrest young couples for holding hands in public, etc. etc.’ This individual went on to lambaste Stalin and the communists and their Republican allies in Spain for their awful atrocities (no disagreement there), but the contrast is intended to provide a justification for doing the same to enemies of the Franco regime. Here I quote directly:

What interests us is that fighting the Crusade, and also the maintenance of Christian social order after the Nationalist victory in 1939, sometimes required the execution of spies, revolutionaries, and other malefactors. As commander of military forces in war and Caudillo later, Franco always insisted on reviewing the file of anyone sentenced to death, and also that he be the one who signed the death warrant. It was important to him because shooting a man is no small thing.

The article itself is here, but try not to give this kind of nonsense too much traffic. Franco was a brutal tyrant. The Church was stupid to get into bed with him, although I’ll have to admit that the Republicans managed to kill a similar volume of innocents in a shorter period.

Why do I bring this up?

We have a dying left-wing guard within the Church, which want to imitate every failed policy of our Prostetant brethren and have dug in deep, partially energised by what I can only call the Spirit of Pope Francis.

And we have a newly energised far-right wing emerging within the Church, typified by the worship of figures such as Francisco Franco, Vladimir Putin and every right-wing thug under the sun, as long as they’ll pay lip service to the Church’s corner in the culture wars.

We desperately, desperately need to articulate a strong, truly orthodox position that adheres to Christian principles over feel-good capitulation to the world on the one hand and the growing extremism that preys on a fragmented Church on the other. We need to build bridges between Catholics. Without that the extremes will be the only voices heard. And the Gospel will be lost amidst the tambourines and the stomp of jackboots.

The key problem here is the right-wing extremism, which is gathering a vicious, angry energy in many quarters, rather than the left-wing laxity, which is on its last legs anyway (even if we shall live with the consequences for a long time).

This kind of extremism preys on those who have an idea that the dominant left-wing cultural narrative does not correspond to reality, but who can see nowhere else to turn since the Church seems to have lost its preaching voice, at least here in Ireland and Europe more generally.

I think that the problems here are threefold:

1. Lack of strong leadership. We need bishops and other Church leaders to really be shepherds of their flocks, leading by example, firing up the lukewarm whilst channelling the passion of the zealous. Hopefully the new crop of bishops will provide this.
2. Lack of a well-articulated, visible, balanced and orthodox Catholicism that can attract those dissatisfied with the status quo. If we’re shut out of mainstream media, we need to find ways around.
3. Finally, and very importantly, I think that the image of a ‘centrifugal’ Church reveals something very important. We’re atomised; the normal point of contact, the parish, is often ineffective at best at reaching out to a modern generation. There are too many young Catholics out there who need the support of Catholic peers and mentors who are balanced, and there aren’t enough lines of communication and encounter to meet them. This is a big problem in universities, where it’s difficult for Catholics to coalesce and form groups, and so those naturally inclined towards the Church feel alone and are either swept away by the culture, or reject it and go into extremism, which they often encounter on the internet. And there IS a radical, extreme version of Catholicism doing the rounds and growing in strength online. We need to find new avenues of reaching such people.

I had another post I meant to write; this was a footnote that got carried away. Oh dear. I might get onto that other tonight.