Escaping the Box

David Quinn, a Catholic journalist here in Ireland, is probably best known for heading up the conservative think tank called the Iona Institute. The Iona Institute, despite its moderate tone, is a good contender for the position of “most hated institution,” and whenever there is a big debate around social issues like abortion or gay marriage, Quinn spends a few months at a time living rent-free in the heads of a half million angry leftists who flood the Irish Twittersphere with dire rants about his pernicious Catholic conservatism.

I don’t intend to focus too much on Quinn’s career here. What interests me most is a comment he made off the cuff a number of years ago about a political talk show he was invited onto (it might have been Primetime, but I can’t recall exactly) to talk about one of the usual conservative Catholic issues, but at the last moment there was a change of programme on account of some breaking news, and he ended up speaking on a panel about other issues that didn’t relate to the culture wars. Quinn said that it was refreshing not to have to speak about the same five culture wars topics over and over.

Something about this last remark unsettled me, and it took me a while to figure it out. Quinn only ended up talking about non-culture wars issues by a fluke; he happened to be on TV, and they happened to change the topic last minute. This is despite the fact that he had been a prominent journalist with the Irish Independent for donkey’s years. But why did a prominent journalist like Quinn, who writes on all sorts of topics, never get invited to talk about non-culture wars affairs?

Likewise one of the other few prominent practicing Catholics in our Irish media, Breda O’Brien, writes for the Irish Times about a broad, expansive range of topics, often with a social justice (in the good sense) bent, and yet I’m fairly certain that the only times she gets invited onto radio or television is to hash out gay marriage and the likes.

Quinn and O’Brien have reputations, you see, as Catholic journalists, and that puts them firmly in a particular box that only gets opened when it’s time to wheel out a conservative Catholic to play their particular role as the villain in any given public debate.

I touched on this in the last post, when I said that the few Catholic figures which my character “Drinks Girl” sees in the media are safely boxed away in a corner labelled “Catholic,” and by being so labelled she can safely ignore them.

In that last post, I talked about the challenges of reaching out to young adults in Ireland, as typified by Drinks Girl, and one of the challenges was finding channels which reach her. I think that what I’m grappling with here is that when Catholic public figures are labelled as Catholic, our media, and the establishment, and high society, label them as outsiders, as persons not in the in-group. They’re not one of us.

Secularists in this country will always bang on about how Catholics are well represented in the media, as after all we have O’Brien in the Times and Quinn in the Indo. But there’s a subtle way in which such figures are pushed into an oppositional role (or squeezed into that Catholic box), which is separate from the rest of Irish society and can safely be castigated and demonised if you’re into that kind of thing, or safely ignored if you’re not.

And all the other conversations in our society, not just the debates but all the news and reviews and online discourse, revolves around those who aren’t in the box, those who are seen as normal and “one of us” and therefore not Catholic. What I think is going on here (not consciously for the most part, albeit perhaps consciously on the part of some high-ranking liberal mandarins in the media) is that certain voices are excluded from the narrative except when convenient, and by being placed in the “not one of us” box your average younger Irish person (such as Drinks Girl) cannot relate to them, and in fact sees them as part of a strange outgroup. And that makes it harder to find that channel into her heart, to bring the Gospel message, because she doesn’t view it as coming from a normal person like herself, but from one of them.

There’s a related phenomenon which I observed with the Eighth Amendment, which protected the right to life of the unborn. During the campaign to repeal that amendment by a vote of approximately 2 to 1 in 2018, the amendment was often portrayed as a Catholic imposition on Ireland, and the fact that it was voted in approximately 2 to 1 in 1983 by the Irish people themselves was glossed over. The actual Irish people who voted for that amendment in 1983 were airbrushed out during that campaign, replaced by a vague image of “the Church” imposing itself on Irish law (as though a million priests were flown in from Rome to vote for it), whereas the Irish who voted to overturn it were detailed in full colour in all the papers.

I don’t know what to do about this on the public stage at the moment. I think that if this box didn’t exist, then what we would have would be the minority of Irish public figures and celebrities and so on who were practicing Catholics being at ease with being public about their faith and their views about such social issues, but also continuing to contribute to the wider conversation about all the non-culture wars issues whether that’s the latest styles and pop culture or the back and forth of Irish politics or the various smaller niche interest groups and charitable campaigns. I don’t know how to get from here to there, how to break out of the box and have people talking about David Quinn’s controversial views on the winners and losers in the latest season of Dancing With The Stars.

But I want to pivot and talk about a point a commenter drew attention to on my last post which I think is related: the issue of being visibly Catholic, and how there’s a tension with the message we often receive to go softly-softly or to “blend into” our surroundings and be a witness by being nice people. I think that there is a way to thread this needle.

I had a conversation with a good friend back when we were in college (many moons ago) about the question of evangelising in such a deeply secular culture. His theory was that the best way to go about it was to, in the first instance, “blend in,” make sure you get to know the people you are sharing your working day with, be their friend, let them know that you are normal. Now my commenter is right; you can’t just do that and expect miracles to happen. But there’s another step. It’s to be unafraid to bring up your faith in conversation once people know you reasonably well, not in an awkward way but when there’s a natural moment, say if somebody asks how your weekend was and you tell them that you went on a retreat, or something like that, which then sparks the question “Oh, so you’re religious?” or “Oh, I didn’t know that you were a Catholic!” or something to that effect.

Because if in the first instance they see you as “one of us” and not “one of them”, it disarms them, it goes past the prejudices. To go in on day one and proclaim your faith is admirable in one way, but in a certain sense it dooms you to be put in the box, because without knowing a little more of the depth of your person, a new classmate or co-worker is going to mentally assign to you all of the prejudices they have against the Church. To be known as a person, first of all, cuts past those prejudices (except maybe with the most strident of true believers in the liberal narrative). You can then be Catholic outside the box. Of course, this only really works if you’re a decent person who is reasonably likeable. If you’re not you need to work on that first, otherwise you have to deal with a whole other set of (justified) prejudices too!

I asked my friend many years later how it had gone. He told me about a return visit to Dublin where he bumped into a classmate he’d known for years. The topic of religion came up unexpectedly in conversation, and he mentioned for the first time his Catholic faith. They ended up going for coffee for hours to talk about who the person of Jesus was. She had a deep curiosity about religion, but it was the relationship in class built up over many years previously which helped her to open up to the conversation.

The alternative is… well, I think of a particular very liberal work colleague who I got along well with, but didn’t know that I was a practicing Catholic. One day she had to deal with a member of the public making complaints, which to a large degree boiled down to homophobic (and I do not use that word lightly) rants. And looking back I realise that that might have been the only practicing Catholic she had knowingly met all year, and that if I had had a little more courage I could have opened up a bit more at an opportune time, and her tally for that year might have been one positive experience with a Catholic and one negative, instead of just the negative one. I don’t know, she might have flown off the handle at me, as certain entrenched liberals do. Or I might have taken that risk and ended up with a conversation from a place of mutual respect.

I don’t know how we get from there to a world of Catholic Bressies. But at the individual level we need to make a start, to break down the prejudices against the Church, person by person, by being relatable, lovable, and loving people, willing to speak about our faith, but having the prudence to lead into it at the right time, and only then will we find our way out of the box.

The Challenge of Evangelising Drinks Girl

It has been six years since I last wrote on this blog. They’ve been six long, busy years. I’ve thought now and again of returning to this old haunt, and a sudden fit of inspiration has driven me back.

Although I have had no time to blog these past few years, I have been reading, thinking, taking notes. The old posts here fumbled around with analysing the state of the Catholic Church in Ireland, and throwing out odds and ends of solutions. I hope my ideas have matured a bit, and what has occupied my thoughts the past few years has been an attempt to really grapple with how to renew the Church in this country, to go beyond mere analysis into solutions, and to go beyond solutions into practice. I still have a long way to go.

The other day found me thinking through the various milestones and goals that might lie on the road to seeing the light of Saint Patrick’s flame burn brightly once more in Ireland, and what achieving them might entail. My thoughts felt too abstract, too difficult to pin down, so I went to pray for a bit in Whitefriar Street Church, and as is the way of these things, inspiration hit me on the way home from there.

I was passing a young couple waiting for the Luas, and they were going on about some party they were going to, and the girl then said something along the lines of, “Oh I’ve got looooads of drink for tonight.” I was suddenly thrown back to the distant worlds of college and secondary school where drinking yourself stupid was considered a vaunted national pastime, and it set me thinking: the question isn’t some abstract one of “how do we evangelise all of Ireland again” or something like that. It’s five million little questions, individual questions, questions along the lines of: “How do we evangelise loads-of-drink girl?”

For the sake of ease let’s call her “Drinks Girl.” Now I don’t know Drinks Girl from Adam, and it would be unfair of me to judge that one girl based on one comment about alcohol. So I’m going to sketch out an image of Drinks Girl, not the girl at the Luas stop, who might or might not fit any of the following descriptors, but a generic description that in my own experience would fit many young women in this country. And since the question is about evangelisation, I’m going to assume that Drinks Girl, like most of her 18- to 35-year-old female contemporaries, is not a practicing Catholic.

Which means that the first question we have to ask is: why is Drinks Girl not a practicing Catholic?

• Family: It starts with Drinks Girl’s family. Between one and four of her grandparents, if they are all still alive, are practicing Catholics of varying degrees of orthodoxy, but for a variety of reasons beyond the scope of this post, they found it difficult to pass on the faith, and Drinks Girl’s parents are either not practicing Catholics at all, or else they go to the odd Mass in a lukewarm kind of way and have a sentimental attachment to Catholic school, First Communions, Church weddings, etc. In short Drinks Girl’s home environment might have had some vestigial Catholic trappings, but there was never a big push to pass on the Catholic faith to her and more worldly goals like school, college, and career were the priority in her home.

• School: Insofar as the Church had an opportunity to put its case to Drinks Girl in Primary School, it did a woeful job of it. Teachers who don’t really believe teach children about “holy bread” and read from inane, wishy-washy textbooks where the Eucharist is explained through the metaphor of witches baking magic bread, and the story of the prodigal son is done on repeat in various guises (look, this is a Scottish prodigal son, the illustrations have kilts!). There’s no consistency, no beauty, no depth or authenticity in the Catholic education Drinks Girl received. And so she has become inoculated from Catholicism, thinking that she already knows all that faith has to offer. Nothing in the way the faith is taught in our Catholic schools speaks to the heart, to the excitement that Drinks Girl’s heart longs for. Instead it has given her a pseudo-familiarity that has bred a mild contempt.

• Social Circles: Whether she is in college or in the workplace, Drinks Girl is in a cultural milieu that considers the Catholic Church as its ultimate opponent. John Charles McQuaid is the new Satan. The Church opposed Repeal (of Ireland’s constitutional ban on abortion). The Church opposed Marriage Equality. The Church repressed women. The Church upheld patriarchy. To her mind, and most importantly to the mind of all of her friends and co-workers, not to mention her college lecturers and her fave celebs, the Church is an ideological foil, an enemy that they can raise their banners against.

• Sins of the Church: Drinks Girl isn’t entirely wrong in her negative view of the Church; for all that certain stories are concocted or blown out of proportion by anti-Church figures, we nonetheless live with the legacy of child abuse, shame and stigma for unmarried mothers, double standards and whitewashed sepulchres. The Church has allowed great evil to fester within itself and it has reaped the whirlwind.

• Lack of Counter-Examples: Drinks Girl doesn’t know any counter-examples of Catholics living their faith in the world that might serve to balance out this distorted image. The vast majority of her generation don’t practice (the vast majority voted ecstatically for Repeal). If Drinks Girl does happen to know any Catholics, they’re either her granny, or they’re deeply closeted, or they’re part of the small, vocal fringe of nutjobs that don’t do the Church any favours. In short Drinks Girl doesn’t see anyone on a day-to-day basis who challenges her preconceptions of the Church.

• Culture: Finally, Drinks Girl lives in a culture which has formed in her a vision of the Good Life which is antithetical to Christianity. It’s a culture formed by chick flicks and Netflix, by Tik Tok and OMG What a Complete Aisling, and above all by her circles of friends from school and college and work who are all formed by the same values. It’s a vision of life that tells her happiness comes from getting drunk, getting laid with random lads on a night out, getting a decent career and some money, dating a Drinks Lad, getting into Green or Repeal ideology, then getting married at 35 and having 1.8 children by the time she’s forty, and all the world travels and creature comforts in between.

So why in the hell would Drinks Girl care about the Catholic Church?

Because I think that deep down, Drinks Girl is unhappy with what this society offers. She’s unhappy with the hookups with Drinks Lads. She’s unhappy with her life and she’s unhappy that she medicates the pain by getting smashed at every opportunity. Deep down, Drinks Girl is longing for something more. It’s a longing that gets filled with career and pleasure and trendy political causes but that’s not enough. The human heart is made for something more. It’s made for beauty and truth and goodness. It’s made for the infinite. It’s made for God. And it’s restless until it rests in Him.

These are the answers of somebody already heavily invested in the Church. They’re answers which I could easily tell myself to reassure myself of the universality of the Church’s claims. But I do think they’re true. The only proof I can offer for this is anecdotal, all the moments when friends and acquaintances let their guard down (usually, ironically, under the influence of alcohol) and told me how deeply unhappy the drinking and the meaningless sex makes them and how they do long for something beyond. If nothing else, my goodness, look at the trend in alcohol-free drink so that you can look like you’re boozing while you’re not. People give in to the pressure to conform to this vision of the good life, they give in because they want to be happy and want to be loved and they live in a society that tells them that this is the way to find those things. But I think that they are ultimately deeply unhappy.

I can’t peer into Drinks Girl’s heart to check if it really is restless until it rests in Him. But my own life experience leads me to believe that it is.

So my third question is: assuming we had a chance to evangelise Drinks Girl, what stands in the way of her coming into the Church?

Oof. There’s a lot here. Let’s break it down.

• Prejudice: Drinks Girl already thinks she has the Church figured out. Her guard is going to be up against it. After all, didn’t she spend fourteen years in Catholic school? Didn’t the Church abuse all those children and lock up all those women in Magdalene Laundries? Doesn’t the Church want to control women? Why the hell would Drinks Girl listen to that shower?

• A Channel that will Reach Her: But imagine that we could get past Drinks Girl’s prejudices. Where are the channels that will reach her? She might not have any Catholics in her social circles, or if she does they might be too afraid, or too inept, to witness to her. The pop culture she ingests, the college lectures she attends, the books she reads, don’t speak a Catholic message to her because the voices she hears there are all avowedly secular (or “spiritual but not religious” in a horoscopey kind of way). The few Catholic figures she sees in the media are safely boxed away in a corner labelled “Catholic” and by being so labelled she can safely ignore them. The State is thoroughly secularised (apart from the useless schools). She’s insulated behind layers and layers of secularism. How does the Gospel message get to her?

• A Message that Moves: Let’s cheat and say that a Gospel message gets to Drinks Girl over and above her prejudices and through some channel that reaches her. Maybe it’s the one Catholic she knows who is neither timid nor inept that she chats to one day. Maybe she got curious and Googled something that leads her to a Catholic website. The next problem is that any old message can’t just be landed in her lap. It has to be a message that will move her. It has to disenchant her current view of what life is all about, and stoke a bit of curiosity and real enchantment, enough for her to look for more. It has to speak to the part of her that is restless until it rests in God. If it’s a poorly crafted message it won’t work. But even more than that, different people are spoken to in different ways. To get past the armour around Drinks Girl’s heart might necessitate a friendship, or it might necessitate art, or maybe rigorous intellectual argument. Because each Drinks Girl is different, and each Drinks Girl’s heart is moved by something different.

• A Message that Speaks Insistently: Okay, so say we’ve overcome Drinks Girl’s prejudices, sent a perfectly crafted message through our ingenious channel that has smitten her heart and had her seeking more. But it’s not enough to move her heart once, to make her curious. In the parable of the sower, the seeds are cast out everywhere, but some are choked up by the cares of the world, and some are picked off by the birds, and some start to grow but wither in the sun. In the same way, if Drinks Girl were to decide to start the long journey to becoming a practicing Catholic, indeed, the long journey to becoming a saint, she will encounter opposition. The friends she knows will turn on her for ideological reasons (“You’re against gay marriage now? You bigot!”) or more profane ones (“You’ve stopped getting drunk every weekend? You dry shite you”). Her parents may be unsupportive if she’s getting “too into it” to a degree that interferes with their worldly dreams for her. Drinks Girl’s boyfriend might not be happy if she suddenly wants to stop having sex with him before marriage (and that’s without getting into how hard it is for her to let go of him). There may be issues with her career if she can no longer do certain things in good conscience. Then on top of all that, she has to step from “The Right Side of History” over to the institution which all her favourite celebrities and role models up until now view as the Enemy. In short, there is a huge amount of pressure on her from all quarters that can easily crush whatever slight doubts she has. And so Drinks Girl doesn’t just have to hear the Gospel. It has to speak in her heart in a way that is insistent and persistent, so that it speaks to her soul louder and more passionately than all the voices of her peers and family and the world around her which is in thrall to  glamourised concupiscence. Otherwise the little moment of light reaching into the dark, neglected corner of her heart that longs for God will quickly be overshadowed.

• A Place to Come Home To: Then imagine Drinks Girl does all this. She leaves behind her old life. She earns the ire of her old friends. Her parents think she’s mad. Her boyfriend dumps her for somebody who will put out. Does Drinks Girl have a place to come home to within the Church where she can find the support she needs, the companionship, the formation, the friendship, the guidance, above all the love she is searching for? Can she find somewhere that isn’t grey and dull but which still speaks of beauty and truth and goodness to her heart, so that she won’t slip back into the old world for want of something to draw her further up and further in? Such places exist in Ireland still. But they are few and far between. You won’t find them in most parishes.

Let’s get one thing straight. These challenges are enormous. They all interlock, like so many layers of defences built to keep grace at bay.

How many Drinks Girls are there in Ireland? I could dig around the last census for a few hours, but I’ll save time and hedge instead and say, probably between a quarter and a half million (with about as many Drinks Lads). There’s a lot of variation within them. They will all have different interests and family setups, some will be working class and some middle class, some will be rural Aislings and some will be urban Saoirses, some will be die hard into liberal causes and others will just shrug and fall into line behind them. But I think that the sketch above does accurately describe a huge number of young Irish women (and, mutatis mutandis, Irish men).

The challenge of reaching one is enormous as it is. Reaching them all…?

We need to caveat the above with two things. The first is that, we in the Church could find every way of overcoming these obstacles, and Drinks Girl would still need to choose. We can’t (and shouldn’t) overcome the free will that God gave her. By the same token, we might fail to overcome a single one of these obstacles, and God could still send through a shaft of grace that touches Drinks Girl’s heart.

I suppose the Gospels do tell us that it is the poor who inherit the Kingdom of God, and the simple will shame the wise. I think that it’s the downbeat and the unpopular and those on the margins who will in the first instance be most open to the Gospel message, as they have the least to lose in rejecting the mores of modern Irish society. But then we’ll need to get the Church in order and actually evangelise to reach even those most open.

How do we meet the challenges above? That’s something I’ll want to write more about. But in short:

• We’ll get the message out by building a creative minority that can grow skilful in all the kinds of evangelisation that there are, whether person-to-person or through art or engaging culture and everything in between, and from there joining our efforts to break through the walls of a secular culture that has locked out the Church.

• We’ll have a place for Drinks Girl to come home to if we build up our own communities and institutions, and avoid the pitfalls of making those communities little angry fortresses, but rather oases of love and compassion for those trapped in a fallen world.

• We’ll meet prejudice and ignorance by being holy, and being visible. We’ll overcome the Church’s sins by showing what it means to truly be Catholic, by being known by our love, in short, by presenting the world with Saints.

I hope I didn’t come across as judging Drinks Girl. The Ireland she was born into wasn’t her fault. She is my sister in Christ, and she is loved by Jesus, and he wants her to dwell with Him forever in Heaven. So to end this post maybe let’s offer up a prayer, that God work His grace in the life of that random girl who inspired this post, and for all the Drinks Girls out there in our country.