The Problem of History

‘He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.’

• Orwell, 1984

I suspect that I am in the minority amongst practicing Catholics for holding this view, but I sincerely believe that one thing that would be of critical importance to any renewal within the Church in Ireland (and, indeed, globally) is an objective, detailed and comprehensive history of the Church and its battles in this country.

Who controls the present in Ireland? Chiefly the universities and media, I would say. Neither are impartial observers. Take this interesting article on historyireland.com on historical revisionism in this country. The focus is on nationalist history, but although this is not principally my area of expertise, I suspect that the history of the Church is portrayed by secular historians in a similarly skewed way.

One key way in which religious history is often reinterpreted by atheist academics and journalists is the application of a Marxist framework to religious belief, which assumes that all religion is about power structures and power struggles, an elite trying to control the masses. There are, of course, men of the cloth who use religion in this way, but the Marxist worldview (I use ‘Marxist’ in the academic sense of the word) refuses to even acknowledge the possibility that some clerics could join the priesthood, for example, out of a desire to serve God.

We also often hear talk of ‘the bad old days.’ There were, indeed, many bad things happening in 20^th Century Catholic Ireland that have thankfully come to light. Industrial schools, clerical child abuse, thoroughly unchristian attitudes towards unmarried mothers (which never seemed to apply to unmarried fathers, funnily enough). But to present only one side, namely the negative side of history, is to skew the picture.

On the other hand, we can often have Catholics who hearken back to the glory days and ignore that which is bad, pointing to the massive number of vocations and high rate of Mass attendance and so on. Never mind that clericalism, the honour of having a son in the priesthood and a distorted vision of discernment that viewed those who left seminary as ‘failures’ grossly inflated the numbers and meant unsuitable candidates trained for the priesthood. Never mind that many of those who left our shores and went to England and further abroad stopped going to Mass once society wasn’t looking over their shoulders.

But why is it important to correct this narrative? Why is it important to look to the past instead of just move on doing God’s work and trying to revive the Church?

I would argue that there are several reasons to do so.

One reason is that it is important to set the record straight, so that people can realise that the past wasn’t all bad and that the Church is more than just a force for unmitigated evil, as bad as many of its actions in this country were. A narrative dominated by the enemies of the Church in this country, one that focuses solely on the negative to the exclusion of the good, will convince people that the Church has no answer to their problems or their spiritual longings.

But more importantly, it is vital that we understand how we got to where we are and what went wrong so that we can learn from past mistakes, learn what worked well and what didn’t, learn what forces and personages were at play in previous years that may still have an impact on the future of the Church here. We need to think on a large scale here, looking at both very recent history and that of the last two or three hundred years. The Penal times and the nineteenth century were key in the developments in the Church that were to come post-Independence.

This needs to look to the future; both to the immediate future, but also to decades from now when new generations will need to learn from the mistakes of much older ones. The urgency of this is that one of the most important sources for understanding the Church in the 20^th Century, namely oral sources, are by their nature dwindling. Every year the limited number of people who lived through the Church’s dominant period pass away, leaving out a part of the story.

Most important of all, I think, is the complex, multifaceted question of why the apparently strong Irish Church collapsed as it did. A decline and fall narrative, if you will, albeit one that must resist a pessimistic ‘long defeat’ attitude or the temptation to look for simple answers.

But apart from this there are other issues. Here is a sweeping sample of questions that might shed light on the Church in this country, what went wrong, how past mistakes might be avoided and future ones corrected:

• To what extent did clericalist attitudes form and how did this impact upon the laity? How did these attitudes form?
• Was there genuinely a lack of intellectual life in the Irish Church in the 19^th and 20^th centuries compared to the continent as is often claimed, or is this an exaggerated or distorted view of the situation? Or was there simply an intellectual core in the Church that didn’t impact on a wider scale (That is to say, did intellectual religious simply not encourage similar inquisitiveness amongst laity and secular clergy)?
• Was Irish Catholicism really influenced by Jansenism as is often claimed, or more by Victorian Puritanism? To what degree was the rigid nature of Irish Catholicism down to theological factors and to what degree to social factors?
• How did the Irish desire for public respectability become so enmeshed with Catholicism and how did the two forces interact?
• To what degree was the faith largely or entirely external in some of the population? How did the Church leadership manage to blind itself to such a phenomenon?
• How were the sex abuse scandals so badly mishandled?
• How did the Church interact with cultural forces such as artistic circles, media etc. and to what degree were these quietly co-opted by groups opposed to the Church?
• Why was there no ‘Catholic University’ such as the one envisioned by Newman?
• What were the forces acting upon the Church that caused such radical change and eventual collapse after Vatican II? Why was the hierarchy so unprepared for it?
• What is the history of the collapse of Catholic catechesis in schools and the seminaries? How did this come about?
• What was the role of the religious orders in Ireland and how did they go into decline?
• How exactly was Humanae Vitae accepted by most of the Irish population? Was it really as widely rejected as the Irish Times claims or was there a more gradual shift away from Church teaching after the Council?
• What strengths did the Church really have that we can learn from?
• What is the history of all of the various lay movements/sodalities and so on that were present in Ireland in this period?
• What factors in the 19^th century impacted upon the 20^th?

There are also a number of interesting questions to be asked on a more global scale, such as the history of Vatican II and its outcomes, the emergence of the New Ecclesiastical Movements (a detailed analysis of what they get right and what they get wrong would be very useful indeed) and the history of the Traditionalist movement come to mind. That said, there are a good number of books out there written on such topics from a variety of viewpoints; their international nature means that they have attracted more attention.

Two difficulties occur to me in such a project, and they are to a degree interlinked. I doubt that many would see the value in such a project given our limited resources and more pressing concerns, and besides, who is going to take it on? Such research would be a full-time job, probably involving a team of people. Who would pay for such a thing and where would it be run from? It couldn’t be done through a secular university, such is the bureaucracy involved in academia these days. Through the Bishops’ Conference perhaps? But then that might lead to conflicts of interest. I’m honestly not certain.

One very good resource in this regard is a blog run by a young Catholic under the pseudonym ‘Shane’ called Lux Occulta (‘Hidden Light’ in Latin). I often disagree with Shane’s viewpoint, but the work he does of putting up old Catholic articles, pamphlets and interviews with clergy amongst other things gives a valuable window into the life of the Church in Ireland over the last two hundred years.

Let me give an example of how this work sheds light on certain aspects of Catholicism by taking one of the questions I listed above: ‘Was Irish Catholicism really influenced by Jansenism as is often claimed, or more by Victorian Puritanism? To what degree was the rigid nature of Irish Catholicism down to theological factors and to what degree to social factors?’

Jansenism imported from France is often the supposed culprit here. Shane provides some cuttings arguing against this thesis. Now, I’m not certain that this proves that the fault is purely that of Victorian prudishness, but it would bear further examination.

This probably seems an overly academic issue of interest only to historians. But I believe that there would be value in taking a look at this topic to determine the root of the puritanical side of Irish Catholicism so as to avoid taking on such values in future.

Let me give a more concrete example, again drawing from material Shane has provided. This is a pamphlet on the 1983 Pro-Life Referendum which draws attention to the media’s role during the referendum. One of the most notable aspects of this pamphlet is that it identifies not only a strong media bias against the referendum in the 1980s (in contrast to the majority of the population who voted to enshrine an anti-abortion law in the Irish Constitution), but also that several media personalities and politicians who opposed the referendum were unwilling to come out and say that they supported abortion. They opposed it based on the specific wording. (Ironically, they may have been right, one of many bitter ironies about this issue in Ireland). Many of these figures have since voiced their support for liberalising the law here, now that they don’t face the same backlash. Some of these individuals include Irish household names such as Vincent Browne and Michael D. Higgins, the current President.

There is a wealth of information here that the Church and the pro-life movement could have learned from (although they are not the same thing, the Church features heavily in the content of the pamphlet due to its support for the amendment).

This is just one small document. A detailed history of the pro-life movement, and more broadly the history of the political battles fought over Culture War flashpoints such as abortion, divorce, same-sex marriage and so on, from the 1980s through to the present day via the very important early 1990s would be an invaluable resource for discovering what went right, what went wrong and how the Church was outflanked by its opponents. It would be key for deciding how to move ahead in the political arena, if it is not too late.

If it is possible, an objective look at the history of the various divisions in the Irish pro-life movements would be useful, especially with a view to healing them and building bridges, although it would be difficult to be truly objective and to have people open up and give oral accounts of what happened given that many wounds are still hurting twenty and thirty years on.

Without such a broad-ranging study, we are left with the Left’s take on things, which whilst sometimes shedding light, also leaves a great deal to be desired when it comes to objectivity.

One other good resource is the Irish Catholics’ Forum, where several very knowledgeable posters and a few significantly less knowledgeable ones such as myself contribute. Well worth checking out, although the difficulty again is that the historical elements are piecemeal, which is not the fault of the contributors since none of them are provided with an income to research these issues.

Historical research is not my area of expertise; nevertheless, when I’m a little farther along with the development of my ideas I may attempt to tackle one of the questions above simply as an exercise and post the results here. Don’t hold your breath though!