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.
By Grace and Banners Fallen 