Toward Irish Catholic Liberation
I recently read a new book, The Best Catholics in the World, by Derek Scally. Reading it has helped me in my Catholic liberation.
The book title highlights the false central message that a lot of us Irish Catholics received. We were told that we were “the best Catholics in the world,” that we “knew best,” and that everyone else was incorrect. This pretense silenced us and prevented us from dealing with what was happening.
The book portrays an Irish Catholic man who is trying to understand what happened to Irish Catholicism and how that has impacted him. It is the best wide-world description of the workings of Irish Catholic oppression, internal and external, I have ever read. There are so many rich facts, stories, insights, opinions, and depths.
The book has inspired my leading of my RC Catholic Irish liberation group. I can more clearly see the long history we have been discharging on and how our Irish identity has gotten tangled up in our Catholic identity. I can see why our liberation work has been slow, and harder than it “should” have been.
In writing the book, Mr. Scally went to Masses, novenas, shrines, and seminaries throughout Ireland and across Europe. He talked to people who had abandoned the Church and others who had not; to survivors and campaigners; to writers, historians, psychologists, and more.
His gentle and humble yet probing interviews with Vatican officials, priests, and religious along the way are a good example of how listening well and telling our Catholic stories in the wide world can produce change.
Mr. Scally traces the history of Irish Catholicism up to the present, including the most recent abuse cases in the Church. He does it in a way that allows the real story to be told, which encourages discharge and offers perspective for Irish Catholics on the island.
He strongly challenges the “official” story and shows how the history of the Catholic Church in Ireland is tied closely to the general history of colonisation, genocide, famine, and class.
The book explains how the Catholicism I received was a unique and very conservative form. For example, the main Catholic seminary in Ireland, once the biggest seminary in the world, produced very conservative priests. Our Catholicism was also heavily influenced by Ireland’s first Catholic Cardinal, Paul Cullen, who led the Romanisation of the Catholic Church in Ireland and the devotional revolution here from about 1850 to 1875. A trained biblical theologian, Cullen also crafted the formula for papal infallibility at the First Vatican Council.
Mr. Scally concludes that only a slow, methodical approach can thaw and reassemble the Irish Catholic experience. He says that we need to clear a “car crash” in our collective minds. Our history has caused a pile-up of pride and shame. It has left many of us silent, struggling to deal with a conflicting narrative we simply cannot process. And there is no official recognition that we need to work on this.
He ends by suggesting three things that are needed in Ireland:
- A Citizens’ Assembly in which our real Catholic stories can be told
- A Museum to Catholicism to commemorate and keep us from forgetting what happened
- A process and place in which the emotions of survivors, perpetrators, and bystanders can be released
I think this book can move us one step further toward Catholic liberation in Ireland.
Ireland
Reprinted from the RC e-mail discussion list for leaders of Catholics
(Present Time 205, October 2021)