Following the resounding defeat of the “No” side, Breda O Brien (Irish Times 16 June 2018 https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/breda-o-brien-a-timid-religion-will-die-fast-1.3531901 ) returned to the fray with an article suffused with resentment bordering on the paranoid. She predicted the scathing headlines that will follow Pope Francis’ visit when – as she expects – there is no comparison with the numbers, the hype and the excitement of Pope John Paul’s visit in 1979. Commentators,from that fuzzily undefined group ‘the elite’ will ‘find it odd that things have changed in other ways since then’ and she claims to look forward to articles about the cost of the visit, which will cry out that ’the money should have gone to the poor’. The main thrust of her article however is that while Irish Catholics only have to endure derision and ‘casual sectarianism’ much worse is to come their way and they should be ready for it. With an infallibility that the modest man from Argentina would never aspire to, she declares that “In reality, the pope’s visit will just be a media circus unless it causes people to realise that there is a cost to being a Christian.” So even if many thousands of Catholics, orthodox and not-so-orthodox, other Christians and even non-believers may take inspiration from the manifest goodness of Pope Francis; perhaps be encouraged by his non-judgemental attitude to their human failings and even inspired to work for equality, justice and environmental causes, Breda dismisses all that in comparison with knowing the ‘cost of being a Christian’. She quotes, with approval, an apocalyptic rant of a US cardinal to the effect that secularisation of society might lead to one of his successors dying ‘a martyr in a public square’. Her rallying call seems to be, as we say in Munster, ‘Stand up and Fight’.
I’d hoped for something more reflective. What was remarkable about the triumph of the Yes vote was that it cut across all the cliched divisions that commentators ascribe to Ireland. Only one constituency voted No. That means a majority of the citizens of Roscommon, Leitrim or Kerry, voted to repeal an amendment a previous generation had approved 35 years ago. Only the over 65 age cohort had a No majority and that wasn’t overwhelming. A second remarkable feature was the systematic way the question was deliberated upon by Irish society. A citizens’ assembly heard comprehensive expert and lay opinion, met over weekends and eventually came to the near unanimous conclusion that the existing situation was not tenable and that limited provision for abortion was essential. This reasoning and proposal were taken up by an all-party parliamentary committee who came, albeit with some dissension, to the same conclusion. Once the government called the referendum the established process was set in motion. The independent referendum commission circulated an impartial and clear statement of the implications of the decision, one way or the other, to every household in the land. During the TV debates – which many voters cited as influential – a serious effort was made to challenge unfounded assertions; to allow equal time for each side and to inform the public as thoroughly as possible about the arguments and examples put forward by both sides. The Iona centre, with which Breda O Brien is associated, were prominent on the No side but their hard-line position – that abortion was wrong no matter what the circumstances and that a fertilised egg had the same value as a mother with children – may have contributed to the undecided voters swinging more to the Yes side, against the usual pattern in Irish referenda where they normally drift to the No side, whatever the proposition.
The real problem for the Catholic Church is that it lost the argument. Educated, intelligent and practicing Catholics voted in their thousands against the official teachings of their church leaders because they didn’t buy their arguments. Catholic moral teaching is founded on two pillars – Scripture and Natural Law. As scripture has nothing to say about many of the socio-sexual issues of the day the Church must rely on natural law, the basic premise of which is that an open-minded rational person, whether a believer or not, will be persuaded by the logical argument in favour of the Church’s position. Horrific posters and scare-mongering notwithstanding, a rational argument was put forward based on reproductive science and ‘axiomatic’ human rights but very few accepted it. If an argument from natural law cannot persuade Mary McAleese then it has failed. It is this failure that Breda O Brien should be addressing. The same Mrs McAleese has recently opined that the Catholic Church has yet to reconcile its claim to divine authority with the notion of universal human rights. That is hardly surprising since the church has, over the centuries, often been on the wrong side opposing, as it did, the moves towards freedom of religion, integrated education and access to contraception. Especially in the last case, it was opposed to citizens having the right to do something the church deemed immoral. In Ireland, Mary Robinson, another of our excellent presidents, successfully fought the case for access to contraception, despite vigorous Catholic opposition and this was the first in a long series of defeats. At no time, that I am aware of, did the Irish Catholic church make the distinction between what the State could allow its citizens to do and what the Church could approve of its members doing. The sort of debates that take place in places where Catholics are a minority, albeit an influential one, such as Holland, the USA, France and Australia, has not been replicated in Ireland. In these countries Catholic thinkers try to persuade the citizenry, of all religions and none, as to what is in the best interest of the country, accepting that a pluralist, secular democracy must avoid imposing restraints on its citizens that are merely the teachings of a particular religion. This means they must construct fact (not faith) based arguments that rely on shared human understanding and values i.e. on the ‘natural law’. Unfortunately, the record of the Catholic church, in countries where it had the allegiance of a majority of the citizens, has not been good. In Franco’s ‘Catholic’ Spain, even the public advertising of other forms of Christian worship was forbidden by law while Malta required Catholic doctrine to be taught in all state schools. Ireland was not unique in having ‘Christ and Caesar go hand in glove’.
Looking back on the past fifty years it is clear that the turning point was Pope Paul’s rejection of contraception in the Humanae Vitae encyclical. He did this against the majority recommendation of the expert commission he had established to advise him. That group, relying on natural law, concluded that it could be morally good to limit the size of one’s family and that the means used to achieve that end was of secondary importance. Within the context of a loving Christian marriage it was ok to have sex that was known to be sterile. The encyclical was divisive from the outset but, crucially, as an argument based entirely on rational natural law, it was a total failure. The vast majority of practising Catholics rejected it. Unfortunately that rejection was not interpreted by the church as a sign from the Spirit that the teaching was wrong, even though such a deduction is quite tenable under church principles. Personally I believe that the problem for Pope Paul was not contraception. He might well have been persuaded to follow the commission’s proposals. The problem was infallibility. While the rejection of contraception had not been officially proclaimed as an infallible teaching ‘of faith or morals, to be held by all the faithful’ it had been restated numerous times over the preceding hundred years, most crucially after a Lambeth (Anglican) conference had indicated a change in Anglican teaching to favour contraception. Infallibility really does mean never being able to say you’re sorry. However to save face and possibly to avoid that intrinsic evil referred to as ‘scandal’, Paul felt he had no choice but to stick with the established teaching. Of course clerical abuse scandals and the even more scandalous coverups contributed to the decline of adherence among the Catholic faithful but I am firmly of the view that Humanae Vitae was a wrong turn for the church of Rome, one that has done grievous harm to its standing in much of the developed world.
ktr2016 