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Losing my religion
It's not my church anymore.
I’ve changed a lot as a person over the years. My church hasn’t, and that’s why it’s not my church anymore.
Today, the 1st February 2010, is St. Brigid’s Day. It’s a day significant for celebrating possibly the second most important Irish saint after Patrick, and of course for making those off-kilter reed crosses. But this year it’s especially significant for me for the fact that I couldn’t care less.
For the past 24 years, I’d been a Roman Catholic of various colours. For the first few years I was quite literally an unthinking Catholic. Since I was just coming to terms with saying “Mama” and “Dada” a well-considered analysis of my faith was slightly beyond me. For the next while after that I was pretty rank and file, often enthusiasticly Catholic. Having Holy Communion, first confession and Confirmation in that 7-12 age bracket, a time of rapid learning when your consciousness and identity comes to the fore, really reinforces Catholicism as an intrinsic part of your life. Weekly mass, religious holidays and a stellar religious ethos at national school welded it tight.
An inevitably teenage mixture of authority questioning and independent thought removed the church of its bastion status, but I still held it with a polite agree-to-disagree deference, even tap dancing out of clerical suggestions I gave the vocation a thought. During college I became a fully fledged Bartlet Catholic, after the President in the West Wing, who mixed a strong liberal conscience with his faith. Up until very recently that was working well: the closer-to-God approach and a local priest who was more spiritual than dogmatic enabled me to maintain my long-held links with the church while feeling free to be as critical or independent or liberal in my opinions as I liked. And then "The Murphy Report" was released, and my position became untenable.
Of course, reports of clerical abuse had been out in the open for years, but this report really broke the camel’s back. Previous reports had exposed the scale of horrific and inexcusable abuse, but Murphy was different for showing the scale of the cover up.
High ranking bishops were in it, and apart from transferring abusive priests they didn’t do a thing about it. Even John Charles McQuaid, the feared arch-conservative, Archbishop of Dublin, who exerted an inordinate influence over Irish life and governments in the mid 20th century, was in on it. The “few bad apples” argument relating to abusive priests no longer rang true; this was a mass scandal of disgusting proportions. Being on the liberal wing of a large conservative organisation capable of such fraud, such cruelty and such hypocrisy just wasn’t acceptable anymore.
The church’s attempts at subsequent damage control have been reminiscent of the behaviour of the banks or expense-fiddling MPs. Mistakes, they all say, were made of course, but let’s not do anything unnecessarily hasty like reforming things, and now that we realise what went wrong it’s best to let us handle things from now on please and thank you.
That simply won’t wash. As far as I’m concerned, they can stay there, but not before we systematically strip them of every single iota of their undue default influence on this country, especially in the education system. If the Catholic Church wants a say in social affairs, they can put their name on a ballot like the rest of the political parties.
I still very much believe in God, but my faith in Catholicism has been mortally wounded, and small wonder. Dante once wrote that there’s a special place in hell for those who do nothing in times of great moral crisis. How very appropriate.
