Irish Catholics should welcome the open space that secularism provides, not fear it, writes Sean O’Conaill.
For three centuries the Catholic Church has been on the defensive against secularism – the modern movement to remove education, politics and public opinion from the control of the Christian clergies. The assault began in France in the 1700s and helped to provoke the revolution of 1789, which stripped the powerful French Catholic hierarchy of its control of education, political clout and landed wealth.
Napoleon I, who came to power in the anarchic wake of the revolution, was an avid secularist, who first invaded the papal states in Italy in 1798, releasing the Jews from their ghettos there. This began the modern erosion of the worldly power of the papacy, which continued with the rise of Italian nationalism in the 1800s. Stripped of its landed wealth – at one time about one third of Italy – the papacy was eventually confined to the Vatican palace in Rome by the Lateran Treaty of 1929.
Secularism’s advance in Ireland
The clerical abuse scandals since 1992, intensified by the administrative error-prone secrecy of bishops, have since greatly reduced the prestige of the institutional Catholic Church. Irish Catholics have been astonished in recent times to find their own church’s lay victims vindicated only by secular laws and institutions under the control of the state. By 1997 Bishop Thomas Flynn had observed that “Ireland is becoming a secular country.” By September 2002 one research study found that average weekly Mass attendance had declined to 48 per cent overall, with higher attendance in rural areas masking an even steeper decline in the cities. As younger generations are also generally less observant, this decline seems set to continue over the next two decades – especially as recruitment to the Catholic clergy continues to be too low to prevent the average age of clergy rising well above 60.
Period of transition
Those who first used the English term ‘secularism’ in the mid-1800s defined it as “a code of duty pertaining to this life. They had assumed, wrongly, that Christianity (and indeed all religion) related only to an unprovable life after death. Since then Catholic theology has rediscovered the gospels as an indispensable guide to happiness in this earthly life. The word ‘salvation’ is closely related in meaning to the word health. Jesus himself said that he came to give us life in ‘abundance,’ and this new life was clearly present in the early church long before its members passed to their eternal reward. The same was true of the Celtic church at its height, and of the greatest Catholic saints in all eras – all healthy, happy, dynamic people.
The reason the early secularists were usually anti-clerical and anti-Christian had to do mainly with the power of clergy, most of whom were slow to recognise the potential of science and technology for improving the material and political lives of ordinary people. The struggle to wrest control of education and government policy from such clergy naturally embittered relations between secularists and the churches.
But because it has no profound answers of its own, secularism has failed to establish any dogmas that would explain the greatest mysteries of life. Insisting upon the freedom of individuals to follow their own convictions, it cannot logically deny the freedom of Christians to adhere to their own beliefs. It merely creates an open – often empty – space in society for people of all faiths to reach their own conclusions – a forum in which all philosophies and religions have equal freedom. This, on balance, is an even more favourable context for a Christian revival than the Roman Empire which persecuted the early church, or the Celtic paganism that often harassed early Irish missionaries.
Secularism and Christianity can be reconciled
The advance of secular anthropology at one time threatened to undermine Christianity by interpreting the Bible as just another collection of myths. Thanks to the French Catholic academic, Rene Girard, we now know that in fact the Bible helps us to discern what lay behind all ancient myth – the use of violence against lowly victims to stabilise the power of military and religious elites. This confirms the observable purpose of victimisation in our own time, while the Gospels present us with the only practical alternative to violence – mercy and forgiveness. This is obviously the only means of resolving our own inter-Christian violence in Ireland – itself a consequence of political competition, not Christianity.
Girard’s work gives us also the answer to the problem of human acquisitiveness, the source of the deadly threat to our whole global environment. Biblical covetousness is, in fact, simply what the American financial expert Alan Greenspan recently called competitive greed – our tendency to imitate one another’s desires in a completely irrational way.
Christian frugality – very close to the philosophy of ‘just enough’ that guides the secular voluntary simplicity movement – is destined to become the only defensible lifestyle for a sustainable planet. The strange Nazarene who coveted nothing but his Father’s love was far more “with it” than the jet and yacht coveting millionaires who currently incite the whole world to over-consumption and pointless competition.
Scourge of addiction
Mere secularism has failed to explain and, more importantly, to address the problem of addiction, while the only known reliable method for recovery is the 12-step process developed originally by Christian addicts.
Most importantly, it stresses the need for reliance on a “higher power” and for relationships of mutual support and equality. Recovering Christian addicts are often the most effective Christian evangelists in our secular world, and their simple, intimate communities the best pointer we have to the relationships that must develop in a truly healthy church.
Secularists are generally in love with the idea of evolution, fondly hoping that we humans will in time evolve beyond our dysfunctionalities – such as greed, violence, addiction and even religion. But secularism never got to the root of that dysfunction – what the Bible calls sin – our endless tendency to be dissatisfied with what we already possess. This makes us victims to the temptation to be as gods‚ to suppose that we should have everything. This is the root of the covetousness, or imitative desire, which explains why we compete, seek power, make war, become sexually unfaithful and over-consume.
And this allows us to see Jesus of Nazareth as the only human who rose above all covetousness, making possible a ‘New Creation.’ The visionary Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin was right to see God in evolution itself, especially in the person of Jesus.
But each of us is personally faced with the need to “evolve‚ beyond all sin,” and here the Christian mystics who followed Jesus will always be indispensable.
Opportunity for the laity
So, we Irish Catholics should welcome the open space that secularism provides, not fear it. The truth is one and indivisible – but there are many different routes to it, and everyone must choose his own. Irish Catholics – and Protestants – can be confident that Patrick’s route, and Columba’s route, are the narrow path that leads most speedily to the destination of all routes – the loving truth of a loving Creator who will never desert his creation. In the end, the secular world too is destined for a new creation to be enjoyed in freedom by all men and women of goodwill.
This article first appeared in Reality, a publication of the Irish Redemptorists.
The secularisation of Ireland is therefore the opportunity that the Irish Catholic laity need to grow beyond mere deference to clergy, while cherishing everything their best priests have taught and still teach. Centrally that is the Creed – the only source of true wisdom. This understanding can still revivify the sacramentality of the Mass, which also celebrates self-sacrifice rather than self-satisfaction.It is surely the hopelessness and social corruption this lifestyle engenders that lies at the root of much addiction, the scourge of the secularised west. Addicts are invariably lacking in self-esteem – often as the result of childhood abandonment or trauma, or of the inability to compete. These problems too are the consequences of human dissatisfaction and misdirection.Although secularism originally supposed that secular science would make religion obsolete, secular knowledge in many cases now converges with Christian truth. Psychology has rediscovered the importance of early life experience and close relationships in developing personal growth, and there is much evidence for the importance of developed religious faith to mental health. Studies of human motivation by Maslow and others have determined that merely material success leaves people dissatisfied. We humans need what Maslow called ‘self-actualisation’ – the full development of our own capacity to love. Wholeness‚ and holiness‚ are strongly related – and love is the central Christian commandment. So the soundest secular psychology and Christianity can easily be reconciled.Does this mean the Catholic Church in Ireland must now throw in the towel? On the contrary, it marks merely a point of transition for the church – from clerical to lay leadership. Christianity and Catholicism are not radically threatened by secularism, only clericalism – the social control and political power of high clergy. Long before the millennium, the Catholic Church had given itself a secure foundation for a different church led by its laity, in the greatest documents of Vatican II.At first repelled in independent Ireland by the strongly pro-Catholic leaders of Ireland’s revolution, secularism nevertheless advanced after 1922 with Ireland’s need to keep pace with cultural and educational developments in the west generally. Despite the tenacity of churchmen like Dublin Archbishop John Charles McQuaid, secularism advanced steadily, with the secularisation of the educational curriculum and industrialisation of Ireland from the 1960s.
