From Where Shall Come My Help? Reflections on Ireland’s Spiritual Plight
For the vast majority of Irish people, the interference by the State in the legitimate functioning of the Church is something new. Only those who have lived, or perhaps ministered in countries where anti-Christian laws exist will have been exposed to anything vaguely similar.
Such positions are sadly neither new nor rare even in the last century. Some have been bloody, protracted, and relentless such as those of the Soviet Union or Communist China. Comparisons of present-day Ireland to these countries would be both inaccurate and unhelpful. Yet there are useful lessons to be garnered from reflecting on situations which the Church has faced elsewhere even when the extent of persecution is not directly comparable. We do so on the premise that any wrongful interference by a temporal power in the spiritual mission of the Church or the unjust suppression of the rights of people to practice their religion is in itself a serious matter which we can never view with indifference.
In the 1920’s the Catholic Church in Mexico underwent a bitter persecution under the Government of President Plutarco Calles, a militant atheist. The Government seized control of every aspect of Church life, confiscated its property, expelled foreign clergy, and sought to establish a nationalised Church where those in ministry would be State employees tolerated only because they followed State rules. The Mexican Bishops, to preserve the Faith and Worship from these attacks and to avoid compliance, closed the churches and suspended all religious services. The faithful were excused from Mass attendance and what became known as “the clerical strike” lasted for over two years. For one of the most Catholic lands in the hemisphere and home to the great Marian Shrine of Guadalupe the trial was immense.
The period gave rise to the Cristero War, where there was open conflict between the State and the organised Catholic resistance which sprung up spontaneously. Calles exercised tyrannical rule over Army and Police and allowed no local discretion as to how the Churches were to be handled. Priests and laity died at their hands including the Mexican Martyrs canonized in the year 2000. For many the suffering was more silent even though acute; no Masses, no Sacraments, with recourse only to priests operating in a clandestine way. For those in Ireland who have been deprived of public worship for eight of the last twelve months we can readily identify.
Fortunately for Mexico Pope Pius XI was quick to become involved. Apostolic Delegates were sent to the Mexican Government although their efforts were rebuffed, a fact greatly lamented by the Pope. In November 1926, the Holy See issued a magnificent encyclical, Iniquis Afflictisque in which the Pope not only protested the injustices being done to the Church but cast them in their correct spiritual light. He accused the Government of having “so outraged the rights of God and of the Church as they are now doing in Mexico, and this without the slightest regard for the past glories of their country, with no feelings of pity for their fellow-citizens. They have done away with the liberties of the majority and in such a clever way that they have been able to clothe their lawless actions with the semblance of legality.”
“Certainly, Venerable Brothers, the men who originated, approved, and gave their sanction to such a law either are totally ignorant of what rights pertain jure divino to the Church as a perfect society, established as the ordinary means of salvation for mankind by Jesus Christ, Our Redeemer and King, to which He gave the full liberty of fulfilling her mission on earth (such ignorance seems incredible today after twenty centuries of Christianity and especially in a Catholic nation and among men who have been baptized, unless in their pride and foolishness they believe themselves able to undermine and destroy the "House of the Lord which has been solidly constructed and strongly built on the living rock”….
This encyclical was the first of three which Pope Pius XI would issue on Mexico, further encyclicals following in 1932 and 1937. Such pronouncements at the highest level of Church authority are of immense benefit when it becomes necessary “to cry to heaven” against wholly unjust temporal over- reach.
Ireland has in the past benefited from Papal Letters, which have both consoled the faithful and clarified important matters of relevance to Church Life. The last was in 2010 when Pope Benedict XVI wrote to the Catholics of Ireland in the wake of the child abuse issues. It concluded with the Prayer for the Church in Ireland which has been much quoted since.
Would it not be time for a Letter from the Pope in solidarity with the Church in Ireland and in solemn protestation that for the first time in centuries there hangs over its head a penal law? Moreover, it might chart the course for a renewal of Church practice for a people that has been afflicted by the longest church lockdown in Europe.
As the hope which the poet of Róisín Dubh once expressed in immortal lines:
Tiocfaidh do phárdún ón bPápa is ón Róimh anoir.
Maurice O’Brien.
