While the pages of Irish Catholic blogs, social media accounts and websites are awash with young people who find joy in the faith, the pages of legacy media outlets are filled with the musings of boomers who cannot let go of the loss of 20th Century Catholicism.
Whether it is Fintan O’Toole’s rants in the Irish Times, or Patsy McGarry’s doomsday warnings over priest numbers, the Irish establishment media does not see a future for Catholicism that does not resemble their narrow understanding of Clonliffe Catholicism.
One letter to the Irish Examiner this past week encapsulated how many older Catholics cannot shake off their narrow parochialism when it comes to the structure of the church, how they cannot let got of the promise of a more liberal church, or whatever it was that they think was promised by the Second Vatican Council.
The priest in question first writes:
As a retired cleric, and after much reflection, I wonder, as my church (Roman Catholic) launches another campaign, in the wake of the visit of US President Joe Biden, to recruit male celibate youth (or not-so-young nor celibate adults) what will they be expected to preach as gospel as Roman-Catholic trained priests in the Ireland of the future which belongs entirely to a multicultural youth?
To repeatedly use the term ‘Roman Catholic’ as opposed to simply ‘Catholic’ certainly is a strange choice, especially given his subsequent point about multiculturalism.
In the past few years, the church in Ireland has been vitalised by a very wide variety of Catholics, many of whom are more engaged in their parish life than are the Irish youth. Many of the new Catholic communities also come from traditions that have married priests.
The next paragraph continues:
I ask this with interest about how tomorrow, Roman-collared clerics will speak/preach about resurrection, redemption, reparation, confession of sin, death, sex, and gender, and the need for Jesus, who was homeless, exiled, hungry, and crucified on a Friday called good in their Rome published liturgical books. Will it make any sense?
These are eternal themes, why would they make any less sense to the next generation?
To take one example, in an age of gender dysphoria, is there anyone with a better answer to this question than the church?
He then continues:
Maybe some Rome-appointed scholar/eccleastic — medieval clad, celibate, white and male might give me a for-instance (notwithstanding Joe Biden’s recent warm welcome to West of Ireland’s Catholic shrine where he made homage to a group of first-century Palestinian Jews — two celibates and one a virgin — on an alleged previous visit on a rainy night in the month of Lughnasa 1879).
Again, this individual does not seem aware of the fact that to much of modern Catholic vibrancy is in the Southern rather than Northern Hemisphere. His repeated use of ‘celibate’ smells of desperation and bitterness over one issue.
He then writes:
Is it best, to avoid confusion and when “advertising” that new recruits to the alone male-celibate priesthood of the Roman-centred Irish-Catholic Church that they learn to discard gospel parables, miracles and apparitions from the past and deal only with facts when preaching, praying and learning, after it all, to become, eventually, elderly pensioners, like my good self and many of its devotees?
There is a narrow mindedness and a bitterness here that the liberal wing of the Irish church can never let go of, perpetually hurt by the failure to gain the approval of The Irish Times and their ilk.
They feel a sense of defeat, partially through their limited scope of reality. In Ireland now, Men’s Rosary Rallies are packed each month, Latin Masses are expanding and the faith is holding steadier than in other parts of Europe.
They see no hope, no way forward, as they cling to their traditions of tea and woolly jumpers, Daniel O’Donnell on the CD player during Communion and societal prestige. Those days are over, thank God.
The priest signs off:
I just wonder what today is the “joy” to attract youth to leave everything in search and sacrifice to preach an Irish-Roman Catholic gospel and its catechism of rules and prohibitions?
What can you say here, but the fact that the Dominicans, the Institute of Christ the King the Sovereign Priest, the FSSP and those who tend to be more traditional in either liturgy or theology are attracting vocations while liberal orders wind themselves down?
There is joy in beauty and freedom in faith.
For a previous generation, Catholicism was completely intertwined with their idea of an oppressive culture of emigration, poverty and stagnation. As the current generation has found out, those problems are inate in the Irish State, but not in Global Catholicism.
