Echo Opinion: Pope’s ’79 visit witnessed a nation in transformation

Nearly a third of the nation — about 1.3 million people — packed Phoenix Park for the pope’s open-air Mass. Holy Catholic Ireland, a bulwark of the faith in changing times, turned out by the hundreds of thousands as he journeyed to Drogheda and to the west. The pope also had hoped to cross the border into Armagh, the seat of Saint Patrick, to pray for peace. But the IRA had plans of its own, and a month before the pope’s journey, the organization murdered Lord Mountbatten and his grandson aboard a yacht off County Donegal. Vatican officials quickly cancelled the trip to the Six Counties. Officials feared the visit of a man clad in white and speaking of peace would serve only to incite those who regarded him as the anti-Christ.
Still, the power of the pope’s moral authority, the clarity of his teaching, and the humility of his pleas for peace were such that both politicians and paramilitaries could only mumble and stammer in the face of this man’s condemnation of violence. Memorably, he said: “I appeal to you in the language of passionate pleading. On my knees I beg you to turn away from the paths of violence and return to the ways of peace.”
Those were the words most people remember from the papal visit, and understandably so, for how often had anyone heard a pope beg, how often had a pope offered to get on his knees in humility and remonstrance? Overlooked at the time and perhaps forgotten now were these other words. “To Catholics, to Protestants, my message is peace and love,” he said. “May no Irish Protestant think the pope is an enemy, a danger or a threat.”
All these years later, the lambeg drum still disturbs the peace on the streets of Belfast every July 12. The pope had charm and the pope had authority, but not everybody succumbed to one or heeded the other.
A quarter-century after the papal visit to Ireland, it seems clear that this event was historic for reasons we can see now but could not foresee on that day in Phoenix Park. If, as the historian Emmet Larkin so memorably argued, the Famine years were the beginning of what he famously called a “devotional revolution” in Ireland, the papal visit marked the end point of that revolution.
In the years since that visit, devotional Ireland has given way to something called post-Catholic Ireland — a phrase that would have been dismissed out of hand in 1979. Changing mores, the age’s spirit of secularism, shifting demographics and the church’s scandals have consigned the devotional revolution to Ireland’s past. It is a measure of how much the Irish changed during John Paul’s papacy that an Irish cleric, the Rev. Desmond O’Donnell, recently argued that faith, and not necessarily regular Mass attendance, was the truer measure of devotion.
Father O’Donnell’s argument is compelling, but it also only confirms that the devotional revolution is a spent force in Ireland. About 48 percent of Ireland’s Catholics regularly attend Mass, down from about 90 percent when the pope visited the country.
The half-full argument about Mass attendance is that the Irish go to church a good deal more often than Catholics elsewhere in Europe, where Christian churches are deserted and mosques are packed. And Mass attendance actually is higher than it was before the Famine, as we know thanks in part to Professor Larkin’s groundbreaking research. Mass attendance in Ireland in the late 1830s and early 1840s was only about 33 percent. After the catastrophe of the Famine, attendance climbed to a peak of about 90 percent within a half-century. Remarkably, that figure remained about the same through most of the 20th century, culminating in the pope’s visit.
The devotional revolution, in Larkin’s view, “provided the Irish with a substitute symbolic language and offered them a new cultural heritage with which they could identify and be identified and through which they could identify with one another.”
But, for so many of Ireland’s young people, that symbolic language — the rituals of Catholicism — now seems as relevant to modern life as that other symbolic language, Irish, a dusty leftover from old Ireland. This is the Ireland of Father Ted, not of Cardinal Cullen, of Bertie Ahern, not of Eamon de Valera.
That the devotional revolution came to an end during the papacy of John Paul II surely is no fault of the pope’s. While his adherence to church doctrine on abortion, an all-male, celibate priesthood and divorce may have alienated many Catholics in Ireland and elsewhere, Ireland was changing anyway. It is hard to think of many ways in which he could have revived the devotional revolution. It was, it would seem, a spent force by the time his papacy began. In that sense, those hundreds of thousands who gathered in Phoenix Park were not only paying tribute to the Holy Father, but participating in a funeral service of sorts for old Ireland.
Many observers of Catholic Ireland, including clerics, believe that Mass attendance will continue to decline. The question, though, is whether this matters.
In the periodical “Reality,” which is published by the Irish Redemptorists, Father O’Donnell wrote that Mass-going “has been carrying more weight than it really should.”
“The mistake begins my making it a primary measure of religious fidelity,” he wrote. “Sometimes it has even been equated with people’s relationship with God — a truly shaky equation.”
In post-John Paul, post-Catholic Ireland, then, perhaps it is only in outward appearance that this once-pious nation has embraced secularism, and only in anecdote has it chosen consumption over reflection.
Father O’Donnell’s point is well-taken: Irish devotion to ritual, to devotion itself, may have waned. But that may not necessarily make them any less Catholic, any less Christian. Or any less devoted to the ethic espoused by the man they so lovingly embraced, a generation and a lifetime ago.