“They knew about it and did nothing”

My wife and I were walking after church in Ireland.  It was a Sunday morning in a little town south of Dublin, on the Irish sea.  While enjoying the dazzling scenery along the coast, we ran into a man I will call Finian, a talkative and friendly retiree from a bank job.  Actually every Irishman we met was talkative and friendly–not to mention fond of Irish ales and whiskies–in this land of my forebears.  

Our new friend insisted he had a lowly job at the bank, “not like the bank bosses who ruined the economy in 2008.”

When he learned that we had just come from church, he wondered why anyone went to services  anymore.  “I am too educated to go to church.  The Church tells you things that are impossible to believe.

“Besides, they have no credibility.  They covered up for all those f—— priests who abused children.  What gets me is that the bishops knew about it and did nothing.  Or they just moved the bad priests around, so they could abuse a new set of children.”

Everywhere we went in Ireland, we ran into ex-Catholics who no longer believe in much of anything.  There was the 30-ish IT expert I will call Sean who was educated by the Christian Brothers.  “They were all bast–ds, except for the few nice guys who did nothing to change an evil system.”  Sean was angry.  He said he was an atheist now.  “Where’s the proof for anything the Church teaches?  There is none!   Not like the laws of physics, which can be proved.”

I tried to explain to him that even the laws of physics cannot be proved, but are statistical approximations of what we see most of the time when we are looking.  And that we know that when we are not looking, subatomic particles behave differently–that our mere watching changes their behavior.

Sean was unmoved, until I told him that the older I become the more I see mystery in life.  I asked if he ever read any of the gospels from beginning to end.  When he said he didn’t, I challenged him to do so, suggesting the gospel of John.  “Write me if you have any questions about it.”  He took my card, and was friendly when we departed.

Then there was the researcher of adolescent psychology who had just taken a new job at an Irish university.  She told me she has no religion, and finds religions “interesting.”  But then she proclaimed the Catholic Church to be “backward,” and that because many elementary schools in Ireland were controlled by the Church, and children could not be admitted unless they were baptized, those schools were “unethical to discriminate against the non-religious.”

Ireland is a beautiful country, but it made Jean and me feel sad.  Just a few decades ago it had the highest rate of belief and church attendance in the world–over 90% for the former and 80% for the latter. Both those figures have now dropped off the cliff.  According to the Irish Times (Jan. 21, 2016), “Weekly Mass attendance levels in Dublin are currently put at 20-22 per cent (of the population), while being as low as 2-3 per cent in some working-class parishes.”

I have not found figures for rates of belief today (we will hear fairly soon the results of the April 2016 census, which made it mandatory to answers questions about religion), but my encounters with random Irishmen and women suggest that rates of belief are also far, far below what they were not so long ago.

It is apparent to any traveler to Ireland that this once-solid Catholic country (I mean the Republic in the south, not the much-smaller Protestant Ulster in the north) has embraced the secular values of the EU with open arms.  An astonishing 62% voted in favour of same-sex marriage last May, making Ireland the first country in the world to endorse so-called marriage equality through a referendum.

What can Christians learn from this?  Let me hazard three lessons.

1. Church success can be a curse.  The Irish Church was remarkably successful for a long time–if success means holding the trust of a vast majority.  But it seems to have become complacent.  That complacency prevented it from disciplining its leaders and protecting its parishioners from abuse.
2. The Church needs to always be on the alert against drinking the Kool-aid of its surrounding culture.  Altho the Irish Catholic Church never changed its doctrine of sex and marriage, it seems to have adopted the Sexual Revolution’s lackadaisical approach to sexual sin.
3. Maybe our culture’s hostility to the Church in America is a blessing in disguise.  It can keep us from becoming arrogant and complacent.  It might help us practice more of what John Stackhouse has called Humble Apologetics.