
4 4 April 2016
and contemplation; but perhaps we have native
idioms more comprehensible to us in our midst.
I do not write this as a spiritual person but as
one who wishes to see a change of heart in the
country which will allow us to realise a society
that it is fairer and more sustainable. It seems
to me that the language of religion, conjoining
poetry and prophesy, speaks to people in a
more powerful way than empiricism. Even Marx
acknowledged the elixir.
One does not have to Believe in order to
believe in its effect, though perhaps a measure
of faith helps. As the philosopher Bartholomew
Ryan puts it in his book ‘Kierkegaard’s Indirect
Politics’: “There is no completion, but for point-
ing towards the elusive faith, but that faith
remains incommensurable and we forever falter
when we try to talk about it (otherwise it would
not be faith)”
People sometimes grow nostalgic about
pagan Europe. At a musical festival you might
be urged to embrace your pagan spirit. But life
was often brutish in pre-Christian Europe. Here
is an account of human sacrifice by an Arab trav-
eller to Scandinavia in the tenth century:
“Then the girl was pulled into the tent and
the men started to beat on the shields so her
screams could not be heard. Six men entered
into the tent to have intercourse with the girl,
after which they put her onto her master’s bed.
Two men grabbed her hands and two men her
wrists. The angel of death put a rope around
her neck and while two men pulled the rope,
the old woman stabbed the girl between her
ribs with a knife”.
Undoubtedly even worse atrocities were com-
mitted in the name of organised Christianity
from Cortez to the Crusades but those acts were
utterly at variance with the ideas expressed in
the gospels, rather than a component of ritual
or doctrine as in many pagan practices. In par-
ticular by dignifying each life Chrisitianity was
crucial to the demise of slavery. Ireland, as a
land of saints and scholars helped to extend
that idea, and early Irish nationalists drew on
this as a source of inspiration. We should be
loath to dispense with it peremptorily.
There have been many powerful critiques of
organised Christianity not least from Edward
Gibbons who wrote that: “The pure Deism of the
first Christians … was changed, by the Church
of Rome, into the incomprehensible dogma of
the trinity”.
One of the most savage attacks on the Church
of Rome came from Fyodor Dostoyevsky whose
omniscient ‘Idiot’ exclaims:
"In my opinion Roman Catholicism isn’t even
a religion, but most decidedly a continuation
of the Holy Roman Empire, and everything in it
is subordinate to that idea, beginning with
faith. The Pope seized the earth, an earthly
throne and took up the sword; and since then
everything has gone on in the same way,
except they’ve added lies, fraud, deceit, fanat-
icism, superstition, wickedness. They have
trifled with the most sacred, truthful, inno
-
cent, ardent feelings of the people, have
bartered it all for money, for base temporal
power. And isn’t that the teachings of the
Antichrist?”.
But Dostoyevsky was a deep believer and his
novels invariably invoke the redemptive power
of a Christian faith removed from temporal
power.
Frederick Nietszche went much further, opin-
ing that: “Christianity has been up till now
mankind’s greatest misfortune”.
In response the Irish poet-philosopher John
Moriarty writes: “As though the Europe he grew
up in was purely idolatrous Mexico and he a
Cortez who came ashore. Nietzsche proceeded
to smash and roll Christianity down the steps
of its own pyramid temples. In its place he set
up actuality, recurrence and will to power”. And
ultimately Nietzsche’s vision is associated with
madness and Fascism.
Moriarty proposes that: “It is as necessary
that we realise a past out of which to grow as it
is to realise a present and future into which to
grow”. In his ‘Dreamtime’ he paints an ecumeni-
cal mythological inheritance out of which this
growth in individuals and across society might
be realised. The Christian experience is
reclaimed and reordered.
It seems that just as the key to defeating the
doctrine of ISIS will emerge from within Arab-
Islamic idiom rather through sustained
bombing campaigns, similarly the key to creat-
ing a more compassionate, thoughtful and
proactive Irishry may be re-engaging with our
mythical inheritance, and that includes a re-
imagined Christianity.
1916
171
Ordinations in 1984
THE IRISH CATHOLIC CHURCH IN CURRENT DECLINE
14
Ordinations in 2015
5055
2020
2030
PARISHES
Tuam diocese in
Tuam diocese in
PRIESTS
3055
PARISHES PRIESTS
Statistics: Brendan Hoban
www.associationofcatholicpriests.ie
55 75
In Killala diocese
there are 7 priests
under
In 20 years there
will be 7 priests
under