More from "Catholic Without Apologies".

Here is another article from Catholic Without Apologies, the collection of my Catholic Voice articles which I put together with the intention of getting it published. I was told that collections of articles don't sell, so I'm posting it here bit by bit. This article is from October 2015.

Do We Need a New Idiom?

I’m typing this article the day after I attended the latest meeting of the Hilaire Belloc Society of Ireland. The Belloc Society meets on a regular basis at the Central Catholic Library in Dublin’s Merrion Square. Many of its members also come to the meetings of the G.K. Chesterton Society of Ireland, which I chair, and which meet in the same venue. All of these ventures—the Belloc Society, the Chesterton Society, and the Central Catholic Library itself—could do with more support. If you are interested in attending one of our Chesterton Society meetings, contact me at Maolsheachlann@gmail.com. If you are interested in attending a Belloc Society meeting, contact me and I’ll pass you onto its organisers. I hope I may be forgiven for beginning my article with these promos. They are, as you’ll see, appropriate to the subject in hand.

Irish Catholicism, right now, is at a point which might be compared to the fall of France in World War Two, or perhaps to the evacuation of Dunkirk in the same war. To put it bluntly, it has taken a hammering. Forces which were working against it in semi-secret, and with little apparent success for many decades, have recently enjoyed a spectacular breakthrough. The near-collapse in vocations, the open hostility to the Church in the Irish media and Dáil Éireann, and the euphoric approval given by the Irish people to same-sex ‘marriage’, are only some of the fronts on which the secular agenda in Ireland has won an “overnight success years in the making”, to indulge in one of my favourite clichés.

Now is the time for Irish Catholics to declare, paraphrasing General De Gaulle, that “We have lost the battle, but we have not lost the war”. Indeed, the shoe is now on the other foot. We are no longer under siege, but on the offensive. There are obviously disadvantages to this; but the great advantage is that we now have the initiative. We don’t have to be on the back foot any more.

So this should be—and indeed, it is—a season of reflection and regrouping for Catholics in Ireland. This is why my ‘promos’ in the first paragraph, I insist, are highly relevant. The Chesterton Society and the Belloc Society primarily exist to study the works of G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc; but, since both these gentlemen were Catholic apologists, our discussions often turn to the present-day challenges facing the Faith in Ireland, and the ways they might be met.

One aspect of this subject that arose at yesterday’s meeting—and that has frequently arisen in other places where these matters are discussed, such as the online Irish Catholics’ Forum—is the matter of how we present the Faith to our contemporaries. Do we need a new language, a new style, in order to speak to today’s Ireland? John Waters has sometimes suggested that we might drop the word ‘God’, at least in some contexts, in order to speak to our contemporaries about the transcendent reality that they are so determinedly blocking out. Nobody at the Belloc meeting made such a radical suggestion, but one young gentleman—who has considerable experience speaking to his unbelieving peers—did suggest that terms like ‘original sin’ might be replaced with different language, since they tend to make young people ‘switch off’ and stop listening. He made a very strong case.

So what do I think? Do we need a new idiom in which to speak about the Faith to our contemporaries, or should we use the old idiom?

I have thought about this a great deal, and my conclusion is that we need both. I especially think it is of supreme importance that we do not discard or devalue the old idiom—and by ‘idiom’ I mean style, terminology, forms of devotion, the whole shebang.

Whatever Happened to Irish Catholicism?

Ever since Irish Catholicism began its recent decline—and the Bishop Eamon Casey case in 1992 may be taken as a convenient point to date this from—a certain narrative of its decline has gained popularity, not only amongst non-Catholics but also amongst Catholics. The narrative is that the Irish Catholic Church had grown complacent during the years of its ascendancy, that the vast majority of Irish people went to Mass out of conformity and fear of what the neighbours would say, and that Irish Catholicism was legalistic, puritanical and joyless. The entire thing came crashing down so quickly, this narrative implies, because it was built on sand all along.

Bishop Eamon Casey

I have never seen very much evidence, beside anecdotal evidence, to actually bear any of this out. And when I go to primary sources—when I read books and articles and poems that were actually written during the long years of ‘Catholic Ireland’—I find the exact opposite. Working as I do in UCD Library, I have access to the back issues of many historical Catholic periodicals, such as The Irish Ecclesiastical Record and The Dublin Review. I often take these bound volumes (going back decades, all the way to the nineteenth century) to read on my coffee and lunch breaks. And what do I find? Not the anti-intellectual, dry, legalistic, moribund traditional Catholicism of modern legend. Instead, I find evidence of a highly literate, reflective, outward-looking Catholicism that flourished right up to Vatican II. (These periodicals include many articles on subjects such as science, other religions, modern social problems, and the arts—articles that are nearly always both informed and thoughtful.)

Regarding the accusation of joyless puritanism, one only has to read the literature written by believing Catholics during these times—such as the novels of Canon Sheenan, Walter Macken, John D. Sheridan and others, popular poems such as ‘The Trimmins on the Rosary’, or even the nostalgic articles in magazines such as Ireland’s Own and Ireland’s Eye— to realise this wasn’t the case. Irish Catholicism may have had its ascetic side—and what is wrong with that?—but it also had an emotional and mystical richness that can strike us as almost maudlin today.

Hours before I started typing this article (on Mission Sunday) I listened to one of our local priests—a Nigerian—deliver a stirring tribute, in his homily, to the Irish priests who had won so many of his people to Christ. He mentioned visiting the graves of priests who had died in their late twenties, and who are buried in that distant land. Such priests did not come from nowhere. They learned their robust faith in fervently Catholic homes and communities.

Personally, I give zero credence to the theory that the Irish Catholic Church had simply been coasting on inertia for decades (or centuries) before it hit a rock in the nineties. I think the decline at that time can be blamed on a much more recent development—on the loss of nerve and (to put it bluntly) the heresies that spread like wildfire after Vatican II. It only took twenty years to undermine what it took centuries to build up, but that is the nature of decay.

Very well, the reader might say—but that was then, and this is now. Society has changed, like it or not. Don’t we need a new language to ‘interface’ with the modern world? Isn’t the old language, the old way of doing things, outdated and archaic?

At the risk of sounding paradoxical, I would like to suggest that the very fact that it is outdated and archaic may be a strength. Let us remember the old Irish proverb that ‘what is strange is wonderful’. Let us pay heed, too, to another wise saying—“Every generation revolts against its parents and makes friends with its grandparents.” This may not be literally true, but it contains a truth—that what is rejected with disdain at one time (in the life of a society, or even the life of an individual) is often embraced fervently at another. Examples abound; the music of Abba, Victorian architecture, the Irish language, vinyl music records, and a thousand others. Even if we look across the water to Britain, we can see that the ‘Old Labour’ that was once considered deader than dead is now back in the saddle, and ‘New Labour’ is old hat. And when the tide changes in this way, what was once a liability becomes an asset.

Come Live With Me and You’ll Know Me

But I have deeper reasons for believing that we should hold onto the old idiom, the old style, of Irish Catholicism. It’s based on that beautiful line from the infancy narrative of the gospel of Luke, often rendered: “Mary treasured all these things, reflecting on them in her heart”. All the traditions and customs and folkways of Irish Catholicism—the Sacred Heart, the Miraculous Medal, Knock, Croagh Patrick, the First Fridays, the importance of First Holy Communion, the break in Lent for St. Patrick’s Day, the songs and holy pictures, right down to less tangible things like the way Irish Catholics talk and think about their faith—are a well of living memory. They grew out of a lived faith over generations, one that was suited to our national temper. A new ‘style’ that is simply invented—no matter how creatively or intelligently—just can’t have the same meaningfulness. We should be seeking to preserve and revive these traditions, this way of life and worship, rather than looking for a new approach. We should treasure these things in our hearts.

I believe that the advice “Show, don’t tell”, which is so often recommended to those writing fiction or giving presentations, also applies to evangelisation. (Well, perhaps we should amend it to “Show, don’t just tell” in this case.) We often hear it said that faith is ‘caught, not taught’. In this, it resembles many other things, such as foreign languages. I bet many of us have had the experience of going to France or Germany, and suddenly finding ourselves just ‘picking up’ the language that we struggled to get to grips with in school lessons. That is, hearing native speakers using them for real actually makes more sense than having them explained to us in simplified form, through our own language. (Though, of course, the latter is still necessary.)

In the same way, I think the Catholic faith makes more sense, and is more likely to be ‘caught’ by unbelievers, when they witness it in others—and by this, I’m not talking about witnessing heroic virtue or personal sanctity (though that is certainly to be wished for). What I mean is that, just as someone learning a language will pick it up best by listening to native speakers talk to each other, so non-Catholics will ‘pick up’ the Faith, and be drawn to it by hearing (and reading and watching) practicing Catholics interact with each other. Most importantly, they will realise there is something there—something solid—something different. They will realise there is an ‘inside’ as well as an ‘outside’.

I had this experience. When I started to investigate the Catholic faith, the Catechism and other books aimed at non-Catholics certainly helped, but Catholic blogs and newspapers and books—which were full of debates and discussions and references which were totally over my head—reassured me that the Faith was really something living, not just a theory. I especially remember, when I started going to Mass, how moved I was at hearing the priest’s own memories of going to Mass as a boy. Such things told me that the Faith was a living thing.

I believe we should not only preserve this living tradition but strengthen it, and revive it—in tangible ways like Corpus Christi processions, ‘Sunday best’, fish on Fridays, Stations of the Cross, and the candle in the window on Christmas Eve. Even more important than these tangible things are the intangible ‘atmosphere’ that comes with them.

I said earlier that we should use both the old idiom and a new idiom. I am certainly not arguing against trying to reach unbelievers by ‘meeting them where they are’. In the church in UCD, I once came across a copy of the Gospel of Luke written in ‘street lingo’. It made me smile, but then I thought; why not? The story of St. Patrick and the shamrock may be apocryphal, but it exemplifies an approach that Church missionaries have always taken. I am in favour of both. Let us take bold new initiatives, certainly. But let’s not throw out what worked so well in the past as we do so.