11 Pope John Paul II

The marking of the anniversary, in September 2009, of the 1979 visit of Pope John Paul II to Ireland comprised part nostalgia and part self-satisfaction, the nostalgia being less for the Pope than for the feeling of innocence which had come to be associated with those times. The analysis went something like this: the Pope, personable but representing an outmoded form of thinking, came to Ireland at approximately the moment when we began to wake up and smell the cappuccino. After the Pope left, the Church fell apart, and Irish society ‘matured’ into new understandings.

The numbers who turned out to see the Pope were remembered thirty years later as evidence of the vigour of Irish Catholicism at the time. It was, we were repeatedly told, the end of an era, or as one dissident priest crudely put it, ‘the last sting of a dying wasp’. Conventional wisdom assumes that Irish Catholicism remained vibrant until the emergence of the clerical scandals of the 1990s, starting with Bishop Eamonn Casey (one of the stars of the papal visit) and his American squeeze, and then continuing in a way that very rapidly cast Casey’s adventuring in an increasingly benign light.

There is another way of looking at it: that really the papal visit was simply a splurge of sentimentalism, empty of any real engagement with the mission of this rather remarkable Pope, or even any understanding of what he stood for. A deeper assessment also suggests that the later public scandals became pretexts for the many who were already failing to find an engagement with Catholicism to declare publicly their alienation. It was far easier to ‘explain’ your disillusionment by reference to a betrayal than to look deeper into the condition and ask questions that might indicate a more complex picture.

The real problem, prevailing long before the arrival of John Paul II, related to the reduction, over the previous century or so, of Christianity as expressed in Irish Catholicism into two thin strands: moralizing and emotionalism. The Church had become a moral police force, and Christ, seeming incompatible with this function, had been externalized and suffused in an aura of sentimentality. Christianity had become separated from reality, except in so far as reality consisted of rules and rituals. Strangely, the mass media persona of John Paul II seems, oddly, to have embodied both the characteristics of these two strands infecting the Irish Church. This was nothing like the full truth of John Paul, but mass communications are poorly adapted for complex truth-telling. By turns, the Pope came across as avuncular and finger-wagging, smiling and stern, doctrinaire and affectionate, and in doing so dramatized precisely the condition of the culture he was addressing. He had to his personality three distinct elements: the charismatic ‘pop star’; the philosopher poet and the stern bearer of simple injunctions. But he also gave rise to a certain ‘à la carte’ tendency in his audience, which warmly embraced his personality while overlooking his message and remaining deeply ignorant of its roots in reason and human experience.

Nothing about his Irish visit managed to transcend the dualisms provoked by his public personality. In his various homilies that weekend in September, the Pope talked about peace, family values, the law of God. But, for all the positive emotionalism unleashed by his persona, his language served mainly to underline the emerging sense that Christianity was unlikely to be in harmony with the coming times. The words the Pope used were designed to shore up something that really no longer existed, if it ever had. For all his brilliance, John Paul was slightly behind what, deeper down the culture was trying to comprehend. John Paul II is remembered with the deepest affection in Ireland, even by some who otherwise have nothing good to say for Catholicism. But it is largely his charisma that is remembered, rather than his more enduring qualities: his understanding of human nature, his clarity of moral vision and his insistent repudiation of utopianism.

An unfavourable comparison is often made in Irish conversation between Benedict XVI and the man who preceded him. This is almost entirely spurious. Few who praise John Paul and seek to bury Benedict as ‘reactionary’, ‘right-wing’, ‘dogmatic’, could name a single point of theological or philosophical difference between them. Of the two, Pope Benedict is by far the more tuned-in to the condition of modern culture. He has a profound grasp of what has happened to Christian societies, including Ireland, beset by a shrivelling of reality through ideology and language. What is called secularism, operating in a pincer movement with the reduction of Christianity to morals and sentiment, has removed from our cultures the means for a human being to access in reality a total definition of himself. Modern man remains secure only for as long as he can remain within his own constructs, but even a glance out the window, at the horizon of knowable reality, casts him into a dizzying terror. His only hope lies in distraction: money, intoxicants, false ideas of freedom and cultures renovated to minimize the human exposure to the Absolute. This is the secret history of the Celtic Tiger and a condensed explanation for the rage and grief that has followed it.

John Paul, of course, recognized these conditions too, and diagnosed them in his writings. But in his more generalized public utterances he tended to offer a simplified solution: a return to lost values and humbler aspirations. His public patronized him and cheered him, but remained certain that he was a kind old man whose ideas had passed their sell-by date.

A few years after the visit of Pope John Paul II, Ireland was briefly convulsed by a summer-long spate of quasi-religious phenomena in which, all around the country, public statues of Christian icons – in particular at shrines to the Blessed Virgin dating from the Marian Year of three decades previously – were said to have moved and danced and shimmied. For months on end, the nation seemed to speak of little else, as new reports came through on almost a daily basis. Even convinced atheists went along and said that they had seen the statues move. Undoubtedly this odd phenomenon spoke of something deep in the heart or soul of the Irish people, perhaps by way of articulating a feeling that could not be spoken otherwise: that despite the surface shift towards what has been acclaimed as an increasingly ‘rational’ worldview, the desires of the human heart continue to seek a correspondence for themselves. A quarter-century and another recession later, these questions are more ‘live’ than ever.