Ireland remains a "remarkably religious country" and news of the Catholic Church's demise has been, like that of Mark Twain, greatly exaggerated, Cardinal Cathal Daly said yesterday.
While the decline in regular Sunday Mass attendance could not be minimised or ignored, it was "less doom-ridden" than was sometimes suggested. Dr Daly was speaking at a Mass celebrated as part of the Chesterton conference in Maynooth, organised to address the challenges facing Christianity in Ireland.
A decline in attendances at Sunday Mass, he said, followed an unusually high level of religious practice and fervour in Ireland.
There had been "few parallels in any country at any period" for the percentage of regular Sunday Mass-going and vocations to the priesthood, as well as to consecrated life for women and for brothers, as that found in Ireland in the first two-thirds of the past century.
Surveys had shown, however, that since 1973 the percentage of Catholics attending regular Sunday Mass had fallen from 91 per cent to about 60 per cent today.
A 2001 survey had put the figure at 63 per cent for Ireland, compared with 43 per cent of Catholics in the US, 42 per cent in Poland and 29 per cent in Italy."Relative to other countries in the so-called developed world, Ireland is still a remarkably religious country."
Local causes, such as the abuse scandals in religious-run institutions and authoritarianism among bishops and the clergy, were often adduced for the decline in religious practice in Ireland, he said.
These factors had had a negative effect. "But we must surely see Ireland also in the context of the rest of the economically developed and affluent world, of which Ireland is now very much a part."
In the western world there was a prevailing mood of relativism of truth and of morals, "making belief in absolute truths and in religious dogmas seem obsolete and intolerant, and making all claims to authority suspect".
He questioned the thinking of those who nostalgically looked back upon a time when the Church was present in all areas of Irish life as "the good old days".
Beneath the "pleasing surface" all was not what it seemed. "There were dangers of conformism and routine. There was sometimes hypocrisy, with people, for reasons of expediency, professing in public views which they rejected in private discussion or contradicted in private behaviour."
He added: "Church teaching was largely unquestioned and Church authority largely unchallenged."
The pendulum had swung full circle and if there was conformism now it was to the current trend of criticism of the Church and of non-practice of faith. The decline had not been as great as some had feared, however, or as others had "perhaps hoped".
