FINE GAEL has been accused of abandoning its Christian Democratic roots and the Labour Party of “anti-clericalism” in the autumn edition of Jesuit magazine Studies.
An editorial by Fr Fergus O’Donoghue says Taoiseach Enda Kenny “could have made a great speech on July 20th, 2011, when he addressed the Dáil about the Cloyne report . . . That was the perfect time for a Government leader to encourage reflection rather than merely articulate public anger.”
He says: “Really good leaders tell the crowd where it should go, rather than simply march in front of it, which is what our present Taoiseach was doing.
“We have had many examples of bad leadership in Irish politics: Charles J Haughey once looked clever and sophisticated, but was really cheap and tawdry; it is only four years since Bertie Ahern seemed masterly, but now is reduced to being the failed master of our collective self-delusion.
“The applause from commentators after the Taoiseach’s speech was vociferous and comparisons were made with Éamon de Valera’s ‘historic’ reply to Winston Churchill – a speech so ‘historic’ that it has been largely forgotten.
“Aged pundits produced more anti-Catholic diatribes; some of our ‘religious affairs’ correspondents proved, yet again, that they have plenty of opinions, but no theology,” he says.
A leading member of the Fine Gael party “called for the expulsion of the Papal Nuncio; a Government Minister made extraordinary remarks about the legal obligation to break the seal of confession. Fine Gael seems to have abandoned its Christian Democratic roots, preferring the humourless embrace of political correctness.”
He asks: “If the Irish right is losing its soul, what of the Irish left?” Labour’s “anti-clericalism conveys nostalgia for the French Third Republic but it wants to be in power, so its radicalism has been muted to inaudibility.
“It now realises that we are governed in ‘Frankfurt’s way’, not ‘Labour’s way’, but this allows Labour to be even more committed to secularism and the hope of making Ireland a southwesterly version of Scandinavia, which has long been the spiritual home of the European left.”
He acknowledged that after the Cloyne report, “public anger was justified: an arrogant bishop had proved his pastoral ineptitude by his fixation with the opinions of a Vatican department, led by a cardinal noted for an obsession with clerical privilege”.
Pope Benedict, however, had “renewed the institutional church’s dialogue with the modern world”, but “a lot of time has been lost.
“Irish Catholicism, once creative and transformative, had long allowed itself to become merely a conservative and controlling force in society. Worse still, it more or less disengaged from Irish intellectual life in the late 20th century. Irish Catholicism is in urgent need of self-reinvention.
“It has done this several times in the course of its history and is capable of doing so again. Several Irish bishops have begun excellent pastoral initiatives, but have not made them widely known. Their shyness should not continue,” he says. “Our recession has become a prolonged lesson in humility.”
The EU “now controls so much of our lives that our Government functions as a debt-collection agency”. The need “to recover a sense of ourselves is imperative. The demonisation of our past has to stop, as does the cycle of blame about everything that has gone wrong in Ireland in the past hundred years.”
Looking to “important anniversaries between 2011 and 2016”, he said these “could be occasions of yet more recrimination but, with good leadership in every aspect of Irish life, they will be times to begin healing, forgiveness and self-acceptance”.
