Willie Walsh, the Catholic bishop of Killaloe from 1994 to 2011, who died last month, was admirable in his uncertainty, not just about the institution he represented, but his own faith. As a seminarian in 1952, he came to his vocation when, in the words of historian Daithí Ó Corráin, the Irish Catholic Church had become a “lazy monopoly” which ultimately proved “to be its greatest burden”. As Walsh remembered it, the role of the laity then was to “pray, pay and obey”, and excessive deference to clergy created a church “rigid in its teaching and sometimes oppressive in its administration”.
In his 2016 book, No Crusader, Walsh promoted the idea of a Christian teaching that should be “commended” rather than “commanded”, and a church as provider of sanctuary rather than a place “where condemnation has been the instinctive response to perceived doctrinal or moral failure ... the true character of religious language should be more poetry than science”.
When interviewing him in 2010, this newspaper’s Kathy Sheridan drew attention to his tendency to “think aloud”, including his criticism of institutional celibacy, his church’s attitude to women and the ban on artificial contraception.
The current bishop of Killaloe, Fintan Monahan, duly paid tribute to Walsh in his funeral homily, referring to him as “a pastor cut out of the same cloth” as the now ailing Pope Francis. But that is debatable. Following his election in 2013 Francis certainly seemed more about the poetry than the science, but his pontificate has been about evasion as well as empathy.
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In his 2015 book Pope Francis Among the Wolves: The Inside Story of a Revolution, Marco Politi adopted the cometh the age cometh the man narrative: “The Catholic Church often mysteriously succeeds in electing the right pontiffs at epochal turning points. John XXIII arrived at the watershed of the thaw between the western and Soviet blocks; Paul VI coincided with the planetwide movement of decolonisation; John Paul II marked the taking down of the Iron Curtain. Francis has become pope at a time of global crisis. It isn’t just third-world countries that are suffering from serious economic imbalance, poverty, marginalisation, corruption, violence, and the intolerable gap between the hyper-rich and swathes of society living close to the edge.”
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But has Francis really been a radical new force or merely in the business of catch-up, in the sense of revisiting the Vatican II reform ethos outlined more than half a century previously: of a church looking outwards, in genuine “communion”? He has spoken convincingly of the need for a change of tone and approach: “a pastoral creativity capable of reaching people where they are living – not waiting for them to come – finding opportunities for listening, dialogue and encounter.” He has also been vocal about migration and climate change. But there has been a certain reticence too, despite his claim in his recent autobiography, Hope, that “being opaque is always the worst choice”.
In his earlier rebukes of dogmatic fundamentalism, he seemed like a harbinger of genuine change, but he also defended, as a “son of the church” what he called “clear” orthodox teachings. He suggested he would not judge gay people, but this was not about upending doctrine. He has been more voluble about poverty than his predecessors, while his relative silence on abortion earned him criticism from the Catholic right. He has recently admonished those weaponising Catholicism to serve extremist political agendas, including in the US. What he has consistently advocated is “a new balance”, but his own balancing act suggests he has been evolutionary rather than revolutionary.
His declared mission regarding women, for example, is to enable them “to be full protagonists at every level of social and ecclesial life”, but he has made it clear holy orders are reserved for men. More women have indeed been appointed to positions of authority in the Vatican, and Italian Raffaella Petrini is the first woman to serve as President of the Governorate of Vatican City State. But there is no guarantee such reforms will continue given the approaching, traditional “war of cardinals” in relation to choosing the pope’s successor.
The vagina detector test at the Vatican’s entrance will hardly be decommissioned, such a thing imagined in the irascible words of a true radical, the recently deceased poet Pat Ingoldsby:
