Many readers who looked at their copy of this newspaper last Monday week must have been tempted to check the date on it - whether it was April 16th, 2001, or April 16th, 1951. Because there on the front page was a photograph of six soldiers, in full dress uniform, acting as pallbearers for a gold casket containing the relics of St Therese of Lisieux.
Logically, it had to be 1951, because this sort of theocratic use of State institutions doesn't happen in 2001, not now that the special constitutional position of the Catholic Church has been abolished, teenagers can buy condoms, and homosexuals are not flogged within an inch of their lives.
Yes, but the picture's in colour, so it must be 2001. But no, maybe the colour was a special treat in 1951, to mark a particularly religious day. On the other hand, this is The Irish Times, and back in 1951 just about everyone who worked on this newspaper was called Neville and Nigel and Mabel and Heather and probably secretly knew the words of God Save the King.
Regimental dinners
The Irish Times back then certainly wouldn't have published a celebratory colour photograph of the remains of St Therese of Lisieux arriving at Wexford, probably preferring to ignore the affair with a slightly baffled if fastidious disdain. We might have reported on Irish Guards' regimental dinners, and Burma Star Veterans' Reunion, but on the more gruesome rituals of the majority religion: ah, I think not, old fellow.
What we need to decide the issue of the date is some corroborative evidence - if there's any mention of the Korean War, or Julius and Ethel Rosenberg being sentenced to death for passing on atomic secrets to the USSR, or Burgess and Maclean going missing, then I know we're back in 1951. But the real killer blow would be whether or not this particular edition of The Irish Times mentions the Mother and Child Scheme, which brought down John A. Costello's government exactly 50 years ago.
And it must be 2001, because there isn't word of that little affair, which revealed the naked and untrammeled power of the Catholic Church, before which both Sean McBride and Noel Browne bent an abject knee. Those days are over, we have been repeatedly assured: so if that is the case, why are soldiers of this Republic, in full ceremonial dress, parading a Catholic ossuary through Rosslare town in the year 2001? Are we a secular state, determined to convince Northern Unionists that the church no longer has whatever power it wants? Or are we a sectarian pseudo-Republic, whose political instincts remain subordinate to the requirements of the Catholic hierarchy, the difference being today that those requirements are usually more modest they once they were?
It is one thing for the Army to turn out to welcome the Pope, a world statesman and the greatest religious leader on Earth; it is quite another to provide an elaborate military welcome for the relics of a 19th century French nun.
Saints in abundance
Who decided this ceremonial should happen? And what saint's remains will not now be given such a State welcome? There could be an awful lot of potential bones to greet, with more on the way: after all, this present Pope has beatified some 15,000 victims of the Spanish Civil War alone, and they could keep the Army very busy into the foreseeable future. But was it really for this that the Defence Forces were raised, trained and armed, the better to welcome whatever reliquary the Catholic Church sees fit to import?
Now the Catholic Church has the right to worship in whatever way it sees fit, without anyone mocking it or its members, though it is testing the straightness of our faces just a little by naming the vehicle bearing the catafalque a "Theresemobile". However, the Catholic Church has no right, at any time to expect the Defence Forces, and the Garda Siochana, to welcome and protect such a lavishly expensive catafalque over the course of a 75-day trip around Ireland.
More important duties
But this is just not any time: we linger on the edge of a national catastrophe, andwe are able to keep twin-disasters at bay only by the widespread deployment of our security forces. What is the morality, please, my Lord Bishops, in causing those forces to dance in attendance on your thoroughly Catholic Theresefest, rather than attend to its graver duties of keeping Ireland free of foot and mouth disease and curbing the Real IRA? Well might His Grace the Bishop Of Ferns, Brendan Comiskey, the organiser of this little affair, sneeringly dismiss the concern of what he called "self-styled intellectuals" about the involvement of what he called "the peasantry" in this visit. You know, I really had supposed his personal trials had, very properly, taught Bishop Comiskey a certain becoming reticence; and I had also thought, wrongly again it seems, that the Catholic Church had abandoned this kind of populist appeal to the mob.
Attacking the Catholic Church for the sake of it is not the mark of a courageous commentator any more, but a species of mob-violence of its own. But this doesn't mean we should mutely accept the misuse of the State's resources, with soldiers and gardai being expensively deployed for the best part of three months around what is a purely denominational matter. This is not merely sectarian, and a parody of the Republic in a time of national crisis, it is plain bonkers.