If you are a Catholic, then it is natural to believe that Catholicismteaches the truth, writes John Waters
The sacking last week of the principal of Dunboyne gaelscoil strikes me as a harsh remedy to a complex conundrum, but to suggest that he was the victim of Catholic obscurantism is pure nonsense.
In a recent interview, Mr Ó Dúlaing was reported as saying, with regard to the issues of the dispute, that if Protestant children had been asked to leave the class while Catholic Communion students were learning about beliefs particular to their faith, this would have amounted to segregation.
The problem is crystallised by his failure to perceive that requiring Catholic children to return after school hours would be segregationist as well.
The Dunboyne dispute was a product of the uniquely Irish definition of pluralism. In an effort to counter past or present intolerance, there is a strong strain in our present culture seeking to tolerate difference. Those minorities who present themselves, believing what they may, are to be respected, tolerated, cherished, celebrated, but the majority get to believe in nothing except that everyone else is entitled to believe in what they choose.
And what then do the children of the majority become but spectators at the carnival of belief which we have promoted, tolerated, affirmed, but declined to participate in. There is not much point in my being in favour of other people believing things if I do not believe in anything myself.
Moreover, far from reassuring those with strong other beliefs, my lack of belief makes them uneasy and my supposed tolerance seems more like condescension. This will leave nothing but an empty shell looking benignly out on a teeming ferment of belief in which it has no part to play other than that of patronising observer. We will tolerate everything, but be nothing.
A letter-writer, in response to my recent column on this subject, wrote in familiar terms about what he termed my " aboriginal" position, and urged the abandonment of "the redundant and backward faith and fatherland notions of singular identity".
Nowhere had I advanced such notions. The issue as I see it is not a question of faith and fatherland, but of the necessity for particularity in the process of transmitting beliefs. I was arguing against what I would characterise as the multicultural theory of post-colonial Ireland, which goes something like this: because we now have growing numbers of different faiths and traditions living among us, we cannot any longer imbue Catholic children with a sense that the Catholic religion is central or uniquely truthful.
This sounds wonderfully magnanimous and pluralist, until you consider what would happen if Catholics were to suggest to Muslims that they are not permitted to see Islam as central or uniquely truthful. If you are a Catholic, then it is natural to believe that Catholicism teaches the truth, and this in no way interferes with the right of others to believe the same of their own faith.
I do not suggest that Catholics should disrespect the beliefs of others; what I say is that it is wrong to expect Catholics to dilute their beliefs in case someone might take offence at the suggestion that Catholicism is closer to the truth than any other tradition. If Catholics do not believe this, why be a Catholic?
It is as though we wish to educate our children to the point of scepticism we ourselves have reached after several decades of intense struggle with the Catholic Church. Much of our thinking on these matters is what I would term parasitic, which is to say that it rests on the assumption that everything we have come to know, understand and believe can be taken for granted, that it always existed and will remain in spite of all. This is folly, because scepticism is the luxury of those who already have beliefs on which to exercise their doubts.
BUT you cannot begin the comprehension of the mysteries of existence from a position of doubt. This is why inter-denominationalism is a worthy folly, promoting nothing but a secularist confusion. The last thing children need is to be told that something is true and yet not true. If my six-year-old child asks me a theological question, I do not burden her with the crypto-agnostic angst of my 47-year-old paradox-ridden head. When she asked, "Daddy, is heaven before or after outer space?" I did not tell her that heaven may be a product of man's inability to accept the nothingness of existence, which is what I might have said if I was being interviewed by the religious correspondent of The Irish Times.
Instead, I said, "After" . And she said, "So, first you have the clouds, then you have the sky, then you have outer space, and then you have heaven. Right, Daddy?"
And I said, "Right". Before you can learn to doubt, you must find something to have doubts about. Diversity is essential to the health of public culture. But in faith as in economics, public virtues can be private vices, especially as radical personal belief-systems are obtained by picking and mixing from the public buffet. The diversity of a culture depends on the individual vigour of its singularities. If you destroy the particularities which create the discrete entities of a culture, what is transmitted to the individual is not an interesting post-modern comprehension of paradoxical realities, but is a sense that truth is a mirage.