IN HER historic address to the Church of Ireland General Synod in Galway yesterday, President Mary McAleese said: “Ireland is neither Catholic nor Protestant, neither agnostic nor atheist, neither Islamic nor Jewish, but it is a welcoming homeland for people of all faiths and of none. It is a homeland indebted to a rich and complex Christian heritage and with a rich and complex multi-faith heritage already in the making”.
Her observations have been illustrated in The Changing Face of Faith series by Patsy McGarry which concludes in this newspaper today. As well as bringing prosperity to Ireland, the Celtic Tiger has also brought a rich diversity in religious expression and practice. It has contributed also to the rapid growth in numbers of atheists and agnostics. It is the case equally that Ireland’s immigrants in the main take religion seriously and worship regularly. What has been heartening in all of this is the generosity of spirit with which the new arrivals have been assisted by our traditional mainstream churches, whether through educating their children in schools run by Christian denominations, Catholic in the main, or through the accommodation of newer forms (to this island) of Christian liturgy and worship in Church of Ireland, Methodist and Catholic churches and chapels. It would be wrong to minimise instances of “growing pains” where school places for some immigrant children have been concerned. But the inclusive spirit of the boards of management should be acknowledged.
In the mid 1990s too it was our churches which were among the first to alert wider society to the plight of asylum seekers arriving here. They helped ensure, as Imam Hussein Halawa of the Islamic Cultural Centre in Dublin observed in the series yesterday, that whereas “elsewhere they were put in camps. Here they got education opportunities”. In all of this our traditional mainstream churches have given contemporary expression to the great humanising role religion can play in society.
The series also indicates that the decades-long moral civil war involving the Catholic Church and liberalising forces in Ireland appears to be ending. This has been helped greatly by the church’s more frequently proclaimed and practised inclusive approach to education, and by a dramatic decline in its post-Famine 19th century model, now gradually being replaced by a more laity-dominated institution. As that older church labours into a new form, many Catholics and their clergy experience pain – even despair – as they imagine the institution they love is dying. But this is not so.
The vast majority of people on this island freely choose to describe themselves as Catholic in census after census, North and South. This is the case, even if, as Church of Ireland Archbishop John Neill observed of people’s adherence to religious institutions in general today: “they might only attend at special occasions, or at the occasional routine service, but [they] still describe themselves by proclamation as members of a particular church”. The truth is that the manner of belonging to a church in Ireland is changing.