Céide and Cardinal Connell

CÉIDE AND CARDINAL CONNELL

by PEADAR LAIGHLÉIS

CÉIDE is a disingenuous magazine.  It has adopted the motto Doras Feasa Fiafraighe which it translates as "The door to knowledge is questioning".  Fiafraighe is more accurately translated as "asking" rather than "questioning".

Anyway, the Céide people are not good questioners.  For example, while they insist upon questioning every aspect of Catholicism which readers of The Brandsma Review accept, why are they so confident about the fruits of the Second Vatican Council?

Why can they not see the irony of calling Céide a "review from the margins" while touting articles by such establishment figures as Garrett FitzGerald, Michael D. Higgins and Mary Robinson (who all have more than their share of questionable actions - unquestioned by an uninquisitive media)?  Why do they accept the media's assertion that journalists, both print and broadcast, do not form but reflect public opinion?

To digress from religion for a moment: consider the recent revelations about the 1970s Arms Trial.  Captain James Kelly has been referred to on the airwaves as the Dreyfus of modern Irish history and is guarranteed a more favourable reception than hitherto.  (It is true that a terrible injustice was done to him - and now that he is "politically correct" how many new supporters will gather round him?).

But is anyone going to sit down and analyse the media presentation of the political protagonists in the intervening years: Messrs. Lynch, Gibbons, O'Malley, Haughey and Blaney?  Céide correspondent Dr FitzGerald got away with referring to Mr Haughey's "flawed pedigree" in Dáil Éireann in 1979, by which he meant the arms trials rather than the more recent allegations of corruption.

Remember how bright the Progressive Democrats were painted in 1985, about two and a half years before they proposed their Godless Constitution on Trinity Sunday of 1988?  But I am not dwelling on the political vagaries of the last 31 years, only the media's assertions about itself that Céide has no trouble accepting.

I would have thought Dr FitzGerald should be ashamed to comment on Ireland's birthrate, as he does in the April/May Céide.  His 1982-1987 coalition closed Carysfort College, confident there would soon be a shortage of primary school children (Family Planning [Amendment] Act, 1985?).   They got it badly wrong: this is a severe shortage of primary teachers now.

Forgive my brief partisan digression.

Knack of opening doors

Céide has a problem with Cardinal Connell.  I must confess I had a good gloat over the commentary by  Fathers Hegarty, Hoban and other anonymous sources sitting at the feet of  Rev Michael Enda McDonagh - in quick succession Professor of Moral Theology in Maynooth; chaplain to Mary Robinson in the Park; and President of the People's Democratic Union of Priests.  Can anyone tell me what Father McDonagh's handshake is like?  I would love to know.  He seems capable of opening so many doors - though his friend Dr FitzGerald failed to talk Monsignor Alibrandi into moving him into a big house in Tuam in the 1980s.

It is funny that these middle-aged established clerics were so shocked at the advent of  a bright young orthodox priest called Fr David O'Hanlon, who was caricatured in Céide's commentary.  (Hang out with Father David for too long and you won't be invited to suburban middle class semi-ds by non-practicing 30-somethings for Chablis and Brie).  Well, they seem to find the septuagenarian cardinal as threatening as the notorious trigintarian curate.

They are hurting

They don't quite say that Cardinal Connell should not have got the red hat.  But they are terribly hurt on behalf of liberal Irish Catholics and Protestant churchmen (who, Father Hegarty tells us, are also disciples.)  Dominus Iesus and intercommunion are the stumbling blocks in regard to the latter.

I have already stated Céide's mantra "Vatican II" (Has anyone analysed this 36-year old fundamentalism - the cult of the Spirit-of-Vatican II?).  So would it come to a surprise to them that Dominus Iesus might be a rehash of Dignatatus Humanae, the Declaration of Religious Liberty?  Dominus Iesus is founded on the conciliar documents as it is written - not on what a manipulative intelligentsia, both ecclesiastical and secular has duped the tea-and-biscuit ecumenists into thinking it says.

Traditionalists have heard endless debates about the use of the Latin verb subsistere (which doesn't quite mean "to subsist") in regard to the Church of Christ in the visible Catholic Church.  This led to a reaction against the document on the council floor.  Dominus Iesus now apologetically uses the same verb, and largely repeats what was stated.  Although it has been denounced as heresy by extreme Dominican supporters of the Society of St Pius X in Avrillé, the greatest opponents of the new document are those who purport to be loyal adherents to its mother-document.

Archbishop Wojtyla, who was influential in the debate on religious liberty at the Council and the framing of the Declaration, is now portrayed as the reactionary pontiff who tenaciously holds on to life.  Rev Professor Joseph Ratzinger, friend of Rahner and Küng, is now the Grand Inquisitor of a reformation tract.  And Dominus Iesus is open to vilification.  One cannot help but question the leadership of the Pontifical Council Promoting Christian Unity, since the time of Cardinal Bea.  So is it really a case of Bea culpa, Bea culpa, Bea maxima culpa?
Shooting the messenger
Monsignor Desmond Connell, Archbishop of Dublin and Primate of Ireland, defends the document.  This earns him the ire of liberals, who prefer the Second Vatican Council the way they imagined it rather than the way it was.  Rev Patrick Jones of the National Liturgy Centre must find this every time some erudite lay observer reminds him that Sacrosanctum Concilium did not mandate the gutting of church sanctuaries, and can quote the document.  It goes a lot further than church architecture: eg, it states that Latin should remain the language of the Mass; and that Gregorian chant should be the norm for sung Masses.

And there are more where that came from.  The Council Documents also ask priests and religious to continue wearing a distinctive mode of dress.  The Second Vatican Council did not, or could not, accept the reformed sects as "sister churches" and neither does Dominus Iesus.  Cardinal Connell states this, and the liberal approach is to shoot the messenger.  But that is to be expected from a clergy who are quite used to twisting their presentation of the faith to suit themselves.
Orthodox on intercommunion
As for intercommunion, ecumenism and ecumania - I lament we do not have a larger Eastern Orthodox community in this country.  In that case, ecumenism would have a more balanced focus.  I would relish seeing well-heeled liberal Catholics refused communion by bearded archimandrites at the iconostasis.

Over a decade ago, a delegation from the Russian Church (before the fall of the Soviet Union) visited Maynooth.  An ill-informed deacon offered the Metropolitan of Odessa the chalice at Mass.  The Metropolitan refused.  This has not entered the lore of intercommunion on these islands.  So when Archbishop Connell offends a number of religiously illiterate bourgeois housewives in BASIC who socialise with The Irish Times' Patsy McGarry (who also contributes to Céide), he gets vilified.  And Father Hegarty sees Dr Connell's new red biretta as giving

little hope to Irish Catholic liberals who need leadership

Don't they have the media to lead them where they want to go?
Left losing support
Céide also names Father Vincent Twomey SVD, lecturer in Moral Theology in Maynooth as Connell's ultimate successor.  As I have no access to their crystal ball, I will not comment.  Fr Twomey studied under Ratzinger at Regensburg in the late 1960s, after the future Cardinal moved away from the jet-setting theologians who founded Concilium.

Céide's main source of information on Father Twomey is John Allen's new biography of Cardinal Ratzinger.  John Allen is a correspondent with the American National Catholic Reporter.  This has been the flagship periodical of the American Catholic left since the Second Vatican Council.  It has been losing steam for some time recently, as it has noticed that the younger generation  of American Catholics is either leaving the Church altogether (often to become Eastern Orthodox or evangelical protestants) or going to conservative, traditionalist or eastern Catholic movements.  The United States Catholic left, hard and soft, is losing support.  Would Céide profit by their example?
Swipe at St Thérèse
Céide have some solutions of their own.  They suggested that when Jim Cantwell retired from the Catholic Press and Information Office, he be replaced by a bright young woman like Annette O'Donnell.  Do they seriously believe that perception is everything?  I think they seriously need to question the media.  And they also propose Father John O'Donoghue as the perfect candidate to translate the Church's spiritual treasury into the language of the unchurched young (this is my terminology).  Father O'Donoghue did not even identify himself as a priest in Anamchara, which was a highly questionable work anyway.

Father Hoban denigrates alternatives to Anamchara, such as trips to Medjugorje and tours of boxes of relics (a swipe at St Thérèse of Lisieux).  In the first instance, the Medjurgorje phenonomen has not been (and is unlikely to be) authenticated by the Church, and pilgrimages there are private affairs.  And the tour of St Thérèse's relics is based on an initiative of the laity - not the hierarchy, not the clergy and not the religious.
Spiritual bankruptcy
This is something that Father Hoban should reflect upon: the paternalistic liberals dominating the Irish clergy do not seem to accept the fact that the most dedicated among the laity now have a different vision to them.  Has the faith they once possessed deserted them so completely that they react against anything tainted by traditional Catholicism - even though, in the majority of instances, this does not in fact come from traditionalists?

Do they not see that the apparitions and the prayer-groups and the new devotions are born out of the spiritual and sacramental bankruptcy of many pastoral settings?  The present state of affairs  has its origin in a false reading of the Second Vatican Council.  Céide follows The National Catholic Reporter in this respect.

The Brandsma Review, Issue 54, May-June 2001

Two cheers for Father Twomey

Book Review

TWO CHEERS FOR FATHER TWOMEY

by PEADAR LAIGHLÉIS

THE END OF IRISH CATHOLICISM?

By Fr Vincent Twomey SVD.  Veritas, Dublin, 2002. 220pp.  €12.95

MY friend, An tAthair Dáibhéad Ua hAnluain, will not mind me citing O'Hanlon's Law.  This states that no Irish Catholic cleric can abide the presence of anyone ideologically to his right.

For this reason, the Catholic Left do their utmost to cultivate the secular Left, who have as little time for former Céide readers as they do for those who read this Review.  The conservative Catholics try to attract liberal Catholics by excluding traditionalists, though the liberals make no distinction between the two.  (It will be interesting to see how the Irish Catholic develops under its new editor.)  And Father Vincent Twomey writes a new book.

I have a certain regard for Rev Dr Vincent Twomey.  For many years, he has been one of the few orthodox paragons in the Pontifical University, Maynooth's theology faculty.  It could not have been so comfortable to work in a moral theology department in which both Rev Enda McDonagh and Rev Patrick Hannon were professors.

For the gossip of many ill-informed (usually lay) theology undergraduates, one might think that Fr Twomey is an arch-conservative reactionary occupying a position of the politico-religious spectrum only slightly to the left of Mère Angelique Arnaud.  And to confirm their analysis, they invariably remind us of the professor under whom he studied at Münster and Regensburg: Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger.

Contrast with Bavaria

For these reasons, I read Fr Twomey's book with interest.  At first I had much to agree with in the opening pages.  Like Fr Twomey, I first realised how devastating the effects of the penal laws were on Ireland while in Catholic Germany.  So many aspects of what Bavarians take for granted are missing from Irish Catholic life: gilded roccoco churches; mediaeval wayside shrines; images of Christ and the Madonna on public display from private houses; observance of Advent; crucifixes hanging in civil service offices; and public holidays on holydays of obligation.

Fr Twomey is particularly interested in this last point.  He contrasts Bavaria, where Ascension Thursday and Corpus Christi are holidays, with Ireland, where the bishops apologetically moved the observance of these feasts to the following Sunday.  This move was intended to woo the lapsed.  As with similar gestures, it did not bring anybody back, but infuriated the faithful.  It occasioned the greatest intake of protest letters that David Quinn received during his editorship of the Irish Catholic.

The comparison is there.  Bavaria (whose relationship with Protestant Prussia resembles our own with Protestant England) has a much more self-confident public Catholicism than Ireland.  And despite the stereotype of the German, Bavaria has more in common with Mediterranean Catholicism than Ireland has.  (I have a thesis that Ireland, Bavaria, Quebec, the southern Netherlands and possibly Lithuania have the common experience of strong regional Catholic identity in the face of persecution by Protestant or Orthodox power.)

Folk festivals

Fr Twomey also points to the folk festivals in Southern Europe on Church holidays.  It should be noted that post-Penal Law Ireland retains one distinctive folk festival - Hallowe'en.  But the Eve of All Hallows has lost  its intimate connexion with the Feasts of All Saints and All Souls.  In Ireland, there seems to be a Calvinist-like obsession with purifying Catholicism of allegedly pagan elements.

Fr Twomey then analyses the present state of the Irish Church in the light of recent historic events.  If I were to caricature this assessment, it would run like this: the Irish Church never took theology seriously and therefore misunderstood the spirit of the Second Vatican Council and implemented it improperly, causing major problems.  And now, the administrators of the Irish Church are shocked into a state of inertia and are unsure of what to do next.

He may have a point, but he should first look at those countries that did take theology seriously.  I am reminded of the Rhine-basin countries referred to in The Rhine Flows into the Tiber.  All these took theology very seriously indeed and all have deeper problems than the Irish Church.

Developments ignored

One of the most positive moves by an episcopal conference I can recall is the Lithuanian bishops' decision to educate all their seminarists in Lithuania, only sending select priests for further study in Rome.  This is not an option for any Irish bishop, unless he has the courage to do as Cardinal Pell has done in Australia, or as Mgr Bruskewitz has done in the United States. (That is, to take personal charge of seminary education and stand no nonsense from dissenting professors.)

But the conservative and traditional lay movements in continental Europe, and moves by the likes of Cardinal Pell and the Lithuanian bishops, and the many positive developments in North American frequently discussed in this Review are not factors in Fr Twomey's thesis.

What Fr Twomey does propose is a radical re-drawing of ecclesiastical boundaries, reducing the number of dioceses and parishes.  This, he argues, will free many priests from administrative duties for pastoral endeavours.

This may well be true, but the scheme is problematic.  The constitution of the Irish dioceses was effected mainly in the 12th Century.  The prelates who oversaw this were saints and scholars under the leadership of St Malachy of Armagh.  It is difficult to see a committee drawn from Ireland's current clergy and bishops (or religious and laity) coming up with something better, should they indulge in a moment of neo-Josephism.

It is true that Irish dioceses are very small and the current vocations crisis will result in a shortage of worthy candidates for the episcopacy in the future (some might say this has already happened).  Prevailing factors may bring about this redrawing of ecclesiastical maps anyway, but I am not without hope that the situation will turn around.  In the circumstances, I disagree with Fr Twomey's prescription for the present.

Weak on catechetics

On the whole, I find Fr Twomey's presentation full of good intentions.  The trouble is that he is unwilling to contaminate himself with the religious Right, preferring (futile) conciliation with the Left.  So the Brandsma Review is unmentioned in the book, in spite of the fact that our readers have a natural sympathy for Fr Twomey.

It is a tragedy that he seems to have missed Éanna Johnson's dissection of the Alive-O series.  Fr Twomey is aware of concern about primary catechesis, but he is reluctant to probe the area.  This reluctance seems like a fudge.

He is vaguely more positive about secondary catechesis, but this affirms the effectiveness of the Maynooth BATh programme he teaches.  In my experience, not only is secondary catechesis negligible, but most informed laypeople under 40 became so by setting aside a lot of their spare time for personal homework.

On political matters, he proffers a pathetic excuse about clergy and laity who knew "in their heart of hearts" that the liberal agenda was wrong, but did not feel competent to enter the debate.  Does this mean that divorce, among other things, was legalised because a considerable number of Irish Catholics were afraid of their own shadows.

I note that Mgr Francis Cremin is conspicuous by his absence.  But the article in the Irish Catholic that described the launch of Humanae Vitae - in which Mgr Cremin played a leading role - as a public relations disaster is reprinted in the book as an appendix.  I wonder if Fr Twomey is hoping to woo those who take this line.  If so, he will fail.
Confidence unjustified
Another disappointment is that Fr Twomey doesn't reflect his former teacher's support for the traditional movement.  Cardinal Ratzinger has been very supportive of new orders such as the Priestly Fraternity of St Peter and lay movements like Una Voce International.  Nor does Fr Twomey note the vitality of Eastern Catholicism - even with the presence of a very active new Byzantine Catholic parish in Dublin.

He prefers to confine his praise to groups which are conservative on faith and morals, but liberal on liturgy, spirituality and general approach.  I would contend that experience of this grotesque age simply does not justify the confidence in modernity displayed by the non-traditionalist neo-conservative movements.

One certainly sympathises with Fr Twomey's endeavours.  It was very brave of an individual priest to produce a work like this in the current ecclesiastical climate.  But one could wish he could bring himself one step closer to the Right.

The Left wrote him off a long time ago.  And those of us on his right really aren't all that odious.  I wonder does O'Hanlon's Law apply outside Ireland.

The Brandsma Review, Issue 69, November-December 2003