A Pilgrim Church: Responding in Uncertain Times

Abstract

Having spent some thirty years (1980–2010) teaching religion at second level in a Dublin city school, I can confirm from personal experience many of the contentions about the steady decline of the influence of the Catholic Church as detailed in Derek Scally’s book The Best Catholics in the World and as it is reflected in the broad range of articles in response to its publication in the autumn 2022 issue of Studies. In those years of experience, I witnessed the gradual withdrawal of any clerical presence in the school, from some four teaching Christian Brothers in 1980 to the funeral of the last one standing, who died at the age of eighty-eight in the year 2000. Those years also ushered in the gradual unavailability of clerical chaplains as local priests became ever older and busier as their numbers declined. It is important to point out at the outset that the ‘local Church’ is often far more compassionate and inclusive in its actions and statements than its institutional and universal counterpart, which is often perceived as harsh and uncaring in its strict adherence to rules and the letter of the law.1 During the period of its decline over the last thirty years, the institutional Church – thankfully just one of the models of Church as described by Avery Dulles in light of the teachings of Vatican II2 – had shown itself as particularly negligent in its duties of care to its faithful and duplicitous in its pursuance of truth and justice. More recently, Dermot Lane lamented what he called ‘the inability of Church leadership to come out with their hands up and give an account of what actually happened’, and their failure ‘to tell the truth, to do justice and to effect healing and reconciliation’.3 And sadly, all these failings were and are serious sins according to the teachings of Jesus Christ whom these people represent. In the light of these scandals and the blatant hypocrisy of those in charge, it is no great surprise that the journalist and critic Fintan O’Toole succinctly summed up the Catholic Church, which had been ‘the great guarantor of continuity over the centuries’, as ‘coming apart at the seams’4 from the 1990s onwards. This statement echoes Derek Scally’s insight into the