Surviving the Secular: Faith, Grief, Parody

Abstract

In The Diary of a Country Priest, George Bernanos offers an unsettling image: [T]he Church is not only ... a kind of sovereign state with laws, officials, armies – a moment, as glorious as you please, in human history. The Church is on the march through time as a regiment marches through strange country, cut off from all its ordinary supplies. The Church lives on successive regimes and societies, as the soldiers would from day to day on the inhabitants.1 I am aware the metaphor of military occupation is problematic, given the present state of war in Europe, but I am intrigued by its audacious and honest assertion, that there is something parasitic about the Church’s relation to the space it is occupying (if only temporarily). How do we imagine the Church’s survival into a post-Christendom future? Is it possible, as Bernanos suggests, that the contemporary Church, apparently burnt out and running on empty, can nevertheless draw sustenance from its environment – no matter how indifferent or hostile the local population? While not losing sight of Bernanos’s fugitive regiment, I will suggest in the conclusion that the musical term ‘parody’ might better describe the relation of dependency that he has in mind. Regarding the Church’s postChristendom survival, there are other indications that the future may be different from what is generally predicted. Crawford Gribben concludes The Rise and Fall of Christian Ireland with some striking assertions: What passed as Christian Ireland is finally over – and Christians should be glad ... What has passed as Christian Ireland is dead. But its critics cannot relax any more than believers ought to despair.2 Gribben’s book narrates the ‘rise and fall’ of Irish Christianity, as we commemorate the historical markers of Ireland’s ascendency, its ‘coming of age’ as a modern secular state (independence in 1922, constitutional amendment to remove the ‘special position’ of the Catholic Church in 1972). The see-saw picture would appear to be a vindication of the standard ‘subtraction’ model of secularisation: ‘the common notion that the secular is Michael Kirwan