The Irish Catholic church is changing its tune – soon the Vatican will too

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/27/catholic-church-ireland-vatican-gay-marriage

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At the start of this week it looked, briefly, as though there had been a rare outbreak of common sense in the Catholic church – an institution that has known very little of that (and a good deal worse) over recent years.

After the Irish vote on gay marriage, which saw 62% vote in favour of a change to the constitution to allow gay people to marry, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin said the church needed to take “a reality check” and “not move into denial”. The church, he said, had lost its connection with young people, and needed to work to reconnect with them.

This sounded interesting, even potentially exciting, to a liberal Catholic like me, who believes there are some things worth fighting for in our church, even if we do have to elbow our way through a lot of men in frilly cassocks to reach the treasures at its centre. But two days later, it seems business-as-usual has returned.

From Rome, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s number two, says Ireland’s vote was “a defeat for humanity”, adding that he was “deeply saddened” by it, and that the answer for the church is to “strengthen its commitment to evangelisation”.

In other words, he is advocating exactly the route Martin seemed to be warning against: bulldozing the popular will, proclaiming anew that he and his fellow churchmen are right, and anyone with a different view is wrong, while flagging up that the church will be doing more of what it’s done before (and badly) for the last few decades: in other words, trying to frighten and cajole people into toeing the line.

Depressing though Parolin’s response is, I still see a chink of light in Martin’s words. What he was talking about, you see, was something the Catholic church hasn’t given a fig about in all its 2,000-year history: democracy.

Of course, it’s still light years away from understanding what most of us believe, which is that truth and right are more likely to be found in common consensus than in autocratic dictatorship. But for a Catholic leader, even the mention of a phrase like “reality check” is groundbreaking.

This, after all, is an organisation that has chosen to ignore reality, even when it is up close, personal and staring it in the face. I’m thinking of issues such as contraception, which it continues to pronounce against, while the vast majority of Catholics are more than happy to use it; and child abuse, which it refused to acknowledge, even as the files on its criminal priests stacked up and grew dusty on the desks of cathedral offices the world over.

So why is the Dublin archbishop conceding to a reality check, and will anything convince the cardinal in Rome to do the same? No, say conservative Catholics. But as a liberal Catholic, I think they’re wrong, because when you look at what made Martin change his tune in Dublin, you realise it’s something that will eventually tap at the door of St Peter’s, and then the Vatican clerics will be forced into the rethink the Irish ones are having right now.

That much-needed intervention is the people power that dramatically reduced the number of regularly mass-going Irish Catholics (now atabout one in five, down from 90% 30 years ago), and which has, in the resounding yes vote in Ireland, socked it to the Catholic hierarchy like never before.

Because, rest assured, the vote in Ireland was about kicking the priests where it hurt, as well as about opening the doors to gay marriage. If the priests oppose it, we’re in favour of it: that’s been the mantra in Ireland, and after generations of abuse and betrayal from clerics and an institution that purports to follow and exemplify Christian values, it’s easy to see why.

What led to Martin’s radical rethink was simple: the fear that he will soon be leading a church without any followers. For thousands of years, the men at the top of the Catholic church thought power flowed just one way: now, at long last, they’re realising it’s not that simple. Because a church with no worshippers wouldn’t be a church at all, and the men who run it would have no power any more.

They’d better do something quick. I have an idea: they could start emulating the life of a preacher who lived in poverty 2,000 years ago. Whatever made me think of that? As reality checks go, that one really would take some beating.