Bryan Appleyard
The Sunday Times
In 1979 Pope John Paul II celebrated mass before 1.25m people in Dublin’s Phoenix Park. Next Sunday only 500,000 are expected to be in the park for mass with Pope Francis.
The real figure may be even smaller. The Say Nope to the Pope campaign has been scooping up tickets that it will not use. Also, off the record, some local churches have been saying their allocated tickets are not being fully taken up.
Catholic Ireland is dying; its iron grip on the Irish imagination has been broken. This is partly because of secularisation but it is the child abuse revelations that have caused real hatred and disgust.
“The church has lost its stranglehold,” said Paul, a taxi driver I hailed in Phoenix Park. “It’s been tamed.”
His mother had five brothers, three of whom were abused by the Christian Brothers, a Catholic teaching community. She gave up on the church and refused to have a Catholic funeral. Paul says he is still a Christian but would not have anything to do with Catholicism.
Abusive clerics are a worldwide phenomenon. Earlier this month we heard from an inquiry that Britain’s two grandest Catholic schools — Ampleforth in North Yorkshire and Downside in Somerset — had harboured abusers. Chile, Argentina, France, Australia and many other countries have been afflicted.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court last week released the report of a grand jury that concluded after a two-year investigation that the church had covered up the abuse of at least 1,000 children by more than 300 priests in the state.
“Priests were raping little boys and girls, and the men of God who were responsible for them not only did nothing; they hid it all. For decades,” the report said. “Monsignors, auxiliary bishops, bishops, archbishops, cardinals have mostly been protected; many, including some named in this report, have been promoted.”
One child abused is a scandal, 1,000 is a crime against humanity. Worldwide, Catholicism may be weathering the storm; not, however, in Ireland. In two referendums — on gay marriage and abortion — the people have rejected the pleas of the church. I was repeatedly told that the Irish church can no longer speak convincingly on any moral issue.
“People don’t want to hear from bishops any more,” said Michael Kelly, editor of The Irish Catholic, a weekly newspaper.

Rejection of the church’s position on abortion has added to the damage done by child abuse
Rejection of the church’s position on abortion has added to the damage done by child abuseNURPHOTO/GETTY IMAGES

But why is Ireland in the eye of the child abuse storm? Because it was, for most of the 20th century, the most Catholic country on earth.
“Catholicism has been interwoven with Irishness and Irish nationalism,” said Kelly. “This symbiosis is so great that it leads not only to the abuse itself but also to the issues of those who have suffered and not been listened to. There’s a certain sense of national betrayal.”
Mark Patrick Hederman, former abbot of Glenstal Abbey in Co Limerick, has gone much further. He once said the church had turned Ireland into a “concentration camp”, adding: “They could control everything. And the control was really all about sex . . . Generations of people were crucified with guilt complexes. Now the game is up.”
The Irish adopted a peculiarly harsh and sex-obsessed version of Catholicism. Sexually abusive priests were doing precisely what they were telling their congregations not to do. Matters were made worse by the cover-ups and the bizarre notion within the hierarchy that these men could not be bad so they must be mad.
“Church leaders,” said David Quinn, a journalist and founder of Catholic advocacy group the Iona Institute, “regarded clerical offenders as the real victims, not the children. The priests were seen as suffering from an ‘illness’. Therefore, and especially in the 1970s and 1980s, abusers were often sent away for therapy and then returned to parishes, supposedly ‘cured’, where they committed more abuse.”
The national betrayal and the staggering hypocrisy have proved toxic for the church. Once, almost the entire population went to mass.
“If you didn’t go to mass on Sunday, people would have remarked about it,” said Kelly. The consolation for him is that people who still go to church will be there out of conviction, not tradition or social pressure.
Now only about a third of the population attends on a weekly basis. It is a high figure by western European standards but it is still falling and the congregations are ageing.
Clerical vocations are plummeting too. The young have had enough of theocracy and a group of thirtysomethings in Sheehan’s pub near St Stephen’s Green just shrugged when the church came up. They may go for weddings and funerals, they said, but that is it. They had, I pointed out, turned into Anglicans.

Just 500,000 people are expected to hear Pope Francis say mass
Just 500,000 people are expected to hear Pope Francis say massALESSANDRA BENEDETTI/CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES

The church, in Ireland and around the world, has been spectacularly tone deaf in its responses to the revelations of child abuse, emitting lame, unfulfillable promises or empty pieties. The church is dying but not, apparently, of shame.
What is clear is that after decades of revelations, the hierarchy does not seem to have grasped the scale of the problem. And this scale cannot be overstated.
“I believe,” said Quinn, “the abuse scandals have caused the church as much damage as the Inquisition and have left just as indelible a stain.”
He thinks the church is dying all over the West. “There is no assurance the church in the West will revive except in small ways. The future for now lies outside the West, in parts of Africa and Asia — for example, South Korea, where Christianity, including Catholicism, has grown by leaps and bounds since the 1950s.”
I ended up in the cold neoclassical vastness of the Catholic cathedral in Dublin. The only other people were four old ladies who had come in out of the rain. I could not tell if they were praying. The 20th century in Ireland was the Catholic century; there will not be another.