Those of you who object to this writer’s broad take on the Irish obsession with the Palestinian conflict – to the notable exclusion of a much bloodier war in South Sudan, for example – will be familiar at least with the argument that I make: That Ireland is ultimately making enemies on the international stage to no net benefit either for Ireland or for the blighted Palestinian people. As Micheál Martin bemoaned in the Dáil this week, “Israel isn’t listening”. Indeed, Israel has no good or compelling reason to listen to Ireland on any subject whatsoever related to Palestinian peace, since it feels that Ireland’s decision to recognise a Palestinian state amounted to a reward for Hamas for October 7th: Palestinians wanted that recognition for years – they only got it when they killed a bunch of Israelis. What does that tell them?
Anyway, that’s a tangent. The basic problem here is that Ireland stands on the international stage, shouting ever louder into a void in the hope that others will admire the strength of our voice.
Which is almost identical to how this country’s cultural and political establishment relates to the Catholic Church. Here’s Fintan O’Toole, earlier in the week:
“Looked at objectively, there are few great problems that have such obvious solutions. The church is like a farmer who complains of a diminished crop while ploughing only one depleted field and leaving the rest of the land fallow. It creates its own dearth by refusing to admit married men or any women to the priesthood.”
Note the language there: Fintan is a superb and precise writer, and every word counts in his sentences. Therefore you should pay particular respect to the word “obvious”: It is obvious that the Catholic Church could reverse the Irish decline in vocations by admitting married men and women to the Priesthood. So obvious, in fact, that he is baffled as to why this does not simply happen.
But the problem, as in so many things, is that what is obvious to the Fintan O’Tooles of this world is not remotely obvious to anybody else: American seminaries, by all accounts, are full. African Seminaries are full. The Roman Catholic Church has many problems, on a worldwide basis, but recruiting new Priests is not actually amongst them.
Indeed, of all the Christian Churches, the Roman variety is amongst the most healthy: The very doctrinal certainty and “rigid” rules which turn off Fintan’s generation of 1970’s vintage liberals actually seems appealing to many younger people in search of constancy in a changing world. As my friend David Quinn never tires of pointing out, the Anglican Church permits female, married, and openly gay clergy, and yet its pews have been emptying out for a generation and the decline appears to be accelerating.
But for any of this to be relevant, you must first believe what I think is O’Toole’s central delusion (note I am not using the word “lie”): That he is interested in the welfare of the Roman Catholic Church.
What many Irish people of his generation and outlook are most interested in, I believe, is validation: Their story is one of progress, of Irish society endlessly moving forward and discarding the past and evolving in a more progressive direction. They therefore diagnose the ailing Irish Catholic Church with the cancer of not being more like us.
This is a common trend in Fintan’s writing: He applied it to Brexit Britain consistently for several years, with the common theme running through those articles being that the United Kingdom should mourn the fact that it was not more like Ireland, and that it had not moved on and discarded its ancient instincts about being a great and notable nation. So is it, in broad terms, with the middle east: This country of our own resolved a long-running ethnic conflict with dialogue and peace and compromise, ergo the Israelis and the Palestinians should be more like us (despite their conflict being vastly more existential for both sides).
O’Toole, I think, genuinely believes that the Roman Church would be a revived institution if it simply opened the doors of its Irish seminaries to women and married men. But he misses the central point: It might be revived, but it would no longer be uniquely Catholic. The Catholic Church with women and married Priests would just be the Anglican Church, with a different religious head. The decision would also undoubtedly cause a schism within the church and do untold harm to its unity, especially given that it is a global institution not an Irish one.
In his heart, I suspect Fintan O’Toole knows this as well as I do. But ultimately, much of Irish commentary comes down to that same central point: Why can’t the rest of the world be as tolerant and liberal and open and feminist as we are? Sure, they’d all be happier for it.
This is what happens when you are a small country, and nobody pays too much attention to you. The rest of the world might decide one day to look at some aspects of Irish life under precisely the liberalism Fintan wants to share with everyone else, and examine just how happy that has made us. I am not sure that Leo XIV, sitting in the Apostolic Palace, would look at modern Ireland and see a society of peace, harmony, and goodwill. Nor that he would be much inclined to take lessons in how to manage change from the generation that has led us by the nose to our present state of being.