(The Nationalist, 19 July 2002)
During the post-war years, Polish society was founded on two pillars, the Polish Workers’ Party, aka the Communist Party, and the Catholic Church. Each struggled to overcome the other. Each maintained unity in its ranks by pointing to the threat from the other. The message to the ranks from both hierarchies was, ‘Don’t rock the boat or you’ll hand an advantage to our opponents. Unity at all costs’.
Poles found their identity in one institution or the other. You were either a Catholic or a Communist. It was like the two poles (excuse the pun!) of a tent. Each supported the other, through being set in opposition. What happens if one pole falls? The other does, too. The Polish Workers’ Party fell from power in 1989. Since then the Catholic Church in Poland has been losing ground, whether measured in terms of attendance at Mass or numbers entering seminaries and religious orders.
There is an analogous situation in Northern Ireland. Since Stormont was set up in 1920, nationalists felt excluded from society, kept in the position of second-class citizens. They found support in the Catholic Church which, especially through its education system, sought to lift the status of nationalists, most of whom were Catholics. Just 25 years passed between the passage of Rab Butler’s Education Act in Britain in 1944 and the beginning of “the Troubles” in 1969. To a degree, the Church became nationalists’ alternative society to Stormont and Unionism.
On Good Friday 1998, a new Agreement was signed in Belfast. It was ratified the following month by voters, north and south. It gave nationalists a substantial share in power at all levels, and was followed up by new institutions giving structural teeth to its provisions. One pole of the tent had fallen – the pole of unionist ascendancy. How would the other fare?
I believe that, as the effects of the Agreement take hold and become more apparent, the Catholic Church will lose the role it had up to 1998. Its “pole”, understood in that sense, will fall. That is for the better. It frees the Church from a role imposed on it by circumstance and gives it the opportunity of developing a new role more in line with its spiritual mission. Up till the present, a lot of problems were kept at bay by the need felt by nationalists for unity in the face of the threat presented by unionism. That situation has changed, and the Church will face the problems of secularism that have challenged the Church in the Irish Republic since the nineteen sixties.
What is the way forward for the Church? An indispensable part of developing a new role for the Church is for clergy to trust laypeople and to give them a full share in the life of the Church at all levels, including the decision-making process.