The former Taoiseach, Dr Garret FitzGerald, has observed that "some at least of the problems of the Irish Catholic Church today derive from an undue deference expected by it, and paid to it, by politicians in the first three to four decades of the State's existence".
Addressing a conference on Chesterton's Ireland Then and Now: A Call for Re-Evangelisation, in St Patrick's College, Maynooth, at the weekend, he said "part of that deference took the form of failing to supervise the many church institutions engaged in providing services on behalf of the state, e.g. industrial schools and reformatories - and indeed schools generally. This permitted both physical and sexual abuse of children to develop in a minority of these institutions."
This failure was "now costing the church and state dear - literally as well as metaphorically".
In his belief "the confidence of the laity in their clergy has been weakened by the fact that, because of past cover-ups of cases of clerical sexual abuse, 40 years of cases have hit the headlines more or less simultaneously, giving a totally false and exaggerated impression of the actual scale of this problem at any given time".
But "the revelation of a tradition of hiding these crimes from the civil authorities over many decades, and merely shifting some of these culprits to other postings where some were able to prey on other children - all that has weakened confidence in the leadership of the Irish Catholic Church".
This issue reflected just part of the long-term problems the Catholic Church created for itself during the first half century or so of the State's independence, Dr FitzGerald continued. "Whilst covering up cases of sexual abuse in its own institutions, it was simultaneously demanding that the State bolster up its own over-protective approach in relation to other sexual matters."
A combination of such Church-State elements "as an over-strict censorship of films; a totally absurd book censorship; laws banning contraceptives that persisted until the 1980s; a ban on divorce maintained long after marriage breakdown without civil divorce had begun to undermine marriage itself; and a ban on inter-confessional adoptions - all these eventually built up a degree of resistance and resentment that finally burst like a flash flood across Irish society. The authority of the State itself was weakened by its earlier subservience to church pressures. But that of the Catholic Church was not just weakened; it was seriously undermined."
He said: "Ireland is now suffering from the fact that, because of past over-protectiveness by an unduly powerful church, allowed to exercise power too long by and through an unduly subservient political class, changes in society that occurred gradually over several centuries elsewhere, in Ireland became unwisely concentrated into a single generation. The disruptive effect of this on Irish society has been immense."
To illustrate this he pointed out that "35 years ago only 1.5 per cent of Irish pregnancies were extra-marital. Today one third of all births are extra-marital, as are more than half of all first pregnancies - and three out of every eight Irish non-marital pregnancies are aborted in Britain. By any standards, this is a very disturbing picture."
Not all these developments found their origin in specifically Irish Catholic Church attitudes, he said. "The Vatican decision of one third of a century ago on the issue of contraception also made a major contribution in Ireland as elsewhere to the weakening of the general moral authority of the church."
He feared that if Chesterton were to revisit Ireland today, he might find it hard to recognise the country he admireded many decades ago.
