“Bouncy castle Catholicism” is not really an accurate description of Ireland’s relationship with the Church.
The institution’s hold over the Irish population has very little to do with the single day in a child’s life when, aged seven or eight, they are trussed up like miniature newlyweds and sent off to hustle wads of cash from neighbours – a tradition that is as weird as it is enduring.
Still, affection for the rite of Communion, Confirmation or even the prospect of a church wedding cannot on its own account for the Church’s continuing grip on Irish society.
Not given all we know about its institutional wrongs – its aiding and abetting in the crime of child abuse, its institutionalised misogyny, its homophobia, its insistence on blind faith and conformity, its stubborn defiance of science and reason.
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Ireland’s relationship with the Catholic Church is messy and complicated. It is an institution that makes many demands of its members – it insists on magisterial control over their most intimate thoughts and behaviours; it instructs them that they must enrol their newborn children as life members or risk them going to hell.
Membership, by definition, demands the lifelong deployment of blind eyes, short memories and large doses of hypocrisy.
Most Catholics take what they want from this and they seem entirely comfortable coexisting with a large gap between what they say and what they do when it comes to matters of faith. (And why not? They learned from no less an example than the hierarchy themselves.)
In recent years, for many, that gap has stretched to a yawning chasm. Weekly mass attendance was more than 80 per cent when I was born in the 1970s. Over my lifetime, it has plummeted to 16 per cent who would characterise themselves as regular mass goers, according a recent survey by Amárach for the Iona Institute. Yet, in the 2022 Census, 69 per cent of people still describe themselves as Catholic.
Ireland’s surprisingly stubborn attachment to Catholicism is not a question of a single day, but one of eternity. It is about death – or, more particularly, funerals.
Of the 3,300 Irish people who responded to an online survey by RIP.ie (which is owned by The Irish Times Group), nearly four in five want a religious ceremony with a priest or minister when they die. This is despite the fact that a smaller proportion – just two-thirds – believe in heaven and just over half believe in the afterlife of the soul (no, I’m not sure how that works either).
Funerals, it turns out, are not really for the dead.
Those who are likely to answer a survey on an online platform for death notices and condolences are obviously a self-selecting group with presumably more than a passing interest in funerals – still the numbers are fascinating.
Respondents went to an average of five funerals in the past year. People in Connacht and Kerry made it to six; in Dublin it was an only marginally less impressive three.
I can find no comparable data for Britain, but The Irish Times columnist Sarah Moss noted recently how she was approaching the age of 50 and had attended just four funerals in her whole life, a little less than average, she reckoned, “but not remarkable”. We are, by the standards of other English-speaking countries, very enthusiastic funeral goers.
One reason for the enduring popularity of the funeral is to be found in one of the RIP.ie survey’s most interesting findings: 92 per cent of believe families should have the right to deliver a eulogy at the funeral Mass of a relative.
Eulogies have become a controversial issue in some parishes, but the survey suggests these are at least part of the reason funerals continue to draw such crowds.
Humanist and non-religious ceremonies also offer the opportunities for eulogies and all sorts of personalisation, of course, but there’s something in the Irish psyche that is drawn to the contrast between the solemnity of the incense, robes and the bells and the heartwarming stories about their late uncle’s habit of improving his lie on the fairway.
Alternatives to the Catholic funeral are becoming more common, but when most of us think about our own it’s generally the full incense and eulogies treatment we’re after.
The dominance of the Irish Catholic funeral is a symptom of what Fintan O’Toole has referred to as our capacity for doublethink: the unknown-knowns and the knowns-unknowns that allow us to exist in a morally liminal space, free of the obligation to think too hard about our choices.
So while on the one hand we know all about the paedophile priests and the bishops who shunted them from parish to parish, we still choose to have our children inducted as permanent lifetime members of the institution that elevated and protected these men.
We know that the Church quite openly regards women as lesser beings, yet many of us still choose to send our daughters to Catholic-ethos schools.
We know that the catechism still encourages the use of corporal punishment by parents, and many of us were ourselves beaten at school, yet we claim a cultural connection to Catholicism in education.
Half of us are dubious about the concept of afterlife and one-third don’t believe in heaven, but four fifths definitely want a Catholic funeral with all the trimmings when we die.
We gamely carry on doing what we have always done: taking what we want from the Catholic Church and disregarding the rest.
But the truth is the more we know, the harder it is to silence the rest, the unknown-knowns.
So we cling on to the traditions, the superstitions, the rituals, perhaps in the hope that some radically better version of Catholicism will eventually come along.
And even if it doesn’t, sure we’ll have had a great old send-off.
