The first meeting in the new structured dialogue between representatives of the Catholic Church and the Irish Government took place this week. A meeting was also held with the Jewish community. Some commentators have felt that it is not a healthy development.
There is another way of looking at it. Today the Government is politely creating structures to facilitate consultation. It seems rather more desirable than what happened in the early years of the State, when obsequious letters were sent to various bishops begging permission to rubber-stamp episcopal wishes.
New structures are only necessary when a previously existing relationship becomes problematic or complex. It is analogous to the Task Force on Citizenship. While a laudable exercise, it would not be required if there were not some deep sense of unease about the concept, a sense of something no longer working. We only start to talk about ideas such as citizenship or community when we feel things are going awry.
The need to set up formal channels of communication amounts to a tacit recognition that these organisations have not had automatic access to power for a long time. It is a healthy development. A church that has too much secular power is a church that is in trouble but just does not know it yet.
Recently, there has been a great deal of discussion and commentary about the decline in religious knowledge. I cannot see why anyone is either surprised or shocked. Anyone who was not aware of the erosion, not just of religious knowledge, but of religious culture, must have been living under a rock. It is a phenomenon that has been happening gradually for more than 40 years.
One of the causes is almost certainly the fact that the Irish Catholic Church had too much influence, was too much and too cosily part of the establishment. It rightly suffered a backlash when anti-establishment feeling began to surface in the 1960s.
As someone with a degree in theology and nearly two decades of experience of teaching religious education to young people at second level, perhaps I should crawl under a rock myself. Certainly, the best I might claim for myself might be inclusion in a catalogue of heroic failures. In fairness, it is impossible for schools acting alone to halt the tide. Yet that is what some commentators apparently want us to do.
The decline in religious knowledge is not easily attributed to any one factor. There is an overall decline in general knowledge that is sometimes startling. For example, many young people no longer automatically know what a TD is or, if they have heard of such personages, may not have even the haziest notion of what it is they actually do.
Then there is the internet. The Google generation does not burden itself with retaining knowledge that is mere clicks away should they ever need it.
Yet an overall decline in general knowledge does not explain why people cannot name the members of the blessed Trinity. Certainly, there was a period of disarray after the Second Vatican Council that meant some people's religious formation at school consisted of multiple verses of Kumbaya and Michael Rowed the Boat Ashore. At that time, all was not lost, because there still was a strong religious culture in the home. Yet if you were a teenager in the mid-1960s, you could be a grandparent by now. If you received very little religious education, it is very difficult to pass it on. We made withdrawals from the capital accumulated by generations, and failed to replenish it.
Some people blame the methods of religious education. Certainly, people designing new school programmes who had probably been reared on hard-line memorisation went overboard on experience-based learning, just at the same moment that real, lived religious experience was becoming more rare.
Bishop Donal Murray of Limerick put this very well. He said religious knowledge has become like Latin irregular verbs, learned in a summer term, left behind and never thought about over the holidays and as foreign as if they had never been learnt by September. Schools can do no more than reinforce what happens in a young person's home and community. If little pertaining to religion is happening in either, any religious knowledge acquired will erode as quickly as the bishop's Latin irregular verbs.
Religion is primarily transmitted through methods other than formal teaching. Ideally, it is absorbed along with mother's milk, along with all the rituals and comforts of a child's life. People complain that children leave primary school without knowing an Our Father or Hail Mary. The place for learning such prayers is the home.
So is secularisation an inevitable process, so inevitable that teaching the poetry of Hopkins or Kavanagh will become as difficult as translating Sanskrit, because all the cultural references will be lost? No. People still search for meaning. Religious representatives are still expected to provide leadership in all sorts of difficult circumstances. For example, most people will have sympathy with the clergy who attempted to reach the tragic Dunne family in Monageer. They were there when other services were not.
Yet religion cannot be something for emergency use only. The churches, if they believe they have something of value, will have to put significant resources into supporting families, into building a sense of community, into creating liturgies that are beautiful, sustaining and that assuage the soul-hunger felt by so many.
Going back is never an option. When we thought we were an island of saints and scholars, our poorest children were being dumped into large institutions and ignored by society. Yet at the time, everyone could probably recite his or her catechism. Religion is ultimately about a life-giving relationship with a reality far greater than oneself, or else it is sterile. To use an imperfect analogy, when you are in love even the tiniest details about the beloved are significant. When you are indifferent, an encyclopaedia of knowledge will leave you unmoved. Educating our young people with facts alone will be futile, if there are no places where they can see people actively striving to live out a faith. We are not primarily rational, but relational creatures. Oddly enough, a church with a greatly reduced level of secular power is in a better position to model such relationships.