In stronghold of Ireland, interest wanes

As in America, a sex-abuse scandal had disastrous effects.
By DAVID O'REILLY
PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER
LIMERICK, Ireland -- In late November 1999, Bishop Willie Walsh set out on a 121-mile walk to apologize for the sins of Roman Catholic clergy in Ireland. The road ahead daunted the 64-year-old prelate, but not because of its grueling length.
What he feared was the church's angry, scattering flock.
In less than a decade, Catholicism had seemingly lost its grip on Ireland, as it had across Europe. One lurid revelation had bred another and another until hundreds of Irish priests stood accused of sexual abuse.
The scandals tapped a deep well of disaffection. From the early 1970s to 1990, the percentage of Irish Catholics who regularly attended Sunday Mass had fallen from 91 to 70. The number was down to 48 percent by the time Walsh embarked on his "pilgrimage of reconciliation" across the 1,600-year-old Diocese of Killaloe.
Leaving the village of Kilbaha, where the Shannon River meets the Atlantic, he soon had a crowd of hundreds telling their stories through biting wind and hail. Many confided their estrangement from Catholicism, but only some were abuse victims.
"Young couples practicing birth control felt they were sinful," Walsh recalled in a Philadelphia Inquirer interview. "Gay people, whom I found to be very gentle, caring people, talked of being asked to live a celibate life."
Catholics with Protestant family members longed to take communion together. Divorced and remarried Catholics lamented not being able to partake at all. Several women challenged the ban on female ordination.
Walsh asked forgiveness for their pain, and invited them to renew their faith. When after 21 days he reached Tipperary, "Bishop Willie" was a national hero with an escort of 1,500.
But his celebrated gesture did little to reconnect Irish Catholics, estimated at 3.5 million, with their ancestral church.
If anything, the chasm has widened since then, particularly among the young. Where once he saw hostility in their eyes, Walsh says he now sees something worse: indifference.
"Basically they're saying, 'What you're offering, we don't find meaningful."'
Europe used to be called "Catholic Europe." But if declining membership, plummeting church attendance and shrinking vocations are measures, Roman Catholicism -- indeed, Christianity -- is headed toward collapse across the continent.
The feeling pervading church circles is that "something important has died, or is in a terminal state," said the Rev. Michael Paul Gallagher, a theologian at Rome's Jesuit seminary, Collegio Romano.
A new pope's charge
The crisis that lies just beyond the Vatican's big bronze doors is arguably the gravest facing Pope Benedict XVI. But how to shore up the church's dissipating base of 280 million baptized Catholics in more than two dozen countries -- without bowing to Europe's postmodern culture -- is a conundrum that seems to have even the pontiff baffled.
In his first year, he has called for a return to worship and better training in the faith for youth. He also has pinned some hope for renewal on the small ecclesial movements he promotes; intensely conservative and often lay-led, groups such as Focolare and Regnum Christi devote themselves to special causes -- the poor, the preservation of traditional families -- and demand utter commitment, even vows, from their members.
Yet Benedict has made it clear that a grand plan eludes him.
"Secularism and de-Christianization are gaining ground ... and the influence of Catholic ethics and morals is in constant decline," he told German bishops late last summer.
"What can we do?" he asked. "I do not know."
Some analysts say there is more at stake than one continent, that the church's European troubles may portend its future in North America. Benedict himself is sounding that alarm.
"In the United States, too, the Christian heritage is decaying at an incessant pace," he warns in a forthcoming book previewed in the Catholic magazine New Things.
The European trends that Benedict has inherited were evident in the 1960s and dramatically visible through the pontificate of John Paul II. Between 1975 and 2000, Catholic baptisms and weddings -- two linchpin rituals -- were down 34 and 41 percent, respectively.
A low birthrate among whites has helped drive the numbers. The population that has traditionally stocked the pews is not replacing itself.
Demographics are only part, and surely the easier part, of the explanation for the Catholic Church's difficulties. Far knottier is a historic attitude shift away from the institutional faiths that held sway over culture and politics for more than a millennium.
For a blatant sign, look no further than the European Union's unratified constitution. Over the Vatican's vehement objections, the document makes no mention at all of the continent's Judeo-Christian heritage.
Among the 25 member nations, many of those long considered devoutly Catholic have legalized divorce, abortion and euthanasia. The Vatican claimed a victory last June when Italians heeded its call to boycott a referendum on loosening restrictions on artificial insemination and embryonic research. The elation was short-lived: Two weeks later, Spain ignored the church's protests and became the third European country to recognize gay marriage, following Belgium and the Netherlands.
In April, Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern promised that same-sex "civil partnerships" would be legalized there.
Outrage would have been the predictable reaction from Irish prelates. After all, the church had vetted the 1937 constitution, requiring the government to protect the institution of marriage; it had kept contraceptives out of bedrooms until 1979 and divorce illegal until 1997.
Instead, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin gave a cautious blessing to the idea of legal rights for all kinds of caring, dependent relationships, not just gay. He called it the "Christian way."
His friend, Bishop Walsh, has publicly urged Rome to open itself to such profound change.
"If the church in Europe is to be turned around," he said, it must examine why so many people "find it impossible to believe or follow a particular teaching. Divorce and remarriage, the role of women -- there's nothing that should be closed to questioning."
The best course, he said in an interview at his residence near Limerick, is the "compromise of Christ," who was "always reaching out to the excluded."
Walsh appears to be whistling into a chill Vatican wind.
The Rev. John Paul Wauck, a professor at the Vatican's Pontifical University of Santa Cruz in Rome and spokesman for the conservative group Opus Dei, said in an interview that there should be no "drastic reformulation of Catholic doctrine to engage a dying generation of agnostic, childless Europeans."
Theirs, he said, is "a mind-set rushing headlong toward demographic extinction."
But are young Europeans actually turning away from God? Or is it institutional religion they're rejecting?
Surveys suggest the latter.
A 2002 poll of 18-to-29-year-old Christians in Western and Eastern Europe found they believed in God, spirituality and life after death even more than their age cohort had 20 years before. But fewer followed institutional churches or attended services, preferring to make their spiritual journeys outside the church.
Riders react
The train from Dublin to Limerick has a clanky, old-fashioned feel.
Its smudged windows look out on a countryside of dairy farms and brightly painted villages. The abundance of stone crosses and steeples attests to the days when the very air of Ireland was Catholic.
This once was a pious, peasant nation devoted to the church, if not also thoroughly intimidated by it. Break the rules about Sunday Mass or meatless Fridays, or entertain impure thoughts, and you were in a state of mortal sin until you got down on your knees and confessed.
It was this Irish Catholicism, rigorous and authoritarian, that provided the model for the hardy immigrant church that rooted in the United States in the 19th century.
The Catholics of Ireland, though, had more than the fear of damnation to keep them on the narrow path. For much of the last century, the Irish Republic's constitution accorded a "special position" to the Roman Catholic Church, giving it extraordinary influence over almost every detail of civic life.
Today, to hear riders interviewed at random on the Dublin-Limerick train, the church's hold never has been more tenuous.
"I consider myself a practicing Catholic," said Louise Barry, 31, a mother of one and a homemaker who attends Mass weekly. "I just don't feel I could live without a safety net."
Yet, she added, "the whole institution of the church is wrong," especially its ban on married priests. "Men of that age, not involved in family life, telling you how to live," Barry said, and shook her head.
Seamus Brady, a 26-year-old supermarket manager, was on his way home to Limerick from a visit to his parents in County Longford. Religious observance is something "you see more in the rural areas," he said.
"I go [to Mass] regularly enough. It's something you're brought up with. ... You just go with the flow."
Sitting nearby was Aisling Keane, 27, project manager for an environmental group and, lately, a practicing Buddhist.
"I'm certainly liking the whole concept of Zen," she said. "No rules. No regulations. ... You could say I'm more drawn to the spiritual side of things than to religion."
Hasn't abandoned faith
Frank Stafford, a 24-year-old actor, said he was leaning toward Eastern religions, having concluded that "the Catholic religion is far from the truth."
He has not, however, abandoned the faith passed along to him by his devout mother, who sent him to Catholic grammar school and Jesuit high school.
"I can still go to Mass and take out what I want," he said. "It still has meaning. I believe in God, Jesus and Mary. But not Jesus the son of God. I think we're all sons of God. I see him as a holy man. A prophet."
The train they were riding had embarked from an archdiocese staggered in recent years by claims of child molestation by Dublin priests. In March, after an internal investigation, Archbishop Martin announced that 102 clerics were suspected of abusing more than 350 children since the 1940s. Having already paid the equivalent of $7 million to settle cases, he said, the archdiocese would have to begin selling off property.
At the end of the rail ride was Limerick, where a clerical order that had been a presence since 1241 was about to disappear.
Unable to attract enough new priests, the Franciscans decided last year that they would not assign any more religious to Ireland's third-largest city.
A typical Sunday at the downtown Franciscan Church near the Shannon River wharves drew 50 worshippers, nearly all gray-haired. The Gospel reading was the story of the prodigal son.
"We pray for all those who have abandoned the faith," said the 92-year-old priest who led the Mass. "May we help them see our love, and God's love, for them."
Young people turn out for family weddings, funerals and baptisms but aren't very likely to show up otherwise, observed the Rev. Ralph Lawless -- at a mere 68 years old, one of the more juniors of the Franciscans left there.
"There's been a great rejection of the institution," he said. "It's spirituality they want now."