IS Cardinal Sean Brady right when he asserts that Ireland’s media are dominated by a secular outlook hostile to religion? He made his remarks during a speech the other day at the Humbert Summer School in Co Mayo, in the course of which he also criticised the European Union attitude to the Christian way of life.
The Cardinal, who is Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland said, “the claims and influence of secularism and relativism have gone largely unchallenged in Irish culture and media.
“It could be argued that they enjoy an uncritical acceptance which would never be afforded to religious faith.” Well, for starters, religious faith in Ireland did enjoy (and still does in certain quarters) “uncritical accep -tance” for a very long time. I grew up in that kind of uncritical culture where bishops and priests were deferred to right across the spectrum, not least by public representatives.
The Cardinal also speaks against the background of a culture which accorded a special and privileged place to religion, especially Catholicism. Up to the referendum of 1972, that special position was even buttressed by constitutional recognition.
Sub-section 2 of Article 44 of the Constitution read: “The State recognises the special position of the Holy Catholic Apostolic and Roman Church as the guardian of the Faith professed by the great majority of the citizens”. This was deleted, along with sub-section 3, as a result of the referendum. That, though, didn’t alter the reality, which is why at the time Cardinal Brady’s predecessor, Cardinal William Conway, declared that he wouldn’t “shed a tear” over the change.
Since independence the State has been happy to cede a large degree of control over education to the Church. And, at least up to the 1970s and the (reluctant) introduction of family planning legislation by the Lynch Government, legislation relating to sex reflected Catholic moral teaching.
In her 1999 book, The Politics of Sexual Morality in Ireland, Chrystel Hug made this pertinent observation: “The 1979 law will remain . . . the first in the socio-moral area to be detached at its basis from the teaching of the Catholic Church, in a process whereby the State will increasingly refuse to criminalise practices merely because they contravene the moral beliefs of the former”.
The media, much like society as a whole, were divided and often uneasy about the beginnings of a move away from a culture in which Catholic values were predominant.
What may really be irking the Cardinal is the undoubted fact that, at least since the news of the Bishop Casey-Annie Murphy affair burst on an unsuspecting public in May 1992, much of the media coverage of the Catholic Church has been negative, critical and, yes, occasionally hostile. But this is because the series of messes and scandals which the Church itself created justified much of this coverage.
It may also be irking the Cardinal that religion is losing its privileged status. This means that the institutions representing it, and the leaders of these institutions, can no longer automatically assume a right to privileged treatment.
For better or worse, the post-9/11 world is a world in which a debate has been raging (largely outside of Ireland) about the place of religion in the public forum and in public affairs.
As the author of a forthcoming book entitled Has God Logged Off? - The Quest for Meaning in the 21st Century, it will come as no surprise if I say that a sustained Irish contribution to that debate is long over-due. But more than bashing the media as “secular” and “hostile” is called for.
