In a 2003 article for the Irish Times, Father Vincent Twomey, a retired professor of moral theology at St. Patrick's College who studied with Pope Benedict himself at a postgraduate program in Germany, wrote, "Irish writers in the early part of the 20th century ... sensed that something was seriously wrong with 'traditional Irish Catholicism'. They saw it as narrow-minded, anti-intellectual and rigorist on morality. They were right."
In the 1960s, cultural influences also came into play -- television for instance. Irish state television, RTE, began broadcasting in 1961. Later in that decade, Oliver Flanagan, a well-known and outspoken politician, stated that "there was no sex in Ireland before television." The cultural revolutions of the second half of the 20th century hit Ireland just as hard as they did every other Western country, and so began Ireland's culture wars, known as Ireland's "moral civil war" and fought between younger liberal elements and the Catholic Church over contraceptives, divorce, and abortion, among other social issues.
Ireland's younger and more-educated Catholics began to assert independence from Rome's teaching on sexuality, particularly following Pope Paul VI's "Humanae Vitae" encyclical in 1968, which banned all artificial means of contraception. Many Irish Catholic women ignored "Humanae Vitae." They took contraceptive pills and found that the heavens didn't fall. Doctors got around Irish law, often with the tacit approval of priests, by prescribing the pill as a regulator for the menstrual cycle rather than as a contraceptive.
In 1979, contraception finally became legally available in Ireland, but only to married couples and on prescription. It was 1992 before contraceptives became freely available to everyone. That same year, coincidentally, the church had its first major sex scandal when it was revealed that the bishop of Galway, Eamonn Casey, had a 17-year-old son; a favorite T-shirt at the time featured a condom and the caption, "Just in Casey."
Divorce was also an extremely pivotal issue, not becoming legal until 1995. Abortion remains banned in Ireland despite referendums in 1983, 1992, and 2002. Although opinion poll after opinion poll over recent years has indicated a great majority now favor legalizing it, Ireland's politicians run scared from yet another bitter and divisive abortion referendum campaign.
With Irish society largely lost to it, the church's final frontier may be the primary-school system, of which it controls 92 percent. But now, the child sex abuse scandals, along with substantial immigration into Ireland over the past 10 years, have significantly increased pressure toward more pluralist control of primary education, something which -- to the surprise of many -- the Catholic bishops now say they favor. Archbishop Martin even called the Catholic control of schools a "historical hangover that doesn't reflect the realities of the times and is, in addition, in many ways detrimental to the possibility of maintaining a true Catholic identity in Catholic schools." If this is the case, it seems the last great battle of Ireland's moral civil wars -- that over control of education -- may be avoided.
And the Catholic Church in Ireland will continue its retreat from a position of unquestioned dominance in society for more than a century and a half, to a more humble role on its margins. "In the painful solitude of the desert, the church must learn how to return to its fundamental mission," Archbishop Martin has said. Some might suggest that is exactly where it belongs.
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