Abstract
A whole generation of young people in Ireland have grown up through various scandals in the Catholic Church, which began in the early 1990s, and have little or no collective memory of a scandal-free church. This has played a key role in shaping how new birth cohorts perceive and think about Irish Catholicism. At the same time, there has been a long-term liberalization of attitudes and behaviors among Irish people that goes back to the time before the scandals, which has also eroded people’s attachments to the church. This, in turn, has overlapped with a sustained period of macro-economic change, which has made contemporary Ireland one of the world’s most prosperous countries. Together, these changes have contributed to the sundering of the automatic association between Irishness and Catholicism—and that earned it the label “Holy Catholic Ireland”—and the emergence of irreligion on a scale that is relatively new in the Irish experience.
Against this background, anthropologist Hugh Turpin’s beautifully written Unholy Catholic Ireland: Religious Hypocrisy, Secular Morality, and Irish Irreligion, combining the analytical rigor of a social scientist with the narrative skills of a novelist, investigates religious-secular dynamics in contemporary Ireland. Based on a mixed-methods research design comprising social surveys, interviews, participation observation, content analysis of secular and religious media, and virtual analysis, Turpin reveals the varieties of Irish people’s relationships to Catholicism. Perhaps unusually for an anthropological study, this book draws on quantitative data from surveys, enriching the ethnographic detail. One admirable feature of the book is how the author frequently begins a chapter with an engaging and well-chosen vignette to open up some broader issues. To take just one example, a quote from a speech by an Irish archbishop about family religious practices provides a jumping-off point for engaging with debates about religious socialization.
Here one can find how ex-Catholics, devout Catholics, and cultural Catholics think about their relationship to Catholicism. In this account, perhaps ex-Catholics and cultural Catholics loom the largest, as the devout represent a relatively small segment of the population. Unholy Catholic Ireland views cultural Catholicism as a kind of empty shell onto which a wide range of meanings can be attached. As the author puts it, “its breezy flexibility helps it to continually adapt and endure” (p. 201). It is instrumentalized to secure public goods such as school places; it is leveraged for social participation, such as first communions; it is a “carryover” of failed religious socialization; it is linked to breeding and inheritance. The commonality that cuts across these “types” is that cultural Catholicism is a low-voltage version of Catholicism and is perhaps the most common self-identification today. This is both Irish Catholicism’s strength and its weakness. On the one hand, it means that there is a relatively large pool or audience with at least some connection to Catholicism and who may be receptive in some way to it. On the other hand, it means that most ordinary people have only a weak attachment to the church that might not take very much to sunder altogether.
Unholy Catholic Ireland reveals the stories of cultural Catholics, including more extreme versions, as well as those of ex-Catholics. What is noteworthy about these narratives is how much ordinary people seem to have imbibed a “church as oppressor” storyline in how they think about it, which seems to crowd out a more nuanced view of the church’s historic role in society. For example, one might consider here the church’s role in global development via the charity Trócaire or in serving the needy in society, such as the homeless, activities that also overlapped with the scandals. Perhaps this reflects the role of media discourses in shaping ordinary people’s perceptions of social institutions, including the church, and the dominance of scandal-related stories within this.
Regarding ex-Catholics, Turpin shows that people in this category, having parted company with their former Catholic identities and feeling energized by the scandals, still feel alienated by the perceived performative nature of cultural Catholicism, revealing an interaction effect between the book’s different types of Catholics. There is also an organized aspect of this category, reflected in the origins and development of an increasingly vocal Atheist Ireland.
The stories of the other categories—for example, devout Catholics—are also examined. Although not numerically common, devout Catholics work hard to hold on to their faith without bypassing the impact of the church’s past. As with the other categories, there is a good deal of within-group heterogeneity. For example, some committed lay people appeal to the idea of the laity compensating for the church. As one lay activist put it, “We’re going to stay in and fight, you know, and not leave it to the bishops, to try and challenge the whole clericalism of the Church and the hierarchy and all that sort of thing” (p. 245). Others cleave to the idea of Catholicism as a kind of diffuse meaning system rooted in one’s inheritance. Even so, moral activism among devout young Catholics in other national contexts suggests that the “quiet perseverance” (p. 252) of this category can be accompanied by more publicly engaged versions as well.
Where might Irish religious-secular dynamics go in the future? On this question, Unholy Catholic Ireland speculates about different irreligion imaginaries, represented in the trajectories of other majority-religion societies such as Denmark and Catholic-majority societies such as Quebec, Poland, and Spain. Here the reflections of German social theorist Jürgen Habermas on post-secular societies could also help to provide a frame of reference for answering this important question. This would imply a continued role for religious actors and discourses in shaping secular realities. The question of the relative importance of the various factors implicated in explaining eroding Catholic influence—that is, institutional scandal, economic change, and attitudinal liberalization—is also an important one.
Unholy Catholic Ireland brings a fresh and rich analysis to the study of Irish Catholicism, especially in the wake of decades of scandals. As such, it will appeal to students of Catholicism but especially, and more generally, those interested in better understanding religious change. And its methodological approach—combining the “deep” insight of ethnographic work with the “wide” analysis of social surveys—will serve as a guidepost for social scientists studying secularizing processes in other societies.