"The Best Catholics in the World" by Derek Scally

Possibly because of its notorious weather, Ireland has a plethora of bookstores, and it was a pleasure to visit as many as I could over three months late last year. That there are first class book outlets in the cities in the north—Dublin, Belfast—was no surprise. But as we moved south into more rural settings, I noticed that there was no slack in availability of the printed word. Even Valentia Island, jutting into the wild Atlantic with a population of 600 souls, had a busy second-hand bookstore in 2015, where I bought Dante’s Inferno on my only other visit to Ireland, for a Euro. The bookstore has since closed to make room for small tourist condominiums in the tiny village of Knightstown.
 
In one retail and used bookstore—in Galway, I believe—I was hunting around and came to an entire shelf entitled “Institutional Religious Abuse,” which gave me a mild jolt. I had always entertained the idea that Church abuse in Ireland and the United States ran on parallel tracks. However, in reading, conversation, and physical visits to cemeteries and sites, I came to appreciate that while the crimes of clerics are publicly acknowledged in Ireland, as they are [supposedly] in the United States, there is a major measure of collective shame and guilt unique to Ireland for a lengthy church abusive system of a different sort, the “Magdalene Girls Laundries.”
 
Before I continue, let me say that if you are looking for an insightful history of the last century of the Irish Catholic Church, you may find The Best Catholics in the World: The Irish, the Church and the End of a Special Relationship [2021] by Derek Scally. Scally is a major reporter and columnist for the Irish Times who had spent twenty years based in Germany. He returned to Ireland in the late 2010’s on a mission aptly described on Waterstone’s website. Waterstone’s, a relatively new [1982] chain book dealer with bookstores and cafes throughout England, Ireland, and Europe, summarizes Scally’s bestseller in this way:
 
When Dubliner Derek Scally goes to Christmas Eve Mass on a visit home from Berlin, he finds more memories than congregants in the church where he was once an altar server. Not for the first time, the collapse of the Catholic Church in Ireland brings to mind the fall of another powerful ideology - East German communism. While Germans are engaging earnestly with their past, Scally sees nothing comparable going on in his native land. So, he embarks on a quest to unravel the tight hold the Church had on the Irish.
 
He travels the length and breadth of Ireland and across Europe, going to Masses, novenas, shrines, and seminaries, talking to those who have abandoned the Church and those who have held on, to survivors and campaigners, to writers, historians, psychologists and many more. And he has probing and revealing encounters with Vatican officials, priests and religious along the way.
 
…With wit, wisdom and compassion Scally gives voice and definition to the murky and difficult questions that face a society coming to terms with its troubling past. It is both a lively personal odyssey and a resonant and gripping work of reporting that is a major contribution to the story of Ireland.
 
I posted this extended commentary from Waterstone because it states the heart of Scally’s thesis: that Ireland’s “healing” has a long way to go when contrasted with the recovery of other countries from national/cultural/religious scandal. In Germany’s case, where the author lived and worked for the Irish Times for twenty years, his impression was that twenty-first century Germans were not running away from their national history of shame, specifically Hitler and the Holocaust. In traveling to Nuremburg and other German cities a few years ago, I noticed many public plaques and markers at the former homes of entire Jewish families who were seized and shipped to the extermination camps.
 
I read The Best Catholics in the World with an eye toward similarities and differences in the ecclesiastical abuse scandals in Ireland and the United States. The similarities are easy enough to note—serial abusing priests shuffled from parish to parish by bishops concerned with diminished devotion to the Sacrament of Orders above all other considerations. Irish bishops were finally brought to some grudging concession of the corrupt priests and victimization of youth by the courage of laity, particularly adults in later life who came to understand the nature and the atrocities of what had happened to them in their youth.
 
But some intrepid youths did come forward to parents and local clergy, and in these cases the differences in culture become clearer. Pay close attention to Chapter 8, “The Fall of Sean Brady.” Scally describes “due process” for abused Irish minors in the 1970’s [pp. 100-114] who were typically denied parental/clerical/legal counsel in abuse interrogations before chancery investigators in secret interviews. The minor and his or her entire family were placed under an oath of secrecy with the threat of excommunication from the sacraments. The interrogatories for such investigations are bizarre, and Scally lists the typical church rubric. If, for example, a thirteen-year-old boy admitted to having ejaculated at any time in his life, including nocturnal emission, typically a bishop or representative ruled that the youngster enjoyed sex with men and was wont to invite them into such activities.
 
Scally’s Chapter 8 is of historical interest because the diocesan recorder in the three-cleric interrogation of fourteen-year-old Brendan Boland was Father Sean Brady. A quarter-century later, the same Father Brady was named Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of all of Ireland and received the Cardinal’s Red Hat. Given that Boland’s complaint had been dismissed in the 1970’s, the abuser continued in his ways for decades with dozens of minor victims until major investigations in this century uncovered Cardinal Brady’s failure to report the priest to civil authorities. Brady was forced to resign his clerical offices to Pope Francis in 2014.
 
To this point, it might be easy to conclude that Irish Catholics and American Catholics suffered the same pangs in the same way. We have horror stories of coverups, and of course our own disgraced Cardinal, Theodore McCarrick. But the roots of clerical abuse are different in the two countries. For starters, American Catholics make up the largest religious group in this country but only at 20% of the population, with ex-Catholics at 15%. We live in a nation where church and political governance is separate, and Catholics themselves are deeply divided about rites and practices, not to forget civil politics. I believe that in the 2024 U.S. Election the Catholic vote tended 60-40 toward Republican candidates and policies, give or take.
 
Ireland, by contrast, is Catholic to its core, bound by blood, history, persecution, tragedy, and creed. The most recent figures put the Catholic population at 69% with an additional 14% calling themselves ex-Catholics—which means that four of every five people living in Ireland today.
are or were in the Catholic tribe. How deeply engrained was Catholic identity in Ireland versus the United States, for example? Given the position of Irish Catholicism—which statistically was probably even higher in the 1970’s before the abuse scandal became public—Irish Church leaders enjoyed an autonomy of respect and authority far greater than we Americans live with here. One way to understand the difference between the two countries is to consider the authority and power bestowed by Catholic ordination.
 
The Irish Church strictly observed the central doctrine of the identity of the priest which in principle is still taught universally in religious education and seminaries: that ordination creates an “ontological” difference in a man that makes him different from all other human beings in the world. Only the priest can utter the sacred words that change the bread and wine at Mass into the Body and Blood of Christ, i.e., transubstantiation. Only an ordained male can utter the words that save a human from an eternity in hell. Catholic doctrine in Ireland was tightly reinforced by its uniform catechetics, notably a green-covered Catechism of the Catholic Church. [See Chapter 6, “The Little Green Book.”] The memorization of the “Green Book” was only gradually replaced by modern texts after Vatican II—newer trendy styles that the author has little use for. The old catechism remained something of the fallback authority and mindset on many issues related to the abuse crisis well into this century.
 
The visitation of priests to Irish homes were frequent, and occasions of pride and joy to the hosts, many of whom had priest chairs and/or a special place at the table for an ordained Catholic priest. It is not hard to put the pieces together: a unique man who spoke for God welcomed into the bosom of a family and trusted unquestionably. If the word “grooming” is running through your head, you are correct, and in the Irish culture the later sufferings of parents like the Bolands were multiplied by a misplaced guilt that they were unwitting co-conspirators of their children’s violation—and the fact that they were bound by oath to do nothing about their child’s plight. Parish priests, as a rule, were more socially engaged in Irish community life. I believe it was Cardinal Paul Cullen [1803-1878] who bragged that there was a Catholic Church within three miles of every Irishman.
 
I bring up Cardinal Cullen here because, as the leader of Ireland in the years after the potato famine and the elimination of the British penal codes against the Church, he ruled Catholic Ireland with an iron hand and instilled strict observance of Catholic life and morals. He supported Vatican I’s [1870] declaration of papal infallibility. From his time until 2000 Catholic practice reflected the late Victorian bias that repelled the morally weak from their place in church and public society—by segregating them from the view of “proper society.” Thus, a new avenue of institutional abuse arose, one that has captured international attention—literary, stage, and film—and continued uninterrupted till 1996 and remains contested as of this writing. [And, I should add, may become an issue with U.S. immigration law.] What, specifically, are we dealing with? Conspiracy between Church and State.
 
The literature on this form of abuse continues to grow under the generic title of “The Magdalene Laundries” [originally, “asylums’]. If the term is unfamiliar to you, Wikipedia’s lengthy entry on the laundries is an inexpensive place to start, for it provides a healthy list of books, TV specials, films, autobiographies, etc. I will provide a quite simple description of the laundries here, but Scally devotes several chapters, [Chapter 9, “Sex in a Cold Climate;” and Chapter 10, “The Necessary Lie,” among other citations.]
 
Going back to the 1700’s Protestants in England had residences and institutions for women of “loose morals,” as a means of keeping public sinners out of sight [and prurient interest?] of “Christian society.” We tend to jump to the conclusion that we are talking about prostitutes, but by the post-potato famine era in Ireland such institutions were more likely to contain young girls who had borne children out of wedlock, or children and teens with behavioral, intellectual, or domestic problems, including the deaths of both parents. By the twentieth century communities of religious women operated such institutions.
 
In 1923 the Republic of Ireland was established, and as a new government, it had no department equivalent to, for example, Florida’s Department of Children and Families. As a result, it turned to the largest existing private social ministry, religious orders. The Sisters of Mercy tend to be remembered as the main provider of domestic services, but there were several others as well who have been named in recent investigations. By the 1900’s such institutions had morphed into profitable laundries, attached to convents, which serviced much of Ireland’s middle class.
 
Who was remanded to these domiciles/sweat shops? There was no recognizable observance of the habeas corpus principle. Any minor who didn’t fit anywhere, in the judgment of any adult, could be housed/incarcerated. Scally cites numerous examples. Children who told their parish priests about problems at home would be remanded on the direction of the priest. Parents could dispatch a child at their judgment. And teenaged girls who became pregnant with a boyfriend—or worse, through incest—could be conveniently hidden away. Residents were contained by lock and key. Whether there were schooling, health, or other human services available to “residents” is hard to say, for two reasons. First, as of this writing, the records of operations have not been released by the three or four religious communities most deeply involved in this arrangement; and second, the Republic itself is enmeshed and is not eager to serve subpoenas to its business partners since 1923. Where liability is concerned, the state does not have exposure to priestly abuse claims, but it does in the laundries.
 
The author interviewed many Irish citizens who admitted they had some idea of these institutions but did not give much thought to the nature of these residences. Scally reports a cab driver telling him about a laundry he served: “They’re pregnant. That’s where their families hide them.” Apparently, the resident minors, mostly but not exclusively teenaged mothers, went to Mass on Sunday in their local parishes. Parishioners kept their own children away from these motley residents of the laundries who spent their time in factory work.
 
What happened to the babies born in the laundries? Investigative reporting undertaken in the 1990’s and beyond indicates that the infants were farmed out for adoption without the consent of the mother, with many of the newborns finding new parents in the United States, among other sites. There is a network of survivors online calling upon Ireland and the religious orders to unseal their records on the minors who passed through these institutions.
 
The story of the Magdalene laundries might never have reached the crescendo it did if in 1993 the Sisters of Mercy had not sold a parcel of land to a developer, who discovered 155 human remains—young women--on the former residential site. As I noted above, there is a considerable library of video and printed material on the laundries on the Wikipedia entry; my wife recommends the film Philomena.
 
Scally devotes the final chapters of his work to more pastoral, philosophical and sociological questions about the structure of Catholic life in Ireland and how scandals like the ones above can survive—even thrive—in the heavily Catholic milieu. In the final analysis he concludes that his native country is only beginning to acknowledge and heal. As one analyst observed to the author, the end of the Magdalene Laundries system did not come about because of public outcry, but because most families could afford clothes washers. Another explained to the author that the silence and collective guilt of Irish Catholics upon the revelations of the laundries was much different from the revelations of priestly abuse, because “everybody brought their nappies to the laundry outlets.”
 
MY PERSONAL TAKE
 
I recently returned from three months in Ireland, with two week stays in Dublin, Belfast, Donegal, Galway, Valentia Island, Kinsale, and Thomastown-Kilkenny. As a visitor from the United States, much of the material discussed in this entry is hardly of the conversation starter type for a pub visit in Galway’s Latin Quarter. However, we did have opportunities to attend Mass in multiple settings, on Sundays and, if lucky, during the week. [Few churches have daily Mass given the declining number of clergy, but an effort is made to have Mass on a Tuesday or a Thursday for example, sometimes in the evening.] Aside from Dublin and Galway, most priests cover multiple parishes. The typical weekend Mass is brief--thirty minutes--and there is little or no congregational singing, but the Mass experience is devout and the number of families was encouraging.
 
Scally, in the book’s title, refers to “the end of a special relationship” between the Irish and the Church. Is this due to multiple abuse scandals, or is there another factor to consider? It is safe to say that Irish Catholics, like those in other Western nations, do not fear the hierarchy as in the days of Cardinal Cullen, nor are they slaves to prescribed Catholic rules of life. I found interesting statistics; 91% of Irish polled disagree with the Church’s teaching on artificial contraception, Humanae Vitae, most recently issued in 1968 by Pope Paul VI. By contrast, 67% of American Catholics disagree with the same teaching. The scandals may have confirmed subterranean doubts about the “Little Green Book” order of things, but Ireland has been changing for quite a while.
 
Having examined at least thirty church bulletins collected from the trip, I noticed the same omissions as those from American bulletins: an absence of adult religious education programs and spiritual direction opportunities. Scally discusses the “kicky relevant” [my generation’s term] religious ed texts of the late 1960’s and beyond for young people with a barely concealed dismay. It is fair to say that Catholic adults sustain themselves with Mass—30% attend weekly, slightly better than United States Catholics—and private devotions to the Blessed Sacrament, Mary, and the saints. The churches are open all day.
 
One major difference between Ireland the United States: Every time you turn around in Ireland, you see stone ruins of medieval monasteries, churches, castles [13,000 of those], and homes. The Irish, for better and worse, have their long history in plain view. We, in the states, have the luxury of forgetting...and repeating our mistakes.