A Church Traumatised.

Michael Paul Gallagher, the Jesuit priest, died recently. Those of my vintage remember Michael Paul fondly as an author of books on faith and contemporary culture, notably his book, Help my Unbelief, which became a kind of bible for a generation of Catholics.
I remember him once lecturing on how the pace of change can suddenly escalate. He took the example of French-Canada where the level of practice among Catholics plummeted in a relatively short time. It could happen in Ireland too, he warned. And none of us believed him. But it did.
We weren’t ready for it then and we’re still not ready for it, even though it has happened on our watch. Probably because we can’t quite get our heads around it.
When Michael Paul was talking about the possibility of this Armageddon, the most recent surveys then indicated that 92% of Catholics attended Mass every weekend. As in French Canada, the decline in Ireland was swift and quite extraordinary.
Without rehearsing again all that has happened in the last two decades, we experienced a steep decline in practice, vocations virtually disappearing, the loss of trust and authority and all the rest of it. And the reasons for it happening: the child abuse scandals, the way they were handled, the inevitable decline as the levels of prosperity and secularism increased, and so on. The result was that, within the space of a few decades, the Catholic Church in Ireland contracted and, in a sense, imploded.
We couldn’t believe it . We couldn’t get our heads around the fact that an institution at the heart of Irish life, apparently so secure in its world and so confident in the support of its people, could become a marginal and often scorned presence on the periphery of Irish society.
We were, and I believe still are, traumatised by the experience. Which, I think, accounts for the lack of energy, the low morale, the collapse of hope evident particularly among the clergy. We don’t quite know where we are or how we got here and have no sense of what we might do to re-build spirit or confidence. All the classic components of trauma.
An equivalent, though possibly laboured, example is the American experience of the war in Vietnam. A generation of 18-somethings were conscripted to fight in south-easy Asia. With huge fanfare and high hopes they were sent off to Vietnam. But as the war there was reported in more graphic detail than any war ever before, media reports soon suggested that American soldiers, usually lauded in the American press for their sacrifices, were responsible for atrocities like My Lai.
By the end of the war returning veterans were shunned by a society that had distanced itself from the war and the soldiers returning from the front found themselves alienated, isolated, abandoned and sometimes reviled and shunned because American society had decided to take a different tack.
It wasn’t unusual for veterans to be labelled psychopaths and called names like ‘baby-killer’.
The new diagnostic term in psychology – post traumatic stress disorder – was easily applied to their predicament, not just because of the horrors they experienced at war but the hostile reception they received at home.
Allowing for the limitations of the comparison, I would argue that Catholics, and particularly priests and bishops, are at present caught in the depths of a communal trauma. Once admired for their selflessness, now in a different Ireland priests are often reviled, scorned, sometimes pitied as society turns its back on them, blaming them, attacking them, even (in the wake of the child abuse scandals) calling them names in the public street.
Social psychologists describe three fundamental beliefs of Western culture, three assumptions we erect as a scaffolding for our lives. One is that the world is ‘benevolent’. (We get up in the morning expecting the best). A second is that the world is meaningful, controllable and predictable. (If we eat properly, work hard, do the right things, everything will be fine). And a third is that we tend to view ourselves in a positive light. (We assume we are worthy, decent people.)
Trauma occurs when those three ideas and the scaffolding they support come tumbling down. The pre-existing assumed beliefs suddenly don’t fit anymore and we are stunned, disillusioned, at odds with ourselves, not knowing what to do or, even if we did, how to go about doing it. In other words, we’re traumatised.
In his book, ‘What Doesn’t Kill Us, a guide to overcoming adversity and moving forward’, Professor Stephen Joseph writes that scientific surveys show that there are three things we need to do to deal with trauma: (i) name what the reality is; (ii) accept what has happened; and (iii) take responsibility for what we need to do.
In other words, in psychology-speak, we need to resolve the tension in our lives between the assumptions we used to make and the new information we have to deal with. We have to ‘accommodate’ a different reality and strive towards ‘assimilating’ it, if we are to move forward.
If we accept that Catholic priests and bishops have been traumatised by the events of recent years – and I would suggest that all the evidence points towards that – what we’re confronted with is not just something as ordinary as ‘denial’ but a deep-seated condition that demands of us that we name, accept and engage with the new realities.
To date, we’ve given no indication of an ability to do what needs to be done: name the reality, accept it and respond to it. As a Church we keep minimising the reality, looking back over our shoulders at a perceived golden age, hoping against hope that the road will soon turn, harking back to the merits of a collapsed scaffolding or organising pious outings in an effort to convince ourselves that nothing has really changed.
Worst of all, those who should be helping us to accept and deal with the realities of life and of religion in Ireland today don’t seem to have any idea about what we need to do or how to go about it – apart from waffling incoherently about faith and secularism.
We need prophets, like Michael Paul Gallagher, to help us realise and accept where we are if we are even to begin to take responsibility for the choices we have to make. Trauma, it really is.