Brendan Hoban: We’re richer for religion, so why abandon it ?           

Western People. 10.9.2024

A quarter of a century ago, at the turn of the millennium, the poet Aidan Mathews wrote a stark piece in the Irish Times, lamenting how our religious sense was disappearing:

‘Something in my tradition is dying and something is being born and it’s hard at times to tell between them . . .You look for a priest’s number in the directory and find his home is now listed in the business section. Five hundred girls pour out of a playground and not one of them answers to the name Mary. At a crowded Requiem Mass, it’s only the altar-server with Down’s Syndrome who knows the rubrics and the responses, what to say, when to stand, how to guide the cultural Christians through the last three mission territories of the 20th century: the rituals of hatch, match and dispatch, of baptisms, brides and burials.’

It was a perceptive and prophetic piece of writing. Almost twenty-five years on, the outline of this brave, new world is becoming clearer by the day. The twentieth century is almost a dim and distant memory; the middle years of that century almost like the Middle Ages; the degree of change such that what seemed endemic to our culture even a few decades ago is vanishing by the day.

Nowhere is this clearer than with religion. A couple getting married and organising their wedding Mass never heard of the Prayers of the Faithful; a sponsor at a baptism is taken aback when asked to profess his faith in God; a child preparing for First Communion looks around her local church on her first visit to a big, strange building since her baptism; teenagers look askance at pictures of the Sacred Heart or Miraculous Medals as if they were viewing Egyptian artefacts on an outing to a museum. A whole religious culture has almost disappeared without trace.

The decline of religious practice and the consequent shuffling of religion to the margins of life means that we are coming to a point where an increasingly ignorant (in the literal sense) populace hasn’t the knowledge or the vocabulary to understand or even sometimes respect the subtleties of a religious faith embedded in our culture.

The problem is not new. Art students in England, for example, sometimes approach an appreciation of religious art without any background in religion. For instance, the famous Francisco de Zurbaran’s painting, The Bound Lamb, shows a lamb with his feet tied and obviously awaiting slaughter. The innocent lamb, of course, is a metaphor for the sufferings of Christ, the Lamb of God. But if you haven’t the language and the meaning to understand content and context, then you end up viewing the picture with the whole point of it lost. The same is true of drama, literature and language, all almost invariably in Ireland steeped in religious themes and sometimes needing a religious primer to work out complicated ideas like Absolution or Anointing.

I remember as a child asking my father, God rest him, why he lifted his hat every time he met a priest. He explained that it wasn’t so much a courtesy to the priest ­– though that was part of it – as much as the possibility that the priest might be carrying the Blessed Sacrament. The gesture, often captured in old photographs of the 1940s and 1950s, is now interpreted as an indication not of religious faith in the Blessed Sacrament but of excessive and sanctimonious deferral to the clergy. (That was there too, of course.)

Part of the problem we have now is that the cultural underpinning of a religious tradition is disappearing and, to a greater part, has already disappeared. An indication of this is the substitution of secular for religious emblems. As religious faith and an understanding of religion diminishes, secular traditions seem to mean more.

Like saying it with flowers as distinct from placing it in the context of faith. Wreaths are replacing Mass cards at funeral times; the red rose thrown into the grave is more significant than holy water; the tribute after Communion more important than a sermon on resurrection. We may be doing the right things but more and more we have less and less idea of what they actually mean.

The legacy of this loss is that life and language lose some of their depth. If we lack insight, understanding and vocabulary to dig under the surface much of the richness of life will pass us by. We can begin to function at the level of, well, function. The practical becomes more important than the profound, and wonder and mystery are relegated to themes for the cinema.

(And, as is becoming progressively clearer, part of the problem too is that the child abuse scandals in the Catholic Church and the collapse of its moral leadership are supplying those on the margins of the Church with permission – whatever their reservations – to jettison the religious enterprise entirely.)

Religion, like art, is a way of engaging with life at a fundamental level and religion in particular is encrusted with serious questions about ourselves, where we came from and who we are. Unless we have some perspective, some depth, some knowledge of where the avenues are that open us up to possibility then we end up ‘having a bit of crack’ ­– or should that now be ‘craic’ (cocaine) – ­ to help deflect from the important questions.

Aidan Mathews is more right now than he was twenty-five years ago. ‘Something in my tradition is dying and something is being born’ and we are all the poorer for it. Give it a few more years and we literally won’t know what we’re missing.