When is a catholic not a ‘real’ catholic?

I’m not sure when the 2016 Census results will be available but no doubt they will make interesting reading. Not least the percentages indicating religious affiliation. In the last census (2011), much to the disappointment of those who campaigned to minimise the over-all Catholic percentage, 84% ticked the Catholic box.
This time around a similar campaign was launched and with the head-wind generated by the 62% vote in favour of same-sex marriage in 2015, the expectation was that the 84%  Catholic figure would be significantly lower this time around. Let’s wait and see.
This time again columnists in The Irish Times (IT) were leading lights in the campaign, justifying it on the grounds that if the Catholic population was seen to have diminished, the argument for alternative (for example, Educate Together) schools will have been enhanced.
Róisín Ingle, for example, wrote that only real Catholics should describe themselves as Catholics in the census. If you don’t go to Mass or say the Rosary or go to Confession regularly, she argued, then you’re not a Catholic so you should write ‘No religion’ on the census form. Even if you were a ‘cultural Catholic’, Róisín helpfully explained, in other words even if Catholicism is ‘a system you were born into’ and may still use ‘to commemorate important rituals around marriage, birth and death’ you shouldn’t tick the Catholic box because, well, you’re not a real Catholic. Or as Róisín’s colleague, Donald Clarke, argued in the same edition ‘those no longer sincerely adhering to Catholicism should stop bearing false witness’ by claiming to be Catholic on the census form.
That Catholics who no longer go to Mass or Confession are no longer ‘Catholics’ in the eyes of the IT will be news to thousands and thousands of people (among them many Irish Times readers) who, I imagine, will feel more than a tad insulted by this casual disenfranchisement. Or at least they would if a pope, bishop or priest said it. Imagine the outrage that would provoke in the letters page of the IT.
Usually this rigid definition of what constitutes a Catholic – this dismissal of what some call ‘a la carte Catholicism’ – comes not from agnostic or atheistic sources but from very conservative, ultra-traditional Catholics who are impatient with what they regard as any perceived diminution in Catholicism. Usually liberal media like the IT tend to be more amenable to those who fail to reach the ideal, apart obviously from Catholics, for whom a new and worrying intolerance is developing.
Coincidentally, as I was reading the IT columnists pontificating on who in their judgement is or is not a Catholic, I was also reading Bishop Willie Walsh’s recent book, No Crusader. In discussing the God question, he wrote: ‘There is a continuum from the totally convinced believer and the totally convinced non-believer and I suggest that the number of people at either end of that scale is quite small. The vast majority of us are somewhere in between the extremes and we move at least a little along that scale at different times in life’.
With all due respect to Róisín and Donald, I think Willie has nailed it here. The truth is that the extreme positions represented by both ultra-conservative Catholics and IT columnists are not representative of the reality of Catholic life and don’t do justice to the twists and turns that life’s experience brings. Most of us, including Pope Francis, are somewhere in between.
The history of the Catholic Church is full of people who keep narrowing the pegs of the tent of Catholicism, and those who keep widening them, because a lived Catholicism, despite what the extremists on either side would say, is often much less than everything.
It may be news to Donald Clarke that the blanket of Catholicism is spread much wider than the narrow definition that suits his ideological purposes and it may be news to Róisín Ingle that there are people who describe themselves as Catholics who never go to Mass or say the rosary and to dismiss them as ‘not Catholics’ is not just to adjudicate infallibly on their status or perversely patronise them but effectively to insult them.
If I were to accuse Róisín of, say, moral confusion in some of the values she represents in her column it could justifiably be said that I was guilty of patronising and insulting her. And that would be true. (Who am I to judge? as Pope Francis famously asked in a different context). I have no right to sit in judgement on her beliefs or to slot them into handy pre-packaged disposal units.
But likewise she has no right to dismiss the lived experience of thousands and thousands of Irish people (and IT readers) who despite the fact that they are uncomfortable with aspects of Catholicism are not prepared to jettison a religion, a spirituality and a culture on the say-so of a journalist who makes no apology for her ideological stance.
I often wonder why the IT seems gloriously unaware of a bias that’s so obvious in its militant espousal of particular religious issues, an example of what Baroness Nuala O’Loan recently described in Boston College as the ‘virulent anti-Catholicism’ of the Irish media. What kind of parallel universe does the IT inhabit that a policy of aggressive hostility to Catholicism is condoned and presumably encouraged? At a time of decreasing sales why does the IT seemingly strive to alienate a considerable constituency of its readers?
As I say, the census results in terms of religious affiliation – and how they are interpreted – will make interesting reading. Last time around when the Catholic box produced an unexpected 84%, the IT greeted the news with a stunned silence. This time there may be more worthwhile fodder. But a word of advice to Róisín and Donald, this time leave the religion to Patsy McGarry.