The Pope in the rat pit
Peter Nichols
Rome Like Ireland now, the forecastle of the merchantman Rights of Man was a rat-pit of quarrels: 'But Billy came, and it was like a Catholic priest striking peace in an Irish shindy.' Billy Budd was a quieter fellow than is Wojtyla: no preacher, without pretensions and over-vulnerable in his innocence. But even a Pope runs the same risks of proving impotent before the force of violence, and John Paul H cannot be denied a claim to courage in deciding to become the first Pope to go to Ireland.
He is not going to Ulster, but that makes little difference. The island is one, as far as the Catholic Church is concerned. The hierarchy has a single national episcopal conference. You sense among Catholics in the North the complete identity they feel with the Irish nation as a whole. Wojtyla himself has talked of certain countries which are particularly Catholic, in the sense that their histories and their Catholicism are totally intermeshed. Poland is one, obviously. Ireland is another.
This mixture of religion and nkionality is the exact opposite historical experience to that of the United States, where the Pope will go after Ireland. The Americans have tried and die still trying to keep the state apart from all forms of institutionalised religion. The irony is that the Catholic Church in the United States was Irish in origin and was greatly reinforced by Polish immigrants as well. And American Catholics can genuinely be said to have gained from the strict division between Church and State which, to an Irishman or a Pole at home, would be unthinkable and, for most of them, wholly undesirable. The attachment of poor immigrants to their own Ch,urch helped them preserve a feeling of identity (the same is happening again with Spanish-speaking Catholic immigrants in America) which is probably the strongest reason why Catholicism in the United States has kept the loyalties of its working class.
The Irish who stayed at home not only make a happy distillation of Catholicism and the nation. They are the one country left in Europe which refuses to allow any political issue to break the ranks of Catholicism drawn up on one side and Protestantism on the other. This is the unique factor in the Ulster question. In all other countries in Western Europe, religion is no longer the principal dividing factor: politics is. In Ireland, the one-ness of the nation is one with Catholicism. Ulster's ties with the United Kingdom are Protestant ties. And the Catholic minority there feels repressed because it is Catholic. 'When we watched the Pope on television,' said an Irish bishop, 'we in the North felt we had much in common with Poland'.
Now that Billy has come, what can change? The Pope at the moment is perhaps the most idolised man in the world. Even the toughest-minded communist can hardly idolise Brezhnev. President Carter in the midst of his decline (he would probably be jogged off the face of Camp David by this athletic Pontiff) will have the terrible experience next week in Washington of receiving history's most popular Pope. This is an indication of what the Pope's statements during his Irish stay will weigh in terms of international opinion. Arguably he should never have gone to Ireland in the first place: not because of the Mountbatten murder, but because his very presence may set the rat-pit quarrelling even worse than before. It is astounding to hear how many Protestants in the North see the centre of their troubles as being Rome, not Dublin — which is abhorred simply as a local branch of the wicked Vatican, The old fashioned piety of Irish Catholics must appeal to the Pope. The Marian veneration, the conservatism, the caste of the priesthood are all close 'to his Polish ideal. His own diocese of Rome is stricken with terrorism. He made it quite clear, however, when he received the new Italian Ambas-, sador to the Holy See that he is also against a violent reaction to acts of terrorism. He would probably regard Northern Ireland as the classic case of mutual destructiveness. The Pope moreover is extremely nonchalant about his own personal safety, paying minimum attention to the requirements of security. But he has just been given an unexpected reminder of danger. Last Sunday in Milan Cathedral, Monsignor Macchi, who was private secretary to Pope Paul VI, revealed that the late Pope was in fact injured in the chest when an attempt to knife him failed in November 1970.
But the Pope feels that Christianity must be brought to bear on the tensions which turn an individual to violence. His reign of little less than a year has been based more than anything on the cause of human rights. He believes that it is the right of all human beings to have the space and the possibility for a full spiritual development, which means a whole series of things including re-distribution of income, housing, social justice, the freedom to practise religious faith. At the same time he can be totally intransigent on questions of discipline and faith. He has just reiterated in St Peter's Square that marriage is indissoluble: he appears to feel practically the same about membership of the priesthood, judging by his reluctance to allow priests who find they have no vocation to leave Holy Orders. He authorised the recent reminder to Catholics that they have to believe in Heaven and Hell and that Mary was assumed bodily into Heaven, The Irish will hardly argue with that. And they will no "doubt be happy enough when his extreme devotion to the Madonna is expressed once again when he visits the sanctuary of Knock. This is a hitherto little known place where the Madonna and two saints were said to have appeared on August 21, 1879 to about 20 people of the local parish. The account given was of a trio consisting of the Virgin, St Joseph and St John the Evangelist grouped around an altar on which stood a lamb.
Not only did the tradition grow of Knock as a centre for pilgrimages, with stories of miraculous cures for the sick: it was accorded in pious legend the extraordinary distinction of having been the place the Virgin chose to appear as a sign of divine approval for the way Irish Catholics kept to their faith throughout the centuries, despite the material and psychological pressures to which they were subjected. The Pope could hardly be paying greater respect towards the contribution of a colourful form of popular religion to Ireland's dramatic history. It is a sign of the times that the Pope's Marian peregrinations — Guadaloupe in Mexico, Czestochowa in Poland, the holy house at Loreto and now Knock— are taken as a matter of course. When Paul VI went to Fatima in May 1967 there was loud and widespread criticism from Catholics among others. Some of the criticism was political: Portugal was still a dictatorship then. Part of it was ecumenical: a fresh encouragement of Marian devotion was seen to be an obstacle to greater Christian unity. John Paul II is probably right in disregarding such Considerations, in Ireland as elsewhere. That means in effect that the Pope will have to rely more than anything on the strength of his own personality, if he is to make a constructive impact on the moral squalor of the Ulster problem. It will have to be said of him when he sets off from Ireland for America: 'not that he preached to them or said or did anything in particular. . but a virtue went out of him, sugaring the sour ones.' The tragedy of Budd was that his virtue was not sufficient because it fed the violence so alien to it.
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