The Pope's message to England
Patrick Marnham
Dublin People were still trying to leave Phoenix Park six hours after the Pope had gone to Drogheda. Many of those at Drogheda did not get back to Belfast till four in the morning; the traffic was jammed the whole way. The fact that one hundred people tumbled into a septic tank in their efforts to get away from Drogheda did not make major news. At Knock the Pope had to leave when it got dark, and hundreds of thousands who had been waiting for 16 hours never saw him. One burly middleaged woman who was hurrying back after Phoenix Park to collect her small children for the evening motorcade (she crossed Dublin four times on foot that day) said in a grating voice that he was, 'heavenly'. She meant that he was from heaven.
To be in Ireland for the Pope's visit was an extraordinary experience. No Church, say the Irish, has been more faithful to Rome. The Pope's presence in Ireland was something no one ever expected, but it was also a moment that the history of 1500 years had been leading to. Almost everyone in the Country was drawn into the mood of excited and unselfish happiness. For thousands of People at the back of the big gatherings the Most they could see was a tiny white figure on the distant altar. That was all they could glimpse, and that was enough. It is hard to think of any cause or person, not even the monarchy, not even a football match, which would unite people in Britain in this way. 8tit then we have never had to wait 1500 Years for anyone. In a way the arrival was the supreme Moment of the visit. By arriving Pope John Paul had accomplished almost everything. The last time a Pope of equivalent age and vigour was elected was in the midnineteenth century. Pius IX left a mark on the Church which is still visible. He declared the doctrine of infallibility, proclaimed the cl,.ogma of the Immaculate Conception, published the Syllabus and generally declared war on the way the world was going. He also started the tradition whereby the Pope Withdrew into the Vatican. It is this century self-imprisonment which gives the modh° Papal visit such power. Pope ,John Paul "as said that he intends to travel every year, a,,nd every time he does so he spends some of me accumulated capital of isolation. But Perhaps he can afford to, he generates his Nn form of excitement. , It was at the airport that journalists covermg the visit began to realise the limitations °Af the event from their ',pint of view, rangements made for the press, like all wiae arrangements of the visit, were excellent -„Ithin a highly-restrictive framework. here was no press conference and there were no interviews. On the plane from Rome one American reporter seized an opportunity to ask the Pope a 'real' question (about the Provos), and received the famous silent smile in reply. 'You must understand,' the Pope told another reporter 'that I know nothing of politics'. Karol Wojtyla knew a vast amount about politics, but he no longer exists in public. Instead we were given the papal texts, which contained some fine phrases. At the airport there was a splendid quotation from St Patrick which could have been intended as a defence of the new, highly-visible papal style. 'Christ before me, Christ behind me . . . Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me, Christ in the mouth of every man who speaks of me.'
Throughout the visit these phrases lit up his sermons. At Phoenix Park, standing in the bright sunshine facing one-and-aquarter million people, more than one third of the country's population, he opened by saying, 'Like St Patrick I too have heard the voice of the Irish calling to me', thereby ensuring that he would instantly hear it again. Later he referred to the penal days and the 'hunted priests' and said, 'Small matter where the Mass was offered, for the Irish it was always the Mass that mattered'; further tumultuous applause. At this early stage of his visit not even the police could be counted on to maintain a professional detachment. When the helicopter arrived in Phoenix Park lines of them rushed towards it, followed by the crowd they were supposed to be holding back. It was also at Phoenix Park that the Pope gave the first hint of his personal doctrinal conservatism. He reaffirmed the traditional Catholic definition of the real presence in the Eucharist, seeming to go out of his way to exclude the possibility of progressive false distinctions. He referred to 'the real presence in the fullest sense: the substantial presence by which the whole and complete Christ, God and Man, is present. The Eucharist, in the Mass and outside the Mass, is the body and blood ofJesus Christ.' Very little for Dr Coggan there. On the following day at the Mass for Youth in Galway there was another hint of this conservatism. Outlining the temptations of the age he said: 'You will hear people tell you that your religious practices are hopelessly out of date.. . Even many religious persons will adopt such attitudes.' This seemed to echo his sermon in Mexico when he warned the assembled priests and nuns not to suppose that political activity was a substitute for prayer. But a Pope concerned about a growing 'religious atheism' has less to trouble him in Ireland than in Mexico. The Irish Church which claims a 90 percent following among the 3.8 million Catholic population, is regarded as one of the most conservative in the world.
In Britain when one talks of the politics of the papal visit one refers simply to the North, but in Ireland the political implications are wider. In the week before the Pope arrived, a number of meetings were held in Dublin by left-wing groups. There were speakers from the Irish Transport and General Workers Union, the Irish Labour Party and numerous feminist organisations which have been pressing for a political programme that is opposed by the Church. Three of the most important issues are divorce which does not exist in Ireland, secular education, which is almost unknown, and the introduction of a state contraception service which is starting on a limited basis. The writer Tony Cronin outlined opposition to the visit by saying that the Irish hierarchy intends to use the popular enthusiasm to regain some of the political ground it has recently lost. He expected a revival of pietism and religious authoritarianism. One of those who shared his views said he found the scenes in Phoenix Park 'frightening'. To him they were a demonstration of the political power that the Church can wield over any party which aspires to democratic election: 'Endorse our teaching if you want us to endorse a vote for you'. Popular pressure, particularly for divorce and secular education, may remain minimal but the left-wing programme does have universal political importance when it comes to the question of the North. The (Anglican) Church of Ireland would regard much of it as essential to the chances of any reconciliation between Catholic and Protestant, and the question of direct Catholic power is the most obvious of the Northern Protestant objections to a united Ireland. The Dublin weekly, Hibernia, stated that the most effective papal contribution to the Northern issue would be to steer the Irish Catholic Church towards a greater respect for individual freedom. Had Pope John Paul wished to do that there were two suitable opportunities on his programme.
In the event he took neither of them. His address at a meeting with leaders of Protestant Churches referred to the internal renewal of the Catholic Church following the Second Vatican Council. But it avoided specific suggestions for the Irish ecumenical movement. And his address to the assembled Catholic bishops was equally unstartling. Anyone looking for signs of movement from the Catholic Church in Ireland would be disappointed.
Indeed one part of the papal visit, the celebrations in Knock which the Pope described as the goal of his journey, was positively discouraging to Protestant ecumenists. Pope John Paul's devotion to the Holy Virgin is well-known, but his visit tb Knock was of more than private importance. As with both Lourdes and Fatima, the Church's decision to extend full approval to Knock is part of a broad policy. The growth of the shrine at Lourdes was linked with nineteenth-century ultramontanism, the last flicker of the temporal power of the papacy. Fatima was part of a . post-second World war devotional revival. This latest re-emphasis on the direct experience of the divine through visions, chimes well with the current insistence on the importance of the laity in the Church. Following the Pope's visit, Knock has been designated the spiritual centre of the Irish Church. The 'shrine of Our Lady at Knock' has now become the Basilica of Our Lady, Queen of Ireland. For devout Catholics that should have no direct political importance, indeed it might be considered sacreligious to infer any, but it is a point that would take some explaining in Belfast. The distinction between the temporal encouragement offered to the starving peasants of County Mayo in 1 879 by the appearance of the Holy Virgin among them, and the spiritual importance of the event, may escape most Northern Protestants. They would find confirmation of their fears in the shrine's official leaflet which invites pilgrims to visit the monument to 'the local patriot dead (of 1798). A British Catholic also finds the mcmory of the penal days and the hunted priests inspiring, and it comes as a shock to realise that for the Irish the Mass Rocks — lonely meeting places on the heath — are just like the famine, symbols of an historic English persecution. For the English the religious martyrs of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were something they did to each other, something they shared. But for the Irish the persecution was something that came from outside, an important part of their nationalism, just as Catholicism is for Poles today. A reminder that England has always instinctively rejected Irish nationalism is Provided by the way in which the Pope's message has been understood as just another call for goodwill and common decency. The most dramatic passage in the Drogheda sermon was the direct appeal to 'all men and women engaged in violence', some of whom were sitting before him, lost in the enormous Northern crowd. 'In language of passionate pleading', he said, 'On 'my knees I beg you to turn away from the paths of violence'. Those moving words were heavily-publicised and naturally so, but it might have been more apt if the British press had devoted more space to that part of the message which was actually intended for the British government. Earlier in his address the Pope had said: 'I want to mention here in the first place: justice. . The moral law, guardian of human rights, Protector of the dignity of man, cannot be set aside by any person or group, or by the State itself, for any cause, not even for security or in the interests of law and order. The law of God stands in judgment over all reasons of State.' If the members of the P. rovisional IRA are supposed to be brooding over such injunctions as 'nobody may ever call murder by any other name than murder', then the authorities in the North Should be reminded that they too have been rebuked.
The passage quoted above is the nearest Pope John Paul came to approving Cardinal O'Fiaghls protest about the conditions in H Block at Long Kesh. The Cardinal's protest has been widely ridiculed in Britain, and it can only be justified on the ground that the demand of the prisoners in H Block for political status is valid. The British government says that it will not give political status to murderers, and that it should be reserved for those who are imprisoned for their opinions rather than for brutal crimes. No doubt there is a distinction; but it is surely idle to pretend, as We increasingly do, that the Provisional IR.A.are just a bunch of criminals. They are criminals but they are also a political movement, and they should be dealt with as such, That is why the mere deploring of 'violence' is so inadequate. Everyone deplores violence, but who will take the steps which ould end it? Politicians like Enoch Powell and Conor Cruise O'Brien (or Conor Cruise O'Brit as he is now termed in his native land), tell us that violence can be ended by improved military techniques. And that even to talk of a united Ireland is to encourage the Provos and to prolong the crisis. Any student of Irish history will find suchdefensive stubbornness ominously familiar, One could just as well argue that to abandon consideration of a united Ireland ould be to increase the influence of the Provos, since it would give them a monopoly of that goal. There have been ten years of violence in Northern Ireland. And influential men are now advising us that the best solution is essentially military. A political movement is to. be treated as though it were simply a gang, and the Provisional IRA is to be paid the compliment of being able to monopolise certain options of policy merely because it is advocating them.
A start might be made on more hopeful lines if the British press were once again to report events in Northern Ireland for what they are; that is as political events which, however criminal they may also be, require a political solution. But the chances do not seem very good. The full implications of papal messages are not easy to accept, as his .`special message' to journalists showed. This was delivered just before midnight on the day of his arrival. Due to a hitch in the timetable press-men who heard it had been confined for nearly four hours in one room of a Dominican convent without chairs, food or water, to say nothing of more stimulating fluids. But when the Pope eventually appeared, they burst out singing and clapping, just like the crowds in the streets. The message the Pope left with his 'friends of the communications media' was .. . 'Love your neighbour as yourself'.
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