In four sessions from 1962-1965 the bishops of the global Catholic church met in Rome to 'update' our church and help it to speak more effectively to the modern world.  It was by far the most important event for Catholics in the twentieth century, and its theology is deeply incorporated into the Catholic Catechism, and church canon law, today.

For over four centuries, since the protestant Reformation of the 1500s, our church had been on the defensive against modern developments such as belief in intellectual and religious freedom, secularisation and the separation of church and state.  This reaction against modernity had climaxed in the reign of Pope Pius IX (1846-78), who had condemned a host of modern 'errors', including freedom of religion and democracy, in 1864.  He had then persuaded a majority of the church's bishops to define the doctrine of papal infallibility in 1870 at Vatican I. 

Under Pius X (1903-14), this trend continued in a condemnation of 'modernism', a supposed conspiracy by some Catholic intellectuals to overthrow traditional Catholic teaching by replacing it with 'modern' ideas.  Although historians are now generally agreed that no such conspiracy ever existed, the mindset that believed in it created in Rome an atmosphere of hostility towards any kind of intellectual originality, as well as a mood of ecclesiastical pessimism about 'the modern world' generally. 

Pius X also advocated a deeply clericalist church of two orders - clergy and laity.  The essential function of the former was, he believed, to lead, and of the latter to allow themselves to be led.  (See Tom Doyle, Communicating with Bishops.)

Most of these attitudes persisted into the reign of Pope Pius XII (1939-58), making life difficult for theologians who believed that key modern values such as liberty and equality had originated in the Gospels - and who also realised that clericalism was scripturally suspect and a barrier to the spiritual development of the laity.

Pope John XXIII (1958-63) interrupted this era of clericalism, papal suspicion and pessimism and called Vatican II to 'open the windows' and 'update' the church.  The bishops who assembled in Rome in 1962 soon showed that they were mostly in tune with this new optimism.  Two notable exceptions, however, were Irish 'heavyweights' - Bishop Michael Brown of Galway and Archbishop John Charles McQuaid of Dublin.

Vatican II produced in all 16 different documents.  Its most important achievements were:

• to redefine the church as the whole 'people of God';

• to make the central liturgy of the Mass a participative experience for all, e.g. by allowing the people to hear it, and to respond, in their own vernacular language;

• to emphasise the equality in dignity of all the baptized;

• to stress the principle of the 'collegiality' of bishops in the governing of the church;

• to initiate an era of 'reaching out' in friendship to other Christians and other faiths;

• to declare firm support for the principle of religious freedom.

Lay people were also challenged by the council to 'engage' with modern culture, and to 'consecrate the world to God' by answering the call to holiness made by Christ to all Christians.

Taken together these documents were a charter for a far less clericalised Catholic church in Ireland.  'Engagement' with modern culture clearly did not mean surrender to it, but neither did it mean total condemnation.  We were being called to grow up spiritually and intellectually, and to undertake a new adult role - one that was absolutely necessary if we were to overcome the negative aspects of secularism.

However, on his return to Ireland from the Council, Archbishop McQuaid declared that nothing had happened there that need disturb the 'tranquillity' of the Christian lives of Ireland's Catholics.  Famous for believing that 'docility' was a necessary attribute of the loyal lay Catholic (in tune with the clericalism of Pius X), and highly suspicious of the new theological currents given expression at the Council, McQuaid believed that the current apparent strength of the Irish church was proof that it simply didn't need any of this 'updating'. 

That profound mistake is the true origin of the present Catholic crisis in Ireland.  Irish clericalism maintained the organisational stagnation and the 'docility' that left Irish Catholic children and their families vulnerable to the manipulation of clerical paedophiles, and with no final recourse for vindication, justice and reparation other than the agencies of the secular state.  

This was a charter for the even more rapid advance of secularism in Ireland.  

So followed the Irish Catholic catastrophe that became also a media catastrophe for the Irish church leadership from 1994.  Failure to grasp the opportunity for reform presented by Vatican II meant that the Irish church had become increasingly dysfunctional, especially after the election of the deeply clericalist Pope John Paul II in 1978.  This led to the appointment over two decades of too many bishops whose most marked characteristic was unquestioning clericalism and conformity rather than ability, energy or theological competence.

However, the longer it was postponed the more obvious became the need for the Irish Church to grasp the opportunity provided by Vatican II for radical renewal.  That need is now overwhelming, and is being forced upon us anyway by the abandonment by younger generations of any interest in, let alone any inclination to join, the unaccountable clerical system as presently constituted.   
 

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