c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and a sociologist at the University of Chicago National Opinion Research Center. Check out his home page at http://www.agreeley.com or contact him via e-mail at agreel(at)aol.com.)

DUBLIN _ A measure of how deeply troubled the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland is today is the rapid and dramatic reversal of the Irish attitude towards priests.

Not so long ago _ say five or 10 years at the most _ the priest was the most respected person on this island. While people may have complained about him behind his back, he was almost always treated the respect due to a feudal noble. In a way he was just that, the acknowledged leader of community resistance to foreign oppression.

Such respect has always struck me as being very different from the Irish American attitude towards their priests.

Those days, it seemed to me there was more than a little servility in the Irish respect for the clergy and not as much of the”kidding around”on which both clergy and laity in the United States have often flourished. I asked myself then whether there might not be resentment lurking under the respect, resentment which, if curtain were ever pulled back, would be terrible to behold.

Well, the sexual abuse scandals in Ireland have pulled back that curtain.

Priests are given the cold shoulder now in Dublin. In the old days you would check into a hotel and be greeted with a happy smile. Now they glare at you. Hardly a novel or a play or a story in this era of enormous creativity does not feature a sexually abusing priest. Some of the best priest-scholars, artists and spiritual writers in Ireland do not publicly acknowledge they are priests even though they continue in the active ministry.

Vocations have fallen so low that Ireland, for the first time, is faced with a priest shortage. Five seminaries are being closed and the seminary of the Archdiocese of Dublin had no new applicants this year.

To change the metaphor, the pedophile crisis was the fuse igniting the tinderbox of lay resentment of the clergy. The priests and the bishops had run the country for a long time but the increasingly well-educated lay people no longer were willing to accept clerical dictation.

Though church attendance rates in Ireland are still the highest in the world, attendance has fallen rapidly, especially among the young. There are still many Catholics in this country who are loyal to the church and to the clergy, but the young and the better educated are, if not resentful, simply indifferent.”They tried to deny us sexual pleasure,”a woman told me,”and they covered up their own, especially when they were exploiting children.” Clericalism in Ireland was perhaps necessary until the founding of the Irish state in the early 1920s. The people had few other leaders.

But it would have been better if the clergy and the hierarchy had discreetly slipped into the background of public life during the last 40 years.

They did no such thing. No one ever gives up power willingly. Now they discover that many of the people have simply taken power from them.

This may be a passing phase in Ireland. If the present generation tends to be indifferent, another generation may discover the Catholic heritage is too much part of their lives to give up. Yet these are bad times.

The mediocre leadership of the Irish Church, shaped by cronyism and the malign influence of a couple of papal nuncios, is utterly incapable of responding to this crisis, save by falling back on the solemn prestige and pompous prerogatives of the past. That makes a bad situation worse.

It is not so much that they lack intelligence as imagination _ a terrible failing in this country where imagination flourishes. They can’t imagine why people are so angry at pedophilia and their efforts to cover-up the scandals. They can’t imagine why the laity would want to free themselves from clerical oppression.

Nor can they imagine why marital sex is so important the laity will no longer let the clergy control their sexual lives. So they blame the rebellion of their own people on materialism, secularism and the new prosperity of Ireland.

And they can’t imagine why they look like hypocrites when they preach reconciliation as a theme for the millennium and prevent exiled Bishop Eamon Casey _ who has more imagination than all of them put together _ from returning to Ireland, and when they preach forgiveness but do not forgive the bishop for having fathered a son a quarter century ago.

Irish Catholicism may survive the present crisis, but it will have to do so without any help from its leaders.

DEA END GREELEY