THE
20 March 1976 The international Catholic weekly 25p
TABLET IRISH SUPPLEMENT: articles by Louis McRedmond • Roderick Goldsworthy Jack White • John A. Murphy • Enda McDonagh Reviews: The Catalpa bow: John Pilcher Cabinet indiscretions: Douglas Woodruff Fr Tom Corbishley: a tribute by Edward Yarnold
The religion of the Irish Last weekend the body of a man was found in Belfast, one more victim of sectarian murder, in circumstances which were unusual. The violence which had been inflicted upon him before his death was such as to render him unrecognisable. It might be a parable summing up the notimpossible fate of Northern Ireland. Already the injuries sustained by civil life, the influence on the young of an atmosphere of violence, the hardening effect of hate, have disfigured a people. Those who attacked the unknown citizen with such ferocity are indeed in a very small minority but, if there is no spirit of resistance to such atrocity in the mass of the people, what is done to one man is done to all. We must moreover face the fact that violent sectarian confrontations between Christians are almost non-existent in any part of the world except in this one corner of the British Isles. We, who pride ourselves on being a tolerant people, seem to stand helpless in face of this paradox. For the present all political recipes seem to have failed, but reconciliation may still go forward by other means and the understanding of religious attitudes and responsibilities is one of these.
that might escape a resident steeped in the city’s particular atmosphere. In the same way the only non-Catholic contributor to this issue recounts how a young Protestant friend coming from County Cork, recently attended a congress where almost all the other delegates of her Church were from Northern Ireland. Although united in the same Church, they found themselves “gazing at one another in bewilderment across a kind of psychological ha-ha.” The shock of first encounter can be more enlightening than years of familiarity.
In recent years we have adopted the practice of producing a special number devoted to Ireland within the octave of St Patrick’s Day. These special issues give an opportunity for self-scrutiny and self-discovery. They endeavour to get to the roots of character and the reasons for conflict, and generally to foster all that goes to the making of a community. In this particular issue we have asked our writers to consider one aspect or another of the religion of the Irish, something so binding in some areas and so divisive in others. Our only non-Irish contributor deals with the latter aspect: as an occasional visitor to Belfast he could take a fresh look at sectarian confrontation there in a way
No consideration of the religion of the Irish would be complete without reference to clericalism and its opposite, so characteristic of the immediate past. They seem now to be losing their peculiar influence but there is a danger of their leaving a vacuum when they eventually succumb to outside influences. Professor Murphy’s article in this issue is instructive on the subject. If the exchange of views and experience through the mass media and other means of communication constitute a threat to the identity of the Irish as they merge with the western world, it is also providing an opportunity for them: making it possible for their particular genius to emerge from its narrow, self-centred preoccupation and to have its say in this wider scene. How relevant this message could be is to be seen in the contribution by Fr Enda McDonagh. He shows how mistaken is the view that morality is almost exclusively concerned with sex. He insists that moral concepts and criteria should be seen as important in every aspect of life. In this way, although this number has concentrated on one small corner of the world, and mainly on its religious aspect, the lessons to be learnt from it are relevant to all who have the sense to realise that “ all arguments are ultimately theological.”
