There has been a resurgence of the religious right in the United States. Could see a similar resurgence of Catholic fundamentalism in Ireland.
A 140-unit apartment complex is to be built on the site of the Bessborough Mother and Baby home, even though the grounds have not been fully exhumed. 900 women and children died there, in circumstances that are still not fully known. In other words, it is probably a crime scene. Yet none of the leaders of the Catholic Church have been held responsible.
Knowledge of child abuse and the horrors of the Mother and Babies home drove many from the Catholic Church. In Dublin, for example, just 14% of people now attend Mass regularly on Sundays. But could there be a revival?
Enter Tom Monaghan, the billionaire founder of Domino’s Pizza. Monaghan is linked to several anti-choice groups and established a private Catholic university in Florida, known as Ave Maria University. He recently bought the Cistercian monastery of Mount Melleray in Waterford to establish a similar campus there. The aim is to turn out graduates who can be at the vanguard of a conservative Catholic movement.
Religious beliefs do not always imply a conservative outlook or a progressive stance. The Protestant Reformation, for example, challenged feudal control, even though its founder later denounced the Peasants’ Revolt in Germany. Today, however, the Protestantism of the DUP is linked to all things reactionary. Similarly, the Iranian sociologist, Ali Sharati, built up a huge following by emphasising the social justice aspect of Islam. Yet in Saudi Arabia, another version of Islam is used to bolster conservative rulers.
In Ireland, the ethos of the Catholic Church has changed over time. During the heyday of the McQuaid-De Valera partnership, it helped forge a deeply conservative ‘Catholic state for a Catholic people.’ As the Irish elite adapted to a mild form of liberalism, the Bishops became more muted. Trócaire boxes appeared in every school, suggesting a concern about global poverty and refugees. Those further left embraced a ‘liberation theology’ that supported resistance movements in Latin America.
There were limits, though. God, it was claimed, had designed a ‘natural order’ to which human beings had to fit in. Our ability to change nature through science or to remake a society without hierarchies was always viewed suspiciously. Nevertheless, the material conditions in which a religion found itself led to different outlooks. It was not simply the text of holy books that determined its direction. Moreover, elites often emphasised different elements within religious beliefs than the poor.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the US, where the billionaire class have drawn on fundamentalist Catholicism, alongside a host of other traditions, to forge a ‘blood and soil’ ideology to replace their previous support for neoliberalism. Where once they spoke to a mythical individual in the marketplace who abstained from all collective organisations, Trumpism plays on themes of the family, an ‘organic’ community with few people of colour, a ‘natural order’ of American power and military prowess. A key element in this ‘post-Liberal ideology’ derives from right-wing Catholicism. Let’s take two examples.
‘Gender ideology’
‘Gender ideology’ is a term that Trump deploys regularly to attack not just transgender people but anyone who challenges the ‘natural’ differences between men and women. Men are born to lead and provide – women to be available and care. The term originated from Vatican opposition to the term ‘gender’ at UN conferences in the 1990s because it suggested that roles were socially constructed rather than natural. A pamphlet by the Catholic journalist, Dale O’Leary, Gender: the Deconstruction of Women, was widely read by Vatican officials, including Joseph Ratzinger, later known as Pope Benedict. Soon, the attacks on ‘gender ideology’ began to replace the mantra about ‘the culture of death’ which was the term the Vatican used when opposing abortion.
The attack on ‘gender ideology’ was a way of disciplining liberal Catholics who were outraged by the paedophile scandals. But ’genderism’ has become a catch-all target that, rhetorically, is linked to the global elite. In this way, as Agnieszka Graff and Elzbieta Korolczuk suggest, it functions in a similar way to earlier antisemitic themes within Catholicism. In the 1930s, the Bishops saw a conspiracy between worldwide Jewry and cosmopolitanism to undermine traditional families. This allowed them to conclude a deal with Mussolini, support Franco in Spain, back the Ustaše in Croatia and dissolve the German Catholic Centre Party at Hitler’s request. Underpinning this support for right-wing dictators was a latent hostility to Jewish people as ‘the killers of Christ’.
‘Liberalism’
A key figure in the modern American Catholic Right is Patrick Dineen, a Professor at Notre Dame, who was raised an Irish Catholic. Dinnen has written two key books, Why Liberalism has Failed and Regime Change: Towards a Post Liberal Future. Like other right-wing ideologues, he attacks the growing inequality and material insecurities that working people face today. But instead of blaming the billionaires whose class power has promoted greater inequality, he defines the problem as ´ human separation from and opposition to nature’. If only we returned to all-white local communities and proper family values, then all would be well. So he thunders against divorce, gay marriage, abortion and ‘deracination’.
In other words, his attack on liberalism does not critique it as a cover for the rich to accumulate wealth, but rather that the real problem is a breakdown of the moral order. “We have the freedom to marry, but fewer people wed. We have the freedom to have children, but birth rates are plummeting. We have the freedom to practice religion, but people abandon the faiths of their fathers and mothers,’ he writes. Like a good Catholic authoritarian, he has a deep distrust of the masses of people because they are easily led and fall prey to moral degeneracy. He advocates an ‘Aristopopulism’ where there is an ‘elite cadre skilled at directing and elevating popular resentments’ and at getting the people ‘to adopt a wider understanding of what constitutes their own good.’
Can such Catholic fundamentalism be imported back into Ireland, as Tom Monaghan might wish?
There are very few signs of it beyond the fact that Ireland’s tiny far right is often composed of people who lost the repeal referendum. When you describe abortion as ‘murder,’ you can move more easily into dismissing the democracy of the ‘murderers’. You can yearn for a strong leader and a return to a 1950s Ireland, but few will join you. Yet in a world where neoliberalism has devastated communities and reduced everything to the bottom line, there can be an abiding appeal to ‘natural gender roles’, particularly for young men.
The left should present a positive vision of freedom that links individual development to a society where there are neither class nor gender hierarchies. And it should do so in a way that can appeal to the many.
Kieran-Allen.com 