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We Must Take Responsibility For What We Believe

With the return of the Eucharistic Congress to Dublin, it seems timely to look afresh at the nature of religious faith – and to stop pretending to be what we are not.

Niall Stokes, 15 Jun 2012

Like most of their friends and neighbours, my parents attended the Eucharistic Congress as children in Dublin, in 1932. I was born into a Roman Catholic family. I was baptised and brought up in the Catholic tradition. For a long time, growing up, I assumed that the religious teaching being handed down to me was the ineluctable, unbreakable truth. I had no reason to doubt it. It was what we were told and we trusted those who were telling us.

At every turn, in Ireland at the time, the assumption that the Catholic way was the only way was reinforced. There was widespread intolerance towards Jews. Protestants of whatever stripe were regarded as oddballs, representative to one degree or another of our old – and now disdained – colonial masters. The likes of Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses, if they surfaced here at all, were treated in a deeply hostile and discriminatory way.

Muslims barely registered, except as the historical enemy of Christians in the time of the crusades, campaigns which were presented as thoroughly righteous, just and admirable endeavours, embarked upon to vanquish heathens, and to spread the word of God and the authority of his representatives on Earth. Hindus were, well, they were bearded weirdos in Tin Tin books, presumably insignificant in their number and their impact on the world. And communists – they were the worst, busy going about the business of persecuting Christians. No-one seemed to remember that Christians had done their fair share of persecuting in their time. Atheists didn’t exist.

The 26 counties were almost entirely Roman Catholic. And those at the helm of the Catholic offensive here were determined to deepen their hold at every opportunity, ruling that mixed marriages involving a Catholic were only permissible if the other non-Catholic party agreed to convert. The aim, as far as possible, was to turn the Republic of Ireland into a completely Catholic society. Such an ambition would have been seen as entirely legitimate, not just by the hierarchy but by their allies in the machinery of State. This, after all, was a Catholic country.



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