COMMENTARY: Catholic Church Needs Luck of the Irish

February 25, 2009 COMMENTARY COMMENTARY: Catholic church needs luck of the Irish By Phyllis Zagano RNS-ZAGANO-COLUMN (UNDATED) Lent has barely begun and already retail stores are reminding us that we all can be Irish on March 17, when the Catholic Church celebrates St. Patrick, Ireland’s most storied saint. It doesn’t matter that he was really British. Legends and myths abound about Patrick, a 5th century bishop who probably could have driven the snakes out of Ireland if there were any there to begin with. One medieval legend says he looked west from a bluff near Limerick, Ireland and predicted the arrival of a miracle worker to help the local people. Sixteen centuries after Patrick promised someone to heal divisions and promote Christianity, a Milwaukee bishop has turned up to take over St. Patrick’s Cathedral on New York City’s Fifth Avenue. Long-rumored to succeed Cardinal Edward Egan, Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan will come from the west permanently in mid-April to take over the mega-archdiocese of New York So what? Dolan’s new job made little news beyond New York and Milwaukee. While Pope John Paul II may have thought New York was the capital of the world, it’s not because of who’s working in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. People just don’t care. Today the Catholic Church in the United States, like the church in Ireland, is foundering on seas roiling of sex abuse and fiduciary improprieties. Every proclamation that the problems are over disappears behind the swells of yet another lawsuit, yet another audit. Not all the raging currents of discontent are obvious. Most swirl just beneath the surface, as Catholics (mostly women, it would seem) increasingly dismiss religion as one more swollen and faltering business. People on both ends of St. Patrick’s vision complain quietly, privately. The honest hard- working clerics are dispirited by bad leadership and cover-ups that tar them equally with the guilty. The genuine, believing faithful are walking, ever so slowly, away from the saints, statues and sacraments that once defined their Catholicism. A major complaint is that the church is just another business, and the business analogy has roots on both sides of the divide. A young seminarian at Maynooth—Ireland’s last surviving seminary—said not long ago that the recession would be “good for business.” Did he hear what he said, as people’s jobs, savings and dreams continue to evaporate? When clerics and church members see the church as just another business, what began as a group of believers pledged to help one another 2,000 years ago is ready to implode. Meanwhile, the “spirituality” business is galloping along. “Spirituality” once strictly concerned personal and communal relation to the uncreated reality most people call God. It meant answering “who am I?” and “why am I here?” in religious terms. But “spirituality” is increasingly disconnected from religious belief and practice, and left to float disconnected in psychobabble ether. What’s left is the all-purpose self-help gravy that TV gurus ladle over self-involvement and self-pity—what Dolan recently called “therapeutic feel-good spirituality.” “Spirituality” is the catch word of the day, and it is highly competitive with traditional religions. The church in the U.S. is in trouble, and New Yorkers are a particularly tough crowd. You’d like to think that when St. Patrick promised Limerick help from “the green island in the west in the mouth of the sea” he also saw beyond, all the way to Wisconsin. Catholicism is a tough sell these days. Like the rest of us, Dolan has a hard road ahead. But St. Patrick did say from the west “shall come the candle of God’s household.” Let’s wish Tim Dolan, and all of us, the luck o’ the Irish. (Phyllis Zagano is a Fulbright Fellow in Religious Studies at Mary Immaculate College, Limerick, Ireland. She also holds a research appointment at Hofstra University.) .

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