Given the plethora of scandals surrounding clerical sex abuse in Ireland, stretching right back to the foundation of the State, is it not time we came to terms with the Catholic Church in Ireland? Shouldn’t we overcome the appalling legacy of this institution?
This sense of overcoming is perhaps best expressed by the German phrase ‘Geschichte Bewältigung’, literally translated as ‘history management’. It’s the process that post-war Germany, guilt-ridden after the Second World War, undertook to rid themselves of the stain of Nazism.
Much like this denazification, the ‘decatholication’ of Ireland would involve facing up to the fact that not since the Celtic church in the Middle Ages has there been an education system in Ireland that’s been independent from Rome. Why do we still depend on a foreign state to run our education system? Are we incapable of teaching ourselves?
The first matter to consider, then, is the complete removal of the Catholic Church from Irish education, followed by the confiscation of Church property by the State to pay for the crimes committed by that institution.
Once we have removed the nefarious influence of the church, we could then consider the possibility of teaching our children how to think. Education should be about creating conditions for the formation of independent, critical thought, inciting and encouraging our children to think about the world around them.
That is why we need to teach them philosophy, as well as the history of religion. The latter will not be for the feint-hearted; it’s not easy to cover the 2,000 years of murder, rape, robbery, superstition and outright terror committed since God decided to ‘save’ us. Only once that’s covered might such a course explain the positive aspects to Christianity, assuming there are any.
When I was a student at university, I remember asking one of my lecturers why philosophy was not a part of the Leaving Cert curriculum. In France, for instance, the study of philosophy is compulsory in that country’s equivalent of the Leaving Cert. The lecturer told me that he and a group of professors had set up a committee years ago to have philosophy introduced into Irish schools, but the idea was rejected outright by the clerical authorities at Maynooth.
Since independence, the Catholic Church has functioned as the national ‘think-thank’. Their job was to run all philosophy departments in universities where students would be forced to study St Thomas and St Augustine and other pious obscurantists. Those who studied philosophy in Ireland became advocates for the Catholic Church, merely posing as philosophers.
Irish philosophy departments were deeply concerned that the minds of their undergraduates might be polluted with the dangerous writings of Marx, Nietzsche, Sartre and other ‘heathens’.
And so, Ireland continued to live in the Middle Ages, writers, artists and intellectuals fled to the modern salons of Paris and London, and people grew up thinking that statues could move, priests could perform magic and critical thinking meant denouncing ‘heathens’.
Yet in spite of the Catholic Church, Ireland does have its own philosophical tradition. The ninth century philosopher John Scotus Eriugena had an enormous influence on the history of European thought, with Hegel hailing him as one of history’s greatest thinkers. Seán O Tuathalán, better known as John Toland, is another neglected Irish thinker who had a significant impact on European Enlightenment philosophy. The French philosopher Baron d’Holbach was a voracious reader of the Irish polymath; the philosopher Denis Diderot once remarked that a “bomb had exploded” in d’Holbach’s house, in reference to his delirious enthusiasm upon reading the wise words of Toland.
In the aftermath of Catholic tyranny, we Irish need to revive our philosophical tradition. If we are to have any future as a nation, we will have to take responsibility for our existence by questioning it. This cannot be done within the framework of religion. We must consign religion to the dustbin of history and take up the task of thinking.
It is time to conceive, fabricate and then detonate a national intellectual bomb!
