FINIS:

CHRISTIANITY AND THE IRISH VOTE FOR ABORTION RIGHTS

Jerry Harkins

On May 25, 2018 Irish voters overturned a constitutional ban on abortion by a landslide of two to one. They had already repealed the criminalization of contraception and approved a law that legalized gay marriage.  It is widely expected that they will soon repeal laws that give control of virtually all state-supported elementary schools to the church.  But the abortion vote was transformative.  Simply stated, it put an end to the church’s influence in this most Catholic of all countries.  Rejecting the most prominent teaching of the church since the Council of Trent, it also marked the end of the Christian Era in Europe.

The Irish did not vote for abortion.  No one actually likes terminating a pregnancy, even a doomed one, because everyone knows it is always a tragedy, always the result of an agonizing decision.  Every sane person knows that, to the extent state and church have any standing in the matter, it is limited to finding ways to reduce unwanted pregnancies.  At the same time, every sane person also knows that unwanted pregnancies do occur in the real world.  No one has ever needed a coterie of politicians or celibate male hierarchs with a cultish understanding of biology to express opinions they ascribe to God without the benefit of either reason or evidence.  No God ever proclaimed from Mount Sinai, "Thou shalt not abort a fetus!"

Over the course of history, the church has shown itself to be a despicable, criminal custodian of sexual morality and the Irish government has been an enabling partner.  The most recent example of this collaboration began to come to light about 20 years ago. For 231 years, at the behest of the hierarchy, Irish law regarded an unwed mother as a criminal and turned her and her child over to the tender mercies of the Magdalene Laundry system where she and her baby were subjected to slave labor and the sexual depravity of the clergy. The income generated from this demonic practice became a mainstay of the church’s income, much of which was forwarded to Rome.  What the Irish were voting for on May 25 was freedom from the self-serving mythologies of the Vatican and the Irish government.  To comprehend the unlimited reach of their influence and the basis of their despotic power, it is necessary first to understand those mythologies which are similar but not identical.

Ireland began to emerge from nearly a thousand years of brutal British colonialism in 1922.  One of the leaders of this process was Éamon de Valera, an aloof Irish-American introvert who became the principal architect of what he imagined to be the Irish ethos.  He had played a peripheral role in the 1916 Easter Uprising and surrendered to the British who tried him and dozens of other people for treason.  He was convicted and sentenced to death but the British did not follow through because he was actually an American citizen and Britain was desperately trying to persuade the United States to enter World War I.  As it turned out, Britain, America and Ireland would have been a lot better off had the Brits shot him.  For 54 years beginning in 1919, he was the dominant player in Irish politics as President, Prime Minister (Taoiseach) or Leader of the Opposition.  He thought of Ireland as a bucolic nation of small tenant farmers, contented peasants serene in the bosom of holy mother the church. His creed was “One faith, one church, one baptism and after that the fires of hell.”  He tried to create a nation intellectually and morally isolated from the corrupt modern world which led him to maintain Ireland’s neutrality in the face of Nazi genocide.  Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945 and the Germans surrendered eight days later.  In between, de Valera visited the German ambassador in Dublin to express his sympathy.  His major fault was that he was against change which he considered the work of the devil.  Like so many other twentieth century dictators, he was highly skilled at manipulating the levers of power.

The church promoted the same medieval vision of Irish society and backed it by its authority to condemn souls to eternal damnation.  The God marketed by the hierarchs warned, “…wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it.  But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.”  Since the middle ages, Catholics had been taught to yearn and pray for salvation as the whole purpose of earthly life and its trials and that the bishops exclusively held the keys to the Kingdom.  Irish Catholics prayed mainly to the only womanly figure the church admitted to the divine pantheon as the Mediatrix of All Graces, the virgin uniquely conceived without sin or, in the words of the thirteenth century prayer Salve Regina, “O clement, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary.”  Perhaps she was but very few attained the goal.  Christianity was a casino and, to keep its subjects playing the lottery, the church preached unquestioning obedience in the here and now.  As always, the odds were stacked against you but you can’t win it if you’re not in it.

In Ireland, the blended mythology translated into a bizarre system of sexual governance promulgated by the church and enforced by the state.  For generations, condoms were not sold in Ireland and, later, if you bought a morning after abortion pill online, the penalty could be life imprisonment followed by damnation.  No dancing in public.  No men and women present at the same beach.  No girls riding bicycles.  No female sports of any kind.  No civil service jobs for women after marriage.  No female ownership of property.  No female drinking in public.  No denying sex to a husband for any reason.  Such misogyny was not, of course, unique to Christianity or to Ireland.  Elsewhere, however, the theory supporting the misogyny involved (more or less) protecting the so-called weaker sex.  In Ireland (and everywhere else), the church taught that women are the cause of all evil.  As a concomitant, it taught that suffering is good for the soul and it would excommunicate a doctor who tried to relieve pain of any kind.  If the doctor was actually a midwife, the penalty could be death. In the Christian world, the theory was that God invented the pain of childbirth to punish women.  He invented sexual attraction to insure that they would bear many children and experience much pain.  Except for one woman, Mary the sinless, sexless Christ bearer.

Even many Irish women bought into these absurdities.  The laundries were, after all, operated by religious sisters, among them, the ironically named Mercy Sisters, Sisters of Our Lady of Charity, Sisters of Charity and Good Shepherd Sisters.  But the direction came from and the profits went to the bishops.

Ireland is presently going through its own Truth and Reconciliation process modeled in part on the pioneering work of the South African post-apartheid commission chaired by Archbishop Tutu.  One of the problems for the Irish, however, is that there is simply no religious figure with Tutu's credibility or compassion.  Another is that the Irish church was the central perpetrator of the evils it is supposedly investigating and it remains largely in denial.  There is hope.  Ireland’s strengths going forward – its economic success, increasing diversity and highly educated work force – are also among the forces of modernization that are driving the worldwide marginalization of the church and the accountability of the government.  But the mythology is strong.

The church’s dogmatic mythology holds that humans are born in a state of original sin, that the sin forfeited any claim people may have had to salvation and that the blame for this is attributable to Eve who “tempted” Adam.  The “son” of God had to suffer and die to “redeem” humanity and make it possible (although extremely difficult and unlikely) for individual humans to avoid the flames of hell.  None of this has any basis in fact or even in any rational understanding of the Bible but it is promulgated vigorously because it is the basis of the absolute power the hierarchy feels entitled to.  Mythology is useful for many social purposes, prominent among them for the assertion and projection of power.  Communities need a power structure but Lord Acton was right, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”  If kings and bishops are seen to have the instruments of power and their power is thought to have magical roots, it becomes irresistible and virtually uncheckable.  Matthew reports that Jesus imparted to Peter the absolute power to “bind” or “loose” upon earth and in heaven whatever he wanted and the church claims (again without evidence) that the power was transferable to his successors.  (The only exception was Pope John Paul II’s assertion that he had no power to ordain women.)

The Irish rejection of the abortion dogma has no precedent.   There have been successful revolutions and even rebellions against papal power:  Luther’s Reformation comes to mind or, more recently, Garibaldi’s defeat of the Papal States.  But Luther was able to avoid the stake only because of German politics and the powerful support of Frederick III, the Elector of Saxony.  Garibaldi’s victory was only partial.  He was never able to destroy the Papacy itself which he referred to as “that pestilential institution” and the unification of the Italian peninsula, Risorigimento, has never resulted in successful governance.  But the Irish rebellion promises to be different.  All over the world, the pedophilia and other sex scandals have exposed the hypocrisy of the church’s perseveration on sexual sin.  In Ireland, however, it goes beyond horror and beyond evil.  It is nothing less than a betrayal of the cardinal virtues of faith, hope and love by the one power that the people looked to for succor in the centuries of their agonies.  The church will crumble to dust long before it can be forgiven and the hour of accountability is at hand.