Why catholics leave the church

Sometime in the early 90’s I promised a Trini friend that while on holiday in Ireland I would visit a site of Our Lady’s appearance in West Cork. It took little to persuade the O’Callaghan with whom we were staying to drive us through West Cork: the scenery was magnificent and she had never heard of this appearance of Our Lady. We drove the miles to West Cork, map in hand, and located the village in nowhere. We went into the pub. There was mystification until the owner suggested that it must be Mrs X’s statue - he had seen a couple of cars going there sometime ago. We followed his directions - there was no one but ourselves on the road. Eventually we saw one car parked. “It’s here,” my husband said. “But there’ll be a lot of people,” I told him. “It’s here,” he repeated. It was. Across a path was a banal statue of Our Lady, a spring with an old pipe chanelling the water, a row of old bottles, a bunch of plastic flowers and a woman ending her rosary - it was Mrs X. We said a rosary together while my husband wandered to snoop. Higher up the road was a plaque. The statue had been erected by a couple in memory of their handicapped child. Along this road they would wheel her until she died. The statue was a gift from one heartbreak mother to another, telling more of Our Lady than a thousand visions. That story had not travelled here. What had travelled was the wave of visions that were part of the ‘moving statues’ hysteria which for a short while hit Ireland. Leave alone West Cork. Along West Kerry are some of the oldest Christian remains in Europe. Here one can follow the route of the pilgrimage that would take Irishmen across to convert parts of Europe. Here are the old beehive monastic cells, an old stone oratory, an early Christian burial ground. Further north there is Clonmacnois, the centre of early medieval Christianity chosen as one of the principal sites of the Pope’s visit. It was this Ireland that would form the later myth of Ireland of saints and scholars. How is it that this never travelled in the near 150 years of Irish priests and nuns, but an insignificant vision in West Cork does? I scan through the Trini pilgrimages going through Paris.

Trapped in
the 19th Century

I know the two major stops: Rue de Bac, site of the vision of the miraculous medal, and Sacre Coeur, a monument of perpetual adoration - and monument to the victory of Thiers’ anti-communards over the French commune. Both are of the 19th century and long faded as centres of French pilgrimage. French Catholic interest is more likely to centre on the ruins of Cluny, once the place of Europe’s Catholic scholarship, or hidden away, it is true, and near to the self-same Sacre Coeur, the place where Ignatius of Loyola and his first Jesuits made their initial private vows. Why is it that none of this travel across the ocean? To put it bluntly: why is it that Trinis remain trapped within the pieties of the 19th century and pitched into the pieties of the 20th. It is the beginning of the Laventille devotions. A friend notices my absence. “I didn’t see you at Laventille, you were sick?” “No, I am not a Fatima person.” Disbelief. “You don’t believe in Fatima?” “No, I don’t have to but I must believe in the Trinity.” Shock. Then curiosity. “What is the Trinity, you have a book you can lend me on it?” But he knew of Bethania, Lourdes - name it. How come the non-essentials have upstaged the essentials? With all the back to Africa business the splendid Ethiopian cross culture was of little interest, nor was Carthage of Cyrene. But then with all the talk of India few were interested in the old Indian Christians long predating Christianity in parts of Europe. Sometimes out of straight bad mind, I would bring them up - Cyrene, Carthage, the Syrian-Christians of India. They were disturbing, undermining the Christianity we wished - of the 19th century. Disturbing too Francis Xavier, the bare-footed Nuncio in Japan or Ricci, Buddhist monk then Confucianist scholar always Catholic missionary in China - undermining the missions as we wished to know them. In a country whose history is streaked through with suffering and peppered with poverty there is much of Our Lady as Queen, little of Our Lady of Sorrows. There is a noticeable absence of the Pieta in Trini devotions and a noticeable absence of devotion to the Crucifixion. I asked one priest why. “Too much suffering in our history, was the reply, “you can’t tell people to accept that now.” Really? But it is that suffering is not useless that is the Catholic ‘identity.’

Marked by the
Student Revolts

I look at the recent canonisations. Edith Stein, the Jewish convert killed in a concentration camp. There, in her story, is the anguish and tension we know well as Black Trini Catholics - and the deafness of the Church of the time. There is a Chilean trade unionist and a young French worker. These never come to us. Why not? Best avoided, disturbing France of French Revolution and worker Communist priests. Best avoided comparison with Ireland - of no interest. Best cocooned. Any wonder that it was not Vatican II which marked us, certainly not Pacem en Terres or Medellin’s Option for the Poor - but the students revolts and their aftermath. Is it that this Victorianism cements the ranking of class, colour and status within Church or society permitting the snobbery that infests us? And shaming us into silence? I get a Catholic helper. She has set out to be holy. She spends half the morning saying her rosary, walks around printy printy with a cup of coffee, leaves two hours early to go to Mt St Benedict. “Do you know the Benedictine motto?” I ask her. “It is to work and pray.” She smiles at me sweetly. “But Miss Callaghan, if I pray I can’t work.” She is praying to get a job like the CEO’s... I speak to a priest. It is a time of condoms, abortion something or other. He is upset about it but if he talks out, this one in his congregation will say this or the other that. Both are important people and may take their revenge through money or the ear of the Bishop. “Marion,” he explains, “you don’t know these people.” Priests are afraid of Syrians, French Creoles, this one who has political contacts, this one leading a Charismatic movement. And that the youth will leave if we do not move with the times. What has happened to the TT Church? Why are so many of our priests afraid - or shame? Charismatics or Pentecostal Catholics if you like, formed in the USA as a reaction to anti-Vietnamese protests, would sweep through the country. Healing, miracles, devils, anointing, slain by the Spirit, Jesus Christ as personal Lord and Saviour, Evangelical individualism of the 18th or 19th century - sweep through, replacing the Catholic Jesus Saviour of the World. Our Lady’s messages warned of the End Times as surely as the prophecies of Revelations. Spectacle Christ-ianity offshoot of spectacle entertainment, of the post student revolt and of American globalised culture would sweep through.

New Age with its pantheism, revival of the myths of Eastern mysticism, its self-esteem and think positively, its food fetishes and glorified fortune telling - also of the student revolt - would sweep through. The supermarket trolley filled with any cans you wished picked off the shelves, was matched by the supermarket religion with anything you wished, as you liked it, and the supermarket morals with anything right when I want it - sweep through. The ethnic reification of ethnic culture of the student revolts - swept through. Revolution as culture - swept through. Counsellors abounded the new feminised industry: ‘counselling’ became fashionable in a society where psychology free-floated chasing out sin, or misery or sorrow. As we sough feverishly for a Catholic identity of processions so we destroyed the Catholic identity we has. As we sought for a Caribbean Church so we stitched ourselves on to a North America in plain crisis. As slums were converted to ghettos and squatter settlements witnessed to a growing marginalisation, as crime witnessed to despair, as the middle class was increasingly impoverished and the wealthy gated themselves in a compassion less Jamaicanised distance the country had never known before, the TT Catholic Church of Pacem en Terres, and of Medellin’s option for the poor offered no alternative vision for society. A universal Church offered nothing but our own 19th century ghetto. The church of ‘Faith and Reason’ could offer no intellectual challenge. The Church of ‘neither Jew nor Gentile,’ neither slave nor free was streaked through with unresolved racism. And Catholic humanism had never arrived. Any wonder Catholics leave the Church? And yet, would you believe it, as society disintegrates ask those who long for something else — non Catholics and non-believers — do you know that their hope is still in the Catholic Church?
And last in the series next week.