A few years back, I gave a paper to the Guild of Catholic Scholars, on the topic of fideism in the history of Irish Catholicism. It has long been a concern of mine that the culture of Irish Catholicism has been indifferent at best, and hostile at worst, to the intellectual exploration of the Catholic and Christian faith. This concern is not purely historical either, in that I maintain it is a feature of the life of the Church in the here and now, and is likely to be for quite some time. I had the chance to revisit the topic, with a revised and updated presentation to the Irish Institute of Catholic Studies at Mary Immaculate College at the University of Limerick. That was part of a panel of 3 relatively brief presentations, so I have included below the longer paper upon which it was based. Many thanks to Dr Patricia Kieran for organising a very rich and broad-ranging event.
Fideism in “Catholic Ireland” – A Philosophical and Personal View
Éamonn Gaines
PhD Student in Philosophy, MIC-UL
& Lecturer in Thomistic Studies, Priory Institute, Dublin
The precarious state of the Church in Ireland is obvious to any reasonable observer, I think. Numbers of children being baptised are falling, numbers attending Mass on Sundays & holy days are in free-fall and have been for some time. More and more marriages and burials are reflecting a secular or humanist belief rather than a religious one.1 Vocations to the diocesan priesthood, upon which the public practise of Catholicism largely depends, are scanty. The recent collapse of Veritas Communications (formerlyThe Catholic Truth Society of Ireland) is another straw in the wind.2 This picture is pretty bleak. My task here, however, is not to point out the obvious but to focus on the elements of this situation that come under my professional notice as a Catholic who is a philosopher and a teacher of philosophy. Having worked in various Irish universities and seminaries, the Irish Dominican studium and the Maryvale Institute, some aspects of the current situation, its aetiology, as it were, and its management occur to me, and I propose to share them with you.
There has never been a particularly vigorous intellectual life in the Irish Church. One thinks anecdotally of the sudden demise in the late 1960s of the prolific publisher Clonmore and Reynolds, which was itself rooted culturally in the energetic missionary culture of “Anglo-Catholicism” in the Church of England, even if William Clonmore was a convert to Catholicism. Likewise, the appearance of the Catechism of the Catholic Church in 1992 whose Irish edition was restricted to only 7,000 copies, as the publishers believed that interest in it would be slight. This meant fewer than 1 copy for each priest or religious on the island, and none for the laity at all! In my own experience, a learned and scholarly priest back in 1994 reprimanded me gently for reading Veritatis Splendor, John Paul II’s landmark encyclical on the moral life, since it was addressed to the bishops, and therefore I as a final year philosophy undergraduate need not concern myself with it. When I related this last anecdote to an Oratorian priest, he assured me that this attitude was one which John Henry Newman had confronted 150 years earlier!
There are all sorts of historical reasons why this absence of a Catholic intellect should be the case. Legal limitations and disabilities in the early modern period prevented the development of an indigenous Catholic intelligentsia; indeed the aim of Government was to suppress Catholic life and practice altogether. Even when these burdens were eased, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, a lack of finance combined with occasional official hostility prevented any significant development of Catholic intellectual life. Primary and secondary education did certainly develop and take root but a Catholic university, for example, had never more than a tenuous – and sometimes merely notional – existence.
The long tradition of sending candidates for priesthood, whether diocesan or from religious orders, to the Irish Colleges in various European cities carried on from the Reformation period until the French Revolution; the unease that the civil authorities, whether in Dublin Castle or London, felt at exposing Irish seminarians to revolutionary thinking led them to permit and even grudgingly to endow seminaries on Irish soil. This was an attractive offer to the Irish Bishops, particularly in the wake of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy of 1790 which effectively introduced an absolute subordination of a now National Church to the new French Republic. That Republic’s expansionist tendencies made the loss of the Colleges across Europe that much more urgent a problem. Thus Carlow College (1793) and Maynooth College (1795) came to be. Neither had any degree granting power which continued to be vested exclusively in the University of Dublin. Both were intended in the words of the Irish Statute that created Maynooth to “allow for the better education of those of his Majesty’s subjects professing the Roman Catholick religion.” Specifically missing from this was any mention of seminary formation but this was understandable as, strictly speaking, it was unlawful to train or ordain a “massing priest”. Nonetheless, the inclusion of laymen among the student body caused some official unhappiness and by 1815 Maynooth had abandoned the education of the laity. Carlow held on until 1892 before separating the laity into a different institution. Maynooth, apparently, did this on foot of an offer from Trinity College to create a new, Catholic college in the University of Dublin. If in fact such a promise was ever given, it has yet to be honoured!
From then until the 1880s, with the creation of the Royal University of Ireland, a Catholic University was a vexed question, apparently impossible to solve. The pragmatic solution that the RUI offered, with each religious body running its own colleges, while the government underwrote overall costs worked well for a time. Many institutions were thus included in undergraduate education, e.g. Blackrock College, Belvedere, Alexandra College, Methody, Inst, Victoria etc. The final settlement, however, came in 1908 with the Irish Universities Act. This created a federal National University which comprised three (de facto) Catholic colleges in Dublin, Cork and Galway. The first of these was a secularised Catholic University of Ireland, while the latter two and the new Queen’s University of Belfast were the ostensibly secular Queen’s Colleges reborn. Queen’s Belfast, of course, was Presbyterian in its culture and Scots in its outlook; some purely ceremonial vestiges of this remain. As an ostensibly secular, non-denominational institution it actually made intellectual room for Catholics with the appointment of Denis O’Keefe to a lectureship in Scholastic (i.e. Thomistic) Philosophy in 1909; his successors maintained and expanded that tradition, until the 1990s, when it experienced sustained institutional hostility. The last trace of that presence in Queen’s survived until 2018, when the courses in Scholastic Ethics and Metaphysics were abruptly discontinued.
Well, so much for this potted history of the Irish universities, what about the fideism I referred to in my title? If we look to the New Catholic Encyclopedia, we find fideism characterised by S A Matczak as “a philosophical and theological doctrine or attitude that minimizes the capacity of the human intellect to attain certitude and assigns faith as a criterion of the fundamental truths.” He goes on to suggest that this attitude entails holding that “God’s existence, the immortality of the soul, principles of morality, the fact of divine revelation, and the credibility of Christianity cannot be proved by reason alone, but must be accepted on authority”.3 While we might not find very many formal adherents to this view in Ireland, I will argue that we have the practical, functional equivalent to it. Additionally we have, as a consequence, an almost total divorce between the subjective act of belief and the objective propositional content required by the Christian and Catholic faith.
With the creation of formally secular institutions that were nonetheless filled with Catholic students and largely staffed by practising Catholics, a system arose that was in large part unreflectively rather than intentionally Catholic in culture and outlook. What was conspicuously lacking however was any significant effort to educate the laity to lead society precisely on the basis of their Catholic intellectual formation. For example, there were philosophy chairs and later departments in the NUI colleges and in QUB. The majority of these were Scholastic for certainly the first half of the 20th century but staffed almost exclusively by clergy. The student body was almost entirely clerical too, for much of the period. There was no opportunity for lay Catholics to engage in any systematic study of Catholic intellectual heritage, to say nothing of theology properly speaking. Thus for most Catholics, knowledge of their faith rested on whatever they had learned in their schooling. At primary and in the gradually expanding secondary sector, catechetics was certainly taught, and in a fairly rigorous fashion at that. Rote memorisation of the 1891 bishop’s question and answer catechism, and its successors until its final 1951 edition, ensured an adequate but basic level of knowledge.
For those who, prior to Donogh O’Malley’s reforms of the late 1960s4, managed to get a secondary education, there was Sheehan’s Apologetics and Catholic Doctrine. Appearing in two volumes originally, (1918; revised edition 1930, final edition 1951) it was a fixture in Catholic schools across the English speaking world and was so widely used that it arguably made the fortune of M. H. Gill, its publishers. It was a systematic work, starting with a rational defence of the praeambula fidei and working on to specifically theological claims. It has been very difficult, until recently, to obtain a readable copy of it, as most were read, re-read and marked by multiple hands until they finally disintegrated. (The odd appearance of a re-issue of Soundings the old Leaving Certificate poetry anthology gives testimony to a similar phenomenon.) Though it left few traces in library collections or the like, it certainly made its mark on those who were taught on the basis of its approach.
Michael Sheehan himself was a brilliant and somewhat eclectic figure. He completed his education at Maynooth two years before reaching the canonical minimum age for ordination and later pursued postgraduate studies at Oxford, Greifswald and Bonn where he received a PhD in 1900 for a thesis on the rhetoric of Isocrates. The Dictionary of Irish Biography rather anachronistically describes him as “professor of Classics” at Maynooth from 1897; in fact he was professor of Rhetoric, i.e. the senior position of the humanities portion of the pre-theology course for seminarians. His real intellectual interest was in Nua-Gaelige and most of his publications are in and on the Irish language. He consecrated Bishop and sent to from Maynooth to Australia in 1922 where he assisted the Archbishop of Sydney until 1937; he then returned to Ireland and lived in retirement in Blackrock, Co Dublin until his death in 1945.
What this combination of classical learning and Teutonic rigour gave Sheehan was a systematic approach to explicating and teaching the propositional content of the Catholic faith that was described by one of its recipients in the following terms:
In the last analysis, the “apologetics” we absorbed could not lift religion above dependence on an act of faith, but an act of faith sustained by, and consonant with, reason. It was not an act of faith standing, as it were, unsupported or contrary to reason … Sheehan’s Apologetics and Christian Doctrine provided me, as a schoolboy at matriculation standard, with the rational justification for my act of faith in Catholic Christianity.5
The apparent cut and dried certainty of Sheehan’s work had its detractors, of course. It is described by a critic of B A Santamaria whom I quoted a moment ago as “the triumphalist certitudes of Archbishop Sheehan’s Apologetics and Christian Doctrine.” An acerbic response from the Australian mathematician, philosopher & historian James Franklin was that
‘Triumphalist’ Sheehan may have been, but he knew a valid argument from a piece of cheap rhetoric. The reason Sheehan worked so hard with argument was that he knew outsiders were not convinced by the alleged certainties of Christianity, and that convincing argument was the only way to challenge them.”6
So, while it is true that an Irish Catholic or in fact almost any English-speaking Catholic who had the benefit of secondary education would have been exposed to Sheehan’s fairly rigorous argumentation, it is also true that most Irish Catholics had no opportunity for secondary education, nor to avail of what Sheehan’s Apologetics had to offer. It was a valuable resource but not widely available.
Moreover, there is a tendency, or perhaps it would be better to say a temptation among Catholics of a theologically orthodox stripe (or a conservative tendency, if you prefer to call it that) to look back to the relatively recent past as a sort of Golden Age, halcyon days when the ordinary pew-sitter knew his or her Catechism, so all was well with the world. While this picture is not entirely false, it is misleading. While clear recall of basic doctrines was a strength, and there was also a capacity to give a reasonable account of the faith for those lucky enough to receive a secondary education, there was also a clear intellectual complacency, particularly among the bishops. This might seem odd at first sight – was +Sheehan himself not an archbishop? He was but not in Ireland. As I mentioned, he went directly from the Faculty in Maynooth College to be coadjutor Archbishop of Sydney, to which he never actually succeeded. He enjoyed no great reputation in the Church in Ireland, and is but one of a number of forceful and original thinkers to have been sidelined in this period and subsequently. One thinks of Peter Coffey in the early decades of the 20th century who after producing translations of Maurice de Wulf’s Scholasticism Old and New and his History of Medieval Philosophy, went on to produce textbooks on ontology, logic and epistemology. He was consistently hampered by the bishops, however, when he tried to apply his rigorous philosophical cast of mind to social and economic questions.7 Another case in point was that of J. D. Bastable in the 1950s and 1960s. He founded the only Irish philosophy journal of that period and sustained it by dogged personal effort over many years. He also took it with him when he left the Faculty of Philosophy at Maynooth after more than 20 years. It is difficult to establish his reasons with any certainty but it seems that he objected to being paid substantially less than his theology colleagues.
The deep-seated anti-intellectual tendency of the Irish hierarchy was thrown into sharpest relief, however, by Studies, the Irish Jesuit journal in 1937/38. Arthur Little SJ, a professor at their philosophy faculty at Rahan, Co. Offaly wrote an article entitled The Present Crisis in Intelligence. Delivered originally to a student society at UCDit was a forceful plea for philosophy qua metaphysics to be recognised as the foundation of a truly educated populace. Moreover it made explicit the connection between a proper grounding in metaphysics and a morally sound approach to ethical questions. Finally it acknowledged the intimate link between a rigorous philosophical formation and a well grounded theology. The last line of the piece states “I leave down the pen in the hope that someone who is interested in Catholic action may take up the argument”.
There was no-one who was so interested or at least not enough to pick up the gauntlet that had been laid down. So a symposium followed, again in Studies in 1938, entitled The Case for Philosophy in Secondary Education. The keynote article in the symposium was by Arthur Little himself, who was later to achieve some small reputation for his published lectures, Philosophy without Tears, and The Nature of Art. He is also remembered for his posthumous book, a scholarly rather than a popular one entitled The Platonic Heritage in Thomism.8 In the 1938 symposium his target was the shallow intellectual culture typical of Irish Catholicism. He saw the inroads that harsh ideological currents were making in continental Europe and rightly discerned that one of the principal bulwarks to defend against them would have to be an intellectually well-formed laity. He made this case persuasively, in the following terms:
All will admit that no aim of education is more important than the perfection of the intellect. Now the intellect is perfected not by merely being trained to acquire knowledge with system and ease, but by the knowledge itself acquired. And clearly the knowledge that will perfect the intellect – since omniscience is out of the question – must include the knowledge of those truths that are the ultimate explanations of everything. Now to teach fundamental truths along with the reasons that prove them true is to teach philosophy. To omit philosophy from education, therefore, is to omit its essence.
Much more could be written, but the essentials of the case are here. Let the last word be to stress the fundamental argument. Philosophy gives a man an independent grasp of ultimate truths and therefore the means of governing himself. A man who cannot govern himself cannot be rationally governed by any authority, ecclesiastical or civil, but will demand coercion in proportion to the intrinsic lawlessness of his own mind.
There were various rejoinders to Fr Little’s proposal, from among others Michael Tierney at UCD to Alfred O’Rahilly at UCC to Edward Leen a Holy Ghost father teaching at Kimmage. They were broadly supportive, although each raised their own particular objections to the stage at which this philosophical education was to be attempted, its precise content and so on.
However, pride of place was given to the strongest response of those offered; this was from Bishop Michael Browne of Galway, who later clashed publicly with Noel Browne over the Mother and Child scheme. To suggest that Bishop Browne’s rejoinder was dismissive in its content, and crushing in its tone would not be an exaggeration. He opened with some carping remarks about whether Little’s claim that “to teach fundamental truths, along with the reasons that prove them true, is to teach philosophy” by asking whether this could not also equally describe theology. It cannot, in fact, do so in the way that philosophy does – given that theology rests on special revelation which Browne must surely have known. However that may be, he goes on to make snide, patronising remarks about Little being principally interested in promoting his own subject, presumably in a rather self-interested way, and engages in a measure of rhetorical hand-waving about what is imposed by canon law on the one hand and the strengths of Sheehan’s textbook on the other. The sting in the tail, I contend, is where Browne suggests:
…the children of our secondary schools are provided with fundamental truth as well as they can absorb it. They get the substance of Christian philosophy. Fr. Little wants to give them the metaphysical form with the difficulties and objections, and all the crazy errors that have ever been propounded.
A dispassionate observer might claim that Little wanted them to think out their own position and to arrive at rationally well-grounded beliefs. Bishop Browne’s approach is itself an excellent illustration of the error of attacking a straw man while also relying on appeals to authority in response to essentially philosophical claims. Be that as it may, Arthur Little’s project bore no particular fruit, in that there was no course of philosophy established then or later in Irish Catholic schools.
At least Sheehan continued in use, and so some students encountered useful arguments for the sorts of basic truths which the Church has always insisted can be known by human reason, chief among them being the existence of God. This was however not to last. Not long after the opening of secondary education to mass participation, school catechesis took a decisive turn from inculcating propositional content to practicing a kerygmatic approach. Kerygma, defined by John Hardon as “…proclaiming, as distinct from teaching or instruction (didache) in the Gospel of Christ” tends to give priority to the proclamation of Christ’s saving work over explication of the content of Christian belief. “
The same shift happened elsewhere, so when English Dominican Herbert McCabe wrote a question and answer style “New Catechism of Christian Doctrine” in 1986, it was
“roundly rejected by the Episcopal Conference of England and Wales. The reported reason ran that it was ‘full of propositions.’ In the bishop’s view, sound modern catechesis abhors propositions. It confines itself to ‘stories’.”9
This rather tongue in cheek description by Aidan Nichols OP is not perhaps an accurate definition but does capture something of the spirit of those changes. In 1973 a revision of catechesis in Ireland was undertaken and in 1976 the Children of God series was introduced. That programme and its successor Alive-O held sway from then until comparatively recently. At this point I ought to confess a personal bias. I experienced 14 years of Irish Catholic religious education, and it has left me with ambivalent feelings about religious education. I attended an academically rigorous secondary school which expected virtually all its students to excel by dint of application and hard work. Thus in my year alone – with only 72 of us – we had two foundation scholars in TCD, three entrance scholars to UCD, one lad got a full 7 year scholarship to the Royal College of Surgeons etc. etc. Yet our progress from parsing Milton’s Paradise Lost to undertaking independent research in history (mine was on Admiral Horthy and irredentism in Trianon Hungary) to geology fieldwork was in inverse proportion to the seriousness of our religious formation. However, my personal reminiscences prove nothing, since the plural of anecdote is not data.
Were we to seek data on the level of religious knowledge present in the Irish Catholic Church, a useful place to start might be the Iona Institute survey of 2007.10 This revealed that fewer than four in ten of 15-24 year olds could state the number of Gospels correctly. Less than half of those surveyed could name the persons of the Holy Trinity. Only 1 in 20 could relate the content of the first commandment. The systematic shortcomings of primary catechesis, at least are addressed at length in a 2010 doctoral thesis submitted to Maynooth Pontifical University by Éanna Johnson. While its scope exceeds anything I can cover here I commend it to your attention.11 The picture that emerges from this is of an institution that disregards the credal claims to which it is wedded and fails to communicate them. It seems to be content to be seen as an irrational throwback to a childish past. Johnson’s subsequent work on the issue shows that the decommissioning of Alive-O, and its replacement by the Grow in Love programme has not had the measurable positive impact we might have hoped.12
This impression of hostility to intellectual engagement with matters of faith was long reinforced by the ban (now thankfully defunct) on lay theology students in Maynooth combining it with philosophy for a joint honours degree. A former colleague of mine, Dr Donal Daly SVD, who served on the relevant committee insisted that this was due to a perception by the Maynooth Trustees in the late 1970s that philosophy would cause the aspiring theologians to lose their faith. As a degree in theology and arts would equip them only for the secondary school classroom, this would then unleash upon Ireland a plague of atheist religion teachers!
The appalling reality of an episcopal bench so deeply imbued with a de facto fideism as to reject claims which the Church has long espoused and even required e.g. that unaided human reason can arrive at certain knowledge of the existence of God, seems however to have deep roots. Canon P A Sheehan of Doneraile, the 19th and early 20th century novelist is said to have had a
“seminary experience [that] left him with a keen sense of the deficiencies of the current system of theological training in preparing its graduates to address the philosophical challenges of modernity and the problems they would encounter in their pastorate.”13
His biographer, Hermann Heusner, suggests that he was attempting to grapple with this same attitude of distrust of intellectual endeavour by way of his novels.
So much for aetiology, and diagnosis. The question that remains is how this is to be managed and by whom. The obvious answer is by episcopal leadership, with a measure of solertia or intellectual clarity on the one hand, and parrhesia or intellectual and moral courage on the other. While this is the obvious answer in one sense, it is also the least likely to occur. Episcopal leaders are drawn from the very ranks of the fideist clergy whose formation or lack thereof I have adverted to. Moreover the laity from whom these priests are drawn share the same basic assumptions of faith as a nebulous kind of belief that makes no demands upon reason and needs no assistance from it. Even where the willingness take decisive action exists, the capacity for it is limited. The adoption by clergy of their local bishop’s priorities or their willingness to follow his lead might not be as clear nor as ready as formal ecclesiology would suggest. The idea that a wholesale change of the kind undertaken in 1974 could be repeated is neither plausible nor even desirable, I would suggest.
Beyond that there is a lack of knowledge of, or even of any desire to engage with, the propositional content of the Christian faith. Right belief, orthodoxy, one of the most significant distinguishing marks of Catholic Christianity, is thus sidelined if not wholly jettisoned. As a corollary, this subjective, often heartfelt and sincere approach to living the Catholic faith carries with it a powerful antinomianism. The results of this were, of course, most clearly seen in the distressing abuse scandals of which we are all aware. While that aspect of the wider problem has been faced, the problem I am addressing has not even been acknowledged. More than that, there is even a deliberate antipathy to any attempt at recognition of the problem. At the launch of the Iona Institute – Northern Ireland in 2017 there were some powerful contributions from figures like Alban Maginness and Nuala O’Loan; an interesting intervention was offered by Eamon Martin, the Archbishop of Armagh. He suggested that an effective contribution by Catholics in the public square
…presumes there exists a group of Catholics… out there who have reflected sufficiently on their faith… take it seriously enough to feel confident in… debate on public matters. The reality is that the vast majority of people of faith may not… be ‘intentional disciples’. They are… not… able to courageously speak from the conviction of a deep personal encounter and relationship with the Risen Lord. A lot of Catholics, as members of society, find themselves easily drawn to support the liberal democratic culture and politics of the State. The politicians Catholics vote for, the media stories we like to read are… those that the majority of people… seem to want or support. Catholics, precisely as Catholics, need to allow their faith to influence their participation in society and the State.14
What the Archbishop does not see is that to contribute decisively we need not only motivation, from an encounter with the Risen Lord, but also something distinctive to contribute. If we are to offer an idea or a proposal or a critique, it must be worked out by dint of rigorous thinking. And rigorous, critical thinking has always to be thinking about something. The only distinctive “something” about which we as Catholics can think, in order to provide a contribution that is of value is our faith. The entirety of that faith takes in a long and deep tradition of intellectual engagement. It is this, I argue, that is so signally absent.
In proposing this approach to faith, that I contend is light on content, Archbishop Martin referred in passing to no less a figure than the Pope Francis. Now it is certainly the case that whether one approved of them or not, John Paul II and Benedict XVI had each in his own way, an intellectual depth and substance that commanded serious attention. This is true of their academic output, personal writing while in office, as well as their Papal teaching proper. Pope Francis’ style on the other hand, was rather more impressionistic and had perhaps less linguistic clarity and precision. This had an effect downstream so to speak. Where we are now with Pope Leo is an open question but the signs such as they are appear to show a more measured and careful manner; there is also the fact of his training in Canon (which is to say Roman) Law, which tends to give its practitioners a serious and rigorous cast of mind.
Even without this change at the top, we cannot say that there are no signs of hope. There are some; one thinks of the Evangelium Conferences, of some of the work done by the Priory Institute, or by the Maryvale Institute albeit the latter now seems to be in a state of flux. The revivification of the Pontifical Philosophy Faculty at Maynooth is another very good sign but it is still early days there, with one of the two recent permanent appointments having moved on greener pastures, while the other has heavy administrative responsibilities. One of the most hopeful signs of all has to be the Credible Catholic programme, developed in the United States by Fr Robert Spitzer, and re-worked for Ireland by a local team including Dr Tom Finegan of MIC-Thurles.15 Its essential modules includeEvidence of God’s Existence from Science, Proof of God’s Existence from Philosophy, Why be Catholic? and Why Would an All-loving God Allow Suffering? The programme as a whole seems to me to try in a new context, with new methods but with the same fundamental motivation what Michael Sheehan tried to do in his time; to provide a reasonable account and defence of Christian faith.
However, as positive as these things are, and I do hope that they will bear good fruit in due season, we cannot avoid the truth that they are seeds sown on may prove to be stony ground. The fear of their being choked by flourishing thorns and weeds is never really absent.
So, who then is to take up this challenge? Catholics engaged in intellectual life will have to, I suggest. There’s a useful hint from Canon law here where it permits, encourages, even requires us to:
(Can. 211) All the Christian faithful have the duty and right to work so that the divine message of salvation … reaches all people in every age and in every land. (Can. 212)
§2. The Christian faithful are free to make known to the pastors… their needs… and their desires. §3. According to [their] knowledge, competence, and prestige… they have the right and even… the duty to manifest… their opinion on matters which pertain to the good of the Church and to make [it] known to the rest of the Christian faithful.
We can see around us many examples of what happens when sloppy sloganistic talk takes the place of rigorous thinking. To recover from the poor state the Church in Ireland is in will take a miracle or even a series of them. They are not our concern. It will also take a spiritual renewal, a rebirth of religious life, a renewal of the liturgy and so on. These too are not our concern, at least not as scholars.
So, what is a believer who is also a philosopher or a scholar more generally to do? Our task, and it is a long and a thankless one is to challenge every instance of shoddy reasoning, both in the Church and in Society. Our task is to take every bad idea, every dubious claim, every indolent refusal to reason about our faith and to subject it to rigorous challenge. From many Catholics this kind of activity will meet with blank incomprehension. And many clergy will react similarly, if truth be told. But if we are to obey the injunction of 1 Peter 3:15 to be ready always to give an account of the hope that we have in us, I don’t see that we have any choice. To quote G K Chesterton: “I tell you naught for your comfort / Yea, naught for your desire / Save that the sky grows darker yet / And the sea rises higher./Night shall be thrice night over you / And heaven an iron cope. / Do you have joy without a cause / Yea, faith without a hope?”
1Cf. The rapid rise of ‘New Age’ weddings in Ireland; How should the Churches respond?, Iona Institute Briefing Note, 2024. Also ‘New Age marriages continue to rise in Ireland’ https://ionainstitute.ie/new-age-marriages-continue-to-rise-in-ireland/ 1st May, 2025
2 https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/social-affairs/2024/02/11/religious-publisher-veritas-to-shut-this-year/
3 S. A. Matczak ‘Fideism’ in the New Catholic Encyclopedia (New York NY: McGraw Hill, 1967)
4 For a succinct account of the bravado of O’Malley’s solo run cf. the meticulous, eponymous article by Patrick Maume in The Dictionary of Irish Biography, https://www.dib.ie/biography/omalley-donogh-a6884 retrieved on 11-04-2025
5 BA. Santamaria, Santamaria: A Memoir, (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 8; Cited in James Franklin Corrupting the Youth: A History of Australian Philosophy, (Sydney: Macleay Press, 2003)
6 Review of Paul Ormonde ed, Santamaria: The Politics of Fear in The Journal of the Australian Catholic Historical Society, 22 (2001) 82-3
7 These difficulties are treated comprehensively in Gavan Jennings, ‘Peter Coffey (1876-1943) From neo-Scholastic scholar to social theorist’ in James McEvoy and Michael Dunne eds. The Irish Contribution to European Scholastic Thought, (Dublin: Four Courts, 2009), 231-253
8 Dublin: James Duffy, 1947; London: Longmans, 1946; Dublin: Golden Eagle Books, 1949
9 Aidan Nichols OP, ‘The Herbert McCabe I knew’ in The Lamp: A Catholic Journal of Literature, Science, the Fine arts etc. June 2021, retrieved from https://thelampmagazine.com/blog/the-herbert-mccabe-i-knew on 17 April, 2025
10 Retrieved from https://ionainstitute.ie/assets/files/NI_religion_poll.pdf on 11-04-2025
11 Retrieved from https://mural.maynoothuniversity.ie/id/eprint/3076/1/PhD_dissertation_-_%C3%89anna_Johnson.pdf on 11-04-2025
12 Retrieved from https://www.catholicireland.net/alive-o-dead-duck-catechetical-crisis-revealed/ on 12-04-2025
13 Patrick Maume, ‘Sheehan, (Canon) Patrick Augustine’, retrieved from https://www.dib.ie/biography/sheehan-canon-patrick-augustine-a8023 on 12-04-2025
14 Retrieved from https://www.armagh-archdiocese.org/importance-speaking-public-square/ on 12-04-2025
15 Details of the course, its structure and core modules can be found at https://catholiceducation.ie/credible-catholic/ (Retrieved on 12-04-2025)
