The Church Confronts Modernity church confronts modernity: Catholicism since 1950 in the United States, Ireland, and Quebec

7. Decline and Continuity: Catholicism since 1950 in the United States, Ireland, and Quebec

M i c h e l e D i ll o n 7. Decline and Continuity Catholicism since 1950 in the United States, Ireland, and Quebec The selection of the United States, Quebec, and the Republic of Ireland as the focus for a comparative analysis of Catholicism may strike some readers as an odd choice. What could possibly be learned from comparing the world’s only superpower with one of the smallest and until recently one of the poorest countries in Western Europe? What could possibly be adduced by introducing a Canadian province into the mix? The answer of course is that it makes sense to compare these three societies because the Catholic Church has a strong presence in each. The results of the charge presented in writing this chapter show that the comparative examination of the United States, Ireland, and Quebec reveals clear patterns of decline in Church authority in important areas of activity. This decline coexists, however, with the continuing presence of the Church and Catholicism across several domains of public and private life in each society. The Historical and Cultural Status of the Church in Ireland, Quebec, and the United States Before considering the fate of the Catholic Church since 1950 in each of the three countries it is important first to give attention to a major difference in the institutional status of the Church in the United States compared to Ireland and Quebec. The Catholic Church is a cultural insider in 239 Ireland and Quebec, whereas in the U.S. it is a cultural outsider. For both Quebec and Ireland, Catholicism and political/national identity have been inextricably intertwined. The centrality of an intellectual and missionary monasticism in premedieval Ireland and its imprint in the country’s collective memory through Ireland’s self-representation as the “Island of Saints and Scholars” gave successive Irish generations what they understood to be a special and unique hold on Catholicism. This legacy was further emboldened by the alignment of popular and institutional Catholicism in the Irish struggle against British domination from the mid-seventeenth century onward . The Irish quest for independence articulated by Daniel O’Connell in the early nineteenth century was explicitly called “Catholic Emancipation.” Catholic struggle against British rule was given local expression in secluded country fields where families gathered around “Mass rocks” or altar stones to hear the Mass, whose formal celebration was prohibited by the Penal Laws imposed by the British colonizers. Irishness and Catholicism became symbolically intertwined as the economically and politically dispossessed Irish used Catholicism to demarcate their separateness from England and from Anglo-Irish Protestant landowners. When political independence was eventually achieved (in 1922), it is not surprising that successive Irish governments used the law and public policy to institutionalize the values perceived as critical to the nation’s Catholic identity. This identity was most clearly defined in the Irish Constitution (1937). Among other provisions, the constitution affirmed the “special position of the Holy Catholic Apostolic and Roman Church as the guardian of the Faith professed by the great majority of the citizens.” It emphasized traditional Catholic teaching on the family, specifically recognizing the family as the “natural primary and fundamental unit” of society; it committed to protect marriage and the family “from attack” by explicitly prohibiting divorce; and it commended women who, by their “life within the home,” give to the State “a support without which the common good cannot be achieved.”1 In sum, in post- as in pre-independence Ireland, to be Irish was to be Catholic. These were two seamlessly intermeshed identities . The pivotal event in Quebec history is the conquest that took place in 1759 when the British captured Quebec, “the heart” of French Cana240 m i c h e l e d i ll o n 1. See Articles 41 and 44 of the Constitution of Ireland (Dublin: Stationery Office, 1937). da. Largely as a result of the divisions set in place by the conquest, Quebec became highly differentiated between the French-speaking Catholic majority and the minority English-speaking Protestants, who dominated politically and economically. The Catholic Church was the only major institution under the control of the French Canadians, and, paralleling to some extent the Irish Catholic experience, Catholics bonded to, and appropriated, the Church in their creation of a distinct French Canadian Catholic identity. As Roger Finke and Rodney Stark have argued, in this context of ethnic subjugation and conflict, “mass...