Jennifer Horgan: A return to our ancient faith is exactly what we need
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More and more of us are ticking the ‘no religion’ box — 14% more of us in the last six years.
I’ve heard it said that by becoming less Catholic, we’re also becoming less Irish. Who are we without the fry-up after Sunday mass, without the Trócaire box on the table, and the Angelus on the radio?
I look at it differently. Rather than mourn a decline in Catholic faith, I celebrate the return of an ancient Irish faith, pantheism, a belief that God is in everything, not restricted to men in robes on alters, or one man in a similarly styled robe in the sky.
Catholic advocacy group The Iona Institute distrusts the numbers. Left floundering in a cold shadow, uncomfortably far from the gilded, patriarchal halls of the Vatican, they suggest it is a matter of bad formatting.
True, the ‘no religion’ box appeared as the first option on the 2022 census and the last in 2016, but however Iona might try to re-frame it, to live in Ireland is to know it’s true: Irish people have had enough of the Roman Catholic Church. More and more of us have had enough of misogyny, dogmatism, and the vilification of the flesh.
More of us are also, simultaneously, concerned about nature. This is arguably related, and all part of this return to what came before.
In an extensive European study on attitudes to climate carried out in late 2022, around the same time as our census, 65% of Irish people expressed their desire for the Government to impose stricter measures to change personal behaviours.
We are returning to what preceded a dark, but relatively brief, period of less than 200 years under Roman Catholic rule.
Reading Richard Kearney’s , a gorgeous novel that holds the early Celtic church at its centre, makes me more or less certain of it.
In the book, set initially in 1939, we encounter a local parish priest in the West Cork town of Skibbereen warning local girls against bodily sin, and his entire congregation against the backward use of the Irish language.
Kearney’s protagonist Maeve O’Sullivan will not be turned from her old ways, however — ways passed down by her father. She will not relinquish her devotion to Brigid, to the well, her connection to the land, the sea, and to the power of her own language. She is also deeply aware of the importance of physical touch, something made fearful and dirty by the body-hating Roman Catholics.
Kearney explained, when I met him recently in Cork, that physical touch goes back to old ways, to what he refers to as “an embodied manner of being in the world".
His book questions our highly visual Western culture and the mind/body divide that’s so integral to the moralism of the Catholic Church. Young Maeve works with her hands to heal. Her body is not sinful or shameful — it is a site of power.
In the novel, Maeve’s mother sides with the priest, suggesting in the opening of the book that she needs faith, to which Maeve replies, “But I have faith. This faith,” pointing to the water font on her island.
“I’ve faith in the cures. In Brigid. She’ll look after us.”
Growing up in 1980s Ireland it was easy for me to believe that Ireland had always been a devout, highly judgemental, body-fearing, patriarchal Catholic country.
His thesis is backed by Prof Breandán Mac Suibhne of the National University of Ireland, Galway who describes the Roman Catholic church as a ‘net winner’ of the famine because the famine killed off rural people with a strong faith in pantheism, a faith inextricably linked to nature, and a faith in Brigid, our protective, feminine force in the world.
Mass wasn’t so high up in our national agenda then either.
As late as the 1970s the figure of people attending mass was 92% or so, but back in the 1830s, the figure was something like 30%.
“For people in these areas, religion was not chapel-oriented and clerically directed devotion like Sunday Mass was not important to them ... their religion was one of holy wells, and season festivals,” Professor Mac Suibhne explains.
It was the 1850s Redemptorists who went around the country spreading fear of Satan that brought about the change “and they made confession, communion and confirmation rites of passage in Catholicism,” he says.
In Kearney’s novel, the local priest dismisses the nature-based wisdom of Brigid and blocks the well. “No more of the Brigid business. And no more talk of pookas and cures. It is all talk,” he tells Maeve’s grieving mother, ordering her to put her ‘faith’ entirely in God’s hands as so many Irish women did, before ending up in state institutions, disempowered and voiceless.
And it’s possible, in my eyes, that people ticking the ‘no religion’ box are part of a social movement away from the Catholicism of de Valera and McQuaid (the co-writer of our woman-fearing constitution).
Irish people are moving forward and simultaneously back to a pantheistic way of being in the world. Our ancestors respected and cared for nature. We’re beginning to remember and realise why. And our timing couldn’t be better.
Nature needs us to come back.
In early medieval Ireland, Brehon Law demanded compensation for any damage done to our sacred trees. The hawthorn and the yew were protected above all others for their medicinal and spiritual powers. They were sites of pilgrimage and devotion.
Our beautiful forests changed with the arrival of the Normans but it was Elizabeth I who truly destroyed our forests when she despatched Lord Mountjoy “with orders for the destruction of all woods to deprive the insurgents of shelter".
A return to our ancient faith is exactly what we need. Kearney believes we must host the earth as it has always hosted us. We must re-open something, “a layer of sensibility that’s disclosed by the resonance in nature", as he puts it.
Having read and received his book as a rare gift, a sacrament of a new way of being, and seeing, and touching, I think the time has come for a new (and simultaneously ancient) box on our census.
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