Eamon Delaney writing in yesterday’s Independent says – Often in a minority of one, the Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral is a true iconoclast.
Delaney continues:
It is often said of a man or a woman in a key position, that nothing became them like the leaving of it. Well, in the tradition of his illustrious predecessor, Jonathan Swift, the latest outgoing Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin has pulled no punches in his farewell sermon. As one letter-writer put it last week, ‘light blue touch paper and retire’.
The Very Rev Robert MacCarthy, 71, fired off a few salvoes at the Catholic Church, his own authorities in the Church of Ireland, the board of the cathedral and even the board of the Rotunda hospital where he found himself in a minority of one in wanting to retain a maternity hospital with a Protestant ethos.
You can be sure that the irrepressible reverend is often in a minority of one, but his insights are a revelation about just how moribund the churches have become in these times of economic upheaval and social change.
Sitting in his study at the Deanery near Patrick Street, the departing dean showed no regrets for his evensong broadside and the summary of his 12 years at the helm.
But he is in a good tradition. After all, the position of Dean of St Patrick’s is an unusual one in the church structure, and in national life, and effectively he is answerable to no one. It was, as he says, “a special position”.
When he was appointed in 1999, a bishop remarked that it would be interesting to see how an iconoclast did as an icon and the Tipperary-born MacCarthy has not disappointed.
His most interesting comments concern the Catholic Church and its lack of co-operation in terms of ecumenism. He believes that the demoralised state of Catholicism may have something to do with it, whereas one would have thought, and hoped, it might be the opposite.
Happy to welcome the present Catholic Archbishop of Dublin as a preacher to St Patrick’s, there has been no reciprocal invitation to the Pro-Cathedral. Irish ecumenism, says MacCarthy, was “equated to fellowship between the two archbishops, whereas this should merely be the first step”.
He is quite right too. Despite all the progress made in breaking down sectarianism and building links between the churches, there has been little broad-based co-operation, beyond a few social visits and exchanged blessings by opposing prelates. And they are still “opposing”, instead of working together.
Indeed, in terms of modern Christianity, there is nothing more depressing than the way the Catholic Church — besieged, unreformed, blinkered — seems to have just battened down the hatches. Or “circled the wagons”, as the dean puts it.
The Protestant minority is seen as so small, he argues, that serious co-operation is not bothered with by the Catholic hierarchy. One would have thought that, in an age of secularism and spiritual hunger, all of the churches would pull together, but this is not the case.
The fact that the Church of Ireland is the biggest Protestant church in Northern Ireland, for example, seems to have made no difference.
“This is a 26-country matter,” says MacCarthy. “Partition has created two different churches north and south, both for the Catholic faith and in the Church of Ireland.” For the latter, it seems that the southern version is avowedly liberal, broad-based and in favour of married clergy, whereas in the North, it has become increasingly evangelical and conservative, and crucially led by actual northerners as opposed to, formerly, southerners with “good degrees and good minds”. As a result we have “a projection of all their blue-collar values”, he says in a sort of philosophical despair. MacCarthy believes that the structure of the Catholic Church is actually quite sound, and at a local level the parish priest is still acceptable and often very much supported, doing things at ground level, and creating finance committees, but “further up the candle”, the problems arise.