Pope in Ireland: Who won, who lost

Thursday, August 30th, 2018

Now that the dust has begun to settle on Pope Francis’s whirlwind 32-hour visit to Ireland over the weekend, it’s time to step back and draw some tentative conclusions about how the pontiff fared, as well as who else gained and lost from the experience.

A qualified success

At one level, it’s easy to assume that any pope traveling to Ireland ought to have a home field advantage.

It’s a country where Catholicism shaped the culture for centuries, and where church and state to this day are deeply intertwined.

Yet the Ireland which greeted Francis politely in 2018 is worlds away from the place that went nuts for John Paul II back in 1979, with well over half the country’s population turning out to shower the Polish pope with adulation.

Ireland now is a secular (or, at least, rapidly secularizing) state, where divorce, contraception, gay marriage and abortion are all legal, the result of popular referendums in which a majority of Irish citizens defied the Church.

It’s also a country that’s been deeply scarred by the child sexual abuse scandals in Catholicism, with rage induced by those scandals virtually a defining feature of national life.

Under any circumstances, therefore, Francis would have had his work cut out for him.

Add in the immediate run-up to the visit, in which one new abuse scandal after another ripped open old wounds, and the mountain he had to climb steep indeed.

In that context, the general consensus was that Francis mostly exceeded expectations.

His crowds were light but genuinely enthusiastic, and most people were more inclined to blame the cold, rainy weather, plus a climate of fear induced by media warnings of road closures, long walks and general awfulness, for the lower-than-expected turnout.

Overall, the “Francis magic” played in Ireland too, especially his iconic visit on Saturday to a Dublin homeless care facility run by the Capuchin Franciscans.

People watched the pontiff project humility and genuine pleasure in greeting society’s outcasts.

They also watched him deliver an impromptu rite of repentance on Sunday after meeting abuse victims the night before and found themselves wanting to believe this could still be the pope who makes it all right.

However, one can’t call the trip a complete success, because it was dogged at the end by the letter of a former papal ambassador in the United States who accused Francis of covering up scandals surrounding former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, and by the fact that he failed to deliver the concrete action plan on accountability for bishops that many Irish survivors were demanding.

In the end, therefore, the best early judgment is that the trip went better than one might have reasonably thought, but not quite as well as one might have dreamed.

Winners and Losers

Aside from the pope himself, not to mention a somewhat beleaguered Irish Church that badly needed a shot in the arm, there seemed to be two clear winners whose stock rose as a result of the papal visit.

One is Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin, who will get much of the credit for hosting a successful World Meeting of Families and papal trip, and who used the occasion to position himself anew as a change agent and reformer on the clerical sexual abuse scandals. Continue reading