DUBLIN — In the Roman Catholic parish of Darndale, where life is hard and attendance at Sunday Mass is well below 10 percent, the missionary pastor recently split the cavernous church in half. Now, the front end provides a more intimate setting for the sparse congregation, and the back end is used for self-esteem classes and aromatherapy sessions intended to make people feel better about themselves and their faith.
It may seem odd that Catholic missionary work with a New Age whiff is being conducted just five miles from central Dublin. But the pastor, the Rev. Willie Fitzpatrick, said that parishes throughout Ireland had to find new ways to reclaim all that they had lost, and to make Roman Catholicism relevant.
Social changes and a string of sordid scandals featuring priests have combined to put distance between two words often uttered as one: Catholic Ireland. As Father Fitzpatrick put it, "The day is gone when people will believe because they are told to believe."
As American Catholics struggle with revelations of child molestation and cover-ups by the clergy, they might glimpse their future here: where modernization and scandal have cost the Catholic Church in influence and participation; where religious orders are relinquishing convents and property to appease adult victims of childhood abuse; and where some Catholics see a "fire in the forest" opportunity for the seeding of a more inclusive church.
The flames of change were set nearly two generations ago, when an insulated Ireland was exposed to television and free trade; they have since been fanned by sex scandals plentiful enough to be absurd if they were not so sad.
There was the hip, guitar-playing priest known to television audiences; after his death, it was revealed that he had fathered two children with a housekeeper who had sought his help years earlier as a homeless girl.
There was the pedophile priest who refused to return to Northern Ireland to answer child-abuse charges; the long delay in his extradition led to the collapse of the government of Prime Minister Albert Reynolds in 1995.
There was Sean Fortune, a well-known priest who committed suicide in 1999, shortly before he was to stand trial on dozens of charges that he had assaulted young boys. Before washing down barbiturates with whiskey, he dressed in his priest's garb and placed a poem he had written, "A Message From Heaven to My Family," on a dressing table, along with instructions that it be read at his funeral Mass.
[On Saturday, the Vatican announced that Pope John Paul II had accepted the resignation of Brendan Comiskey, the Bishop of Ferns in County Wexford, which the bishop offered on April 1 amid allegations that he had mishandled years of complaints about Father Fortune.]
Last year, a country renowned for exporting its priests, nuns and religious brothers had fewer than 100 people enter into vocations, compared with an annual average of more than 1,400 in the 1960's. The Archdiocese of Dublin — Ireland's largest diocese, with more than one million Catholics — expects to ordain just one priest this year, as it did last year, and at a time when more than 40 percent of its priests are over the age of 60.
Even so, the archdiocese is resisting any urge to follow the United States in recruiting priests from other countries, according to the Rev. Kevin Doran, the director of vocation for the archdiocese. To do so would signal to the laity that "you don't necessarily have to make a commitment" to fostering vocations, he said. "In the end, the only way to have people sit up and take notice is to let them experience firsthand the problems that result from their own behavior."
Such a dare may not sit well with an Irish laity that grows ever-more skeptical of the hierarchy.
The psychic connection between Ireland and Catholicism was once so strong that Sunday Mass achieved nearly perfect attendance in 1900, with regular attendance remaining above 90 percent into the early 1970's. It is now estimated to be around 60 percent — still higher than the United States and the rest of Europe, but a marked drop.
Alan Burke is among those the church has lost. He is 41, a Dublin firefighter who was raised by parents he described as "moderately fanatical" about Catholicism. After a pleasant experience with nuns in kindergarten, he graduated to a school run by the Christian Brothers, he said, "and it was sheer terror for six years."
He remembers the leather strap — "12 of the best across the hands" — for being late; the time a teacher slammed his 8-year-old brother's face into a wall, breaking teeth; and the common advice to "steer clear of that fella," in reference to one or two teachers.
He no longer believes in God, he said, and neither he nor his wife, Angela, attends Mass. But their children attend parochial school — there is little choice in Ireland — which "causes big problems," he said. "The way my wife and I handle it is, we let them learn the stuff and basically don't practice any of it."
Therese Dolan, 36, an aromatherapist whose workweek includes one day at the Darndale parish, provides what Irish sociologists say is a more typical viewpoint. She grew up in rural County Galway, where she remembers dutiful church attendance, the "doom and black" of Good Friday, and a local pastor so imposing "that you'd nearly be afraid of him."
While living in New York City for 13 years, she said, her exposure to other faiths led her to believe in a more "universal God." Now, back in Ireland for more than a year, she said she still felt the church's pull, and recently went to an intimate Mass held at a neighbor's home that she described as "absolutely gorgeous."
But over all, she said, she is like a lot of her friends: "I go now and again."
How did the church descend in just 30 years from high and dutiful attendance to such lukewarm acceptance?
"That is the big question," said Tony Fahey, a sociologist at the Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin. "But one interesting way to put it is not to ask why there's been a decline, but rather how it reached those very high levels in the first place."