Derek Hanrahan

What happens to a Catholic nation when it stops understanding what the Mass is & what it is actually for? I found this article in The Irish Times, written by Séamas O'Reilly, profoundly sad. He describes abandoning Sunday Mass 22 years ago and feeling grateful, almost every Sunday since, to have escaped the obligation. At first glance, it reads like another familiar celebration of Ireland's emancipation from Catholicism. The oppressive institution has been left behind, the burdensome rituals discarded, and the modern individual is finally free to spend Sunday morning as he pleases. Obviously this is the editorial intention. Except that something rather more interesting happens. O'Reilly returns to Mass in Enniskillen with his father and siblings, to commemorate the 35th anniversary of his mother's death. Suddenly, the religion he has so happily discarded becomes the means by which his family remembers her. His body remembers the gestures, his knees remember when to bend, his mouth remembers the prayers. The words have changed slightly, but something far older and deeper remains. He describes the peculiar experience of encountering something once intimately familiar that has become strangely foreign, I found that extraordinarily poignant. Here is a man who has spent more than two decades congratulating himself on escaping Catholicism, yet finds himself returning to the altar when confronted with one of the most fundamental realities of human existence: death, memory, love and the enduring bond between the living and those who have gone before us. Of course, he presents his attendance as an act of affection for his parents rather than renewed religious belief...we should take him at his word, but surely there is something worth examining in the fact that the Church he has rejected still provides the language, gestures and sacred setting through which his family remembers its dead? The deeper tragedy, I think, is what his account reveals about the disappearance of transcendence from our understanding of the sacred liturgy. O'Reilly remembers Mass as an obligation, an activity to be endured, something measured in annual attendances, like school assemblies or compulsory exercise. He recalls attending perhaps 70 or 80 Masses a year, but nowhere does he suggest that he understood himself to be standing at Calvary, participating sacramentally in the one sacrifice of Christ, or encountering the living God. I do not say that to criticise him personally. Rather, I wonder what it tells us about the catechesis and liturgical culture of an entire generation. How did a nation once so thoroughly immersed in Catholic practice produce so many people for whom the Mass appears to have meant so little? Perhaps we should ask whether the Church, in its eagerness to make the liturgy accessible, familiar and ordinary, sometimes failed to communicate precisely what makes it extraordinary. If the Mass becomes principally a communal gathering, a collection of readings, songs and familiar routines, why should anyone feel compelled to attend once the social expectation disappears? The obligation only makes sense when we understand what we are obliged towards. Catholics do not attend Mass simply because the Church has devised an arbitrary Sunday regulation. We go because worship is not an optional embellishment of human existence. It is the proper response of creatures to their Creator. We go because the Eucharist is not merely a memorial of something that happened long ago, but the sacramental making-present of Christ's sacrifice, through which heaven touches earth. We go because, in the deepest sense, we were made for communion with God. This is where the modern language of liberation becomes so terribly inadequate. Freedom is not simply the absence of obligation. A husband is not liberated by abandoning fidelity, nor a parent by escaping responsibility for a child. The obligations arising from love are not necessarily constraints upon our freedom. They can be the very means by which freedom finds its meaning. St Augustine understood this with remarkable clarity: "Our heart is restless until it rests in you." What if the apparent freedom of abandoning worship is, at least in part, a freedom from the very thing that makes us most fully human? There is another dimension to this which seems particularly relevant to Ireland. Catholicism did not merely provide the Irish with a Sunday activity. It shaped their understanding of time, suffering, death, community, history and eternity. The Mass connected generations across centuries. The same prayers were offered for the dead, the same sacrifice celebrated, the same hope proclaimed in the Resurrection. This is not merely cultural nostalgia. The Catholic understanding of the Communion of Saints makes a startling claim: that the dead in Christ are not simply figures preserved in our memories, but members of a living communion which transcends death itself. When O'Reilly attends Mass for his mother, he enters a tradition which understands remembrance as something infinitely more profound than recollection. The Church prays for her soul, commends her to God's mercy and offers the sacrifice of Christ. That is an astonishing thing, whether one believes it or not. Yet much contemporary secular commentary seems incapable of recognising this distinction. Religion is reduced to sociology, ritual to habit, doctrine to institutional control, and liberation to the ability to sleep in on Sunday. Ireland has every reason to confront the appalling failures and scandals of its ecclesiastical institutions. Those failures were real, and the anger they generated cannot simply be dismissed. But there is an intellectual poverty in imagining that the failures of churchmen somehow exhaust the meaning of Catholicism, or that the abandonment of religious practice necessarily represents human progress. Indeed, the irony of O'Reilly's article is that its most moving passages concern the very things his supposed liberation cannot entirely explain: the persistence of memory, the significance of inherited gestures, the enduring claims of family, and the human instinct to reach beyond death. He concludes with a joke about being relieved not to burst into flames on entering a church. I smiled at that, but I was left thinking about something much sadder. A civilisation can forget the meaning of its rituals long before it stops performing them. Eventually, it stops performing them because it has forgotten why they mattered. Perhaps that is the real story of Catholic Ireland. Not simply that people stopped going to Mass, but that generations of Catholics were never adequately taught what an extraordinary thing the Mass actually is. And perhaps the greatest tragedy is that, having mistaken an invitation to eternity for an inconvenient Sunday obligation, so many now celebrate their freedom from it. What they have lost may be infinitely greater than what they imagine they have gained. irishtimes.com/life-style/pe…