Catholic pilgrims to Croag Patrick in County Mayo, Ireland, circa 1995. St. Patrick is said to have passed a Lenten season on the mountain. Photograph:Michael St. Maur Sheil/CORBIS

Changes in religious attitudes that took several centuries to develop else­where in Europe have in Ireland all occurred within the past four decades. Since the 1960s, there has been a huge erosion of religious practice, so much so that some observers now speak of a post-Christian Ireland. In April 2006, the respected archbishop of Dublin went so far as to describe a large part of the Irish population as “heathen.”

Weekly Mass attendance among Catholics has declined from higher than 90 percent in the 1960s to an estimated 50 percent, and in some working-class Dublin suburbs, to which families have relocated from older more established neighborhoods, attendance is down to 5–10 percent. In rural areas, weekly Mass attendance remains quite high, but there, also, it has fallen off. This downward trend accelerated rapidly during the 1980s and 1990s and was well-advanced even before clerical pedophilia emerged as a major scandal about a decade ago.

A convergence of factors is responsible for this dramatic development. Some portion of it has been born of broad cultural and social changes in Ireland and elsewhere. Other portions can be traced to pronouncements and circumstances within the Catholic Church, and more specifically within the Irish Catholic Church. I’ll name four key factors here.

The Role of Humanae Vitae. In 1935 contraceptives were legally banned in Ireland, but around 1964 the Pill was introduced and, because it was prescribed to regularize women’s reproductive cycles, it was not banned; from then onward marital fertility declined quite rapidly in the country. In July 1968, the publication of Humanae Vitae, in which Paul VI banned artificial means of birth control, precipitated a crisis in the Irish Church, as it did elsewhere. The Church’s earlier acceptance of the rhythm method, and later of the related but more scientific Billings method, was seen by the married laity as having validated in principle their efforts to space their families. Couples by and large rejected the Church’s attempt at a distinction between “natural” and artificial contraception.

A significant fall in church attendance did not immediately follow, as many of the Irish clergy shared the laity’s view of the encyclical and did not seek to enforce its teaching in the confessional. But the negative consequences of Humanae Vitae would run deep and long-term: a gradual erosion of the authority of the Church as Irish lay people increasingly began to make up their own minds on issues for which they had previously been prepared to accept without question the Church’s guidance.

To grasp the altered status of the Catholic Church in Ireland, one need only look at the country’s constitution and how it has changed. The original 1922 Constitution of the new Irish Free State, which had to secure British approval, was unambiguously nondenominational. When in 1937 Eamon de Valera, as head of government, sought to replace this document with a new constitution—I recall attending one of the parliamentary debates on this document at the age of 11—he came under pressure from the Catholic Church at home and from Rome to make Ireland a Catholic state. De Valera met this pressure by giving the new constitution a Christian preamble; by introducing a constitutional ban on divorce; and by including current Catholic social principles in a non-justiciable form at the end of the document.

But de Valera was not prepared to declare Ireland a Catholic state, and he wanted to protect religious minorities, and in particular the Jewish community, with whose leader, Rabbi Herzog (father of Chaim Herzog, later president of Israel), he was particularly friendly. De Valera eventually extricated himself, quite ingeniously, from this potential conflict with the Church by devising a constitutional article that referred to all the main religions of Ireland by their official names—an idea suggested to him by the Anglican archbishop of Dublin—while recognizing as a fact that most Irish people were Roman Catholics:

The State recognises the special position of the Holy Catholic Apostolic and Roman Church as the guardian of the Faith professed by the great majority of the citizens. The State also recognises the Church of Ireland, the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, the Methodist Church in Ireland, the Religious Society of Friends in Ireland, as well as the Jewish Congregations and the other religious denominations existing in Ireland at the date of the coming into force of this Constitution.

With some reluctance the Holy See accepted this formulation. “We will remain silent,” was the response by Cardinal Pacelli, soon to be Pius XII. Without that silence the constitution would not have been adopted by the Irish people. Thirty-five years later even this subtle formulation came to be seen as giving the Catholic Church too big a role. In 1972, it was deleted from the Constitution by a majority of more than five to one.

The high-water mark of the Catholic Church’s influence on Irish politics may well have been 1951. That was the year the bishops opposed, for being against what they saw as Catholic teaching, a government scheme to provide free maternity services and medical care for children up to the age of 16. The proposal was abandoned by the government, but for the episcopacy this proved a pyrrhic victory. During the years that followed, most Irish politicians ceased to feel personally obliged to follow the bishops’ views on legislation.

Clerical Pedophilia. During the last 10 or 15 years, the Church/State relationship in Ireland entered a new phase, as the spectacular failure of the Irish Church to adress clerical pedophilia eventually led politicians, with massive public support, to face down the bishops on this issue. Human weakness among ministers of the Church is understood by the laity. But lay members of the Church simply will not accept the adoption by Church leaders of a double standard with respect to criminal activity, above all where the abuse of children is involved.

State investigations of such abuse have been under way in several Irish dioceses (one has already been completed and the report published), and all dioceses are now subject to close state monitoring of Church procedures in this matter. The State/Church relationship has thereby been radically transformed.

Episcopal Appointments. Since the late 1960s, appointments to the episcopacy in Ireland, as elsewhere, have increasingly come to be decided on the basis of the willingness of candidates to accept and defend Humanae Vitae. As a result, the intellectual level of the Church hierarchy in Ireland has increasingly failed to keep pace with the rapidly rising educational level of the laity. What’s more, the results of diocesan consultations on nominations to the episcopacy have come to be so persistently ignored that it has almost seemed as if that process were being used simply to identify whom not to appoint. This has created a gulf between much of the laity—together with many of the clergy—and the bishops.

One no longer gets the impression of a self-confident episcopacy in Ireland. Even before the Irish bishops blundered into, and through, the recent pedophilia controversy, there were signs that they were feeling unsure of themselves, under pressure on the one hand from liberal opinion and on the other, less publicly, from Ireland’s extreme Catholic right, made up of lay Catholics, primarily, who have not been averse to complaining to Rome about some of their bishops.

I offer an example from my own experience: the bishops’ refusal in 1983 to meet with my government when, as taoiseach, or prime minister, I invited them to discuss problematic, ambiguous wording of a proposed constitutional amendment opposing abortion that could have been interpreted as banning operations which have always been approved by both the Church and the State or, in the other direction, as actually facilitating abortion. To me, the bishops seemed to be afraid that any direct dialogue would confront them with a compelling argument for changes in the wording, which they could not with intellectual honesty resist but which if accepted would get them into trouble with the right—and thus with Rome. Better to avoid difficult talk, they seemed to feel.

With few exceptions, it is hard to avoid the impression that the criteria employed in selecting bishops has worked against the emergence of an Irish episcopacy capable of offering effective moral leadership. (The appointment in 2004 of Diarmuid Martin, a man with qualities of both leadership and intellect, as archbishop of Dublin, however, suggests that the need for a new approach may at last have penetrated Rome.)

Enda McDonagh, one of Ireland’s foremost theologians, has suggested that “a clean break with the Christendom mentality is necessary,” bringing “an end to clericalism, to the caste system of bishops, priests and religious, with their power and privileges.” Bishops, says McDonagh, should be “chosen as in the past by the believing community they are to serve, while confirmed in the unity of the whole Church by local bishops and by the Church’s traditional symbol of universal unity, the Bishop of Rome.” A thousand years ago, the Church was insistent on such ecclesiastical democracy. Why not again in the third millennium?

Changes in Sexual Mores. From the 1960s onward, Irish society has undergone startling changes in sexual mores. The proportion of births outside of marriage rose from 2 percent of the total in 1965 to 31 percent in 2003, at which level it seems recently to have stabilized. Today 10 percent of Irish pregnancies are aborted in Britain each year. And for much of the past decade, over half of all first pregnancies have been nonmarital. The Irish rate of nonmarital births is much higher than in other European Catholic countries, including Spain, Portugal, and Italy, and is also higher than in Germany and the Netherlands.

Only one-tenth of births out of wedlock are to teenagers, probably reflecting the higher rate of abortion in that age group. The highest proportion of single women having children is in fact in the 35 and upwards age group; in the 40–44 age group, the ratio of births to single women is actually higher than for married women. These figures suggest a significant rate of cohabitation among young middle-age adults.

Another recent development has been an increase in the proportion of civil marriages, from just under 4 percent in 1991 to 18 percent in 2002. Some of this increase reflects the sharp rise during that period in the proportion of the population registered as non-Roman Catholic or having no religion, a subgroup that grew from 6 percent in 1991 to nearly 10 percent in year 2002, mainly due to immigration. But the shift toward civil marriage also suggests a significant change in the marriage practices of Catholics. Since the legalization of divorce a decade ago, the ratio of divorces to marriages has risen to 17 percent (in 2005).

And how would Ireland’s new parents prefer to see their children educated? For more than a century, the state has depended on (and supported financially) a system of Catholic and Protestant primary schools. But an increasing proportion of parents today want nondenominational schools. The demand for nondenominational schools emerged first in developing urban and suburban areas where the child population is rising and where new schools are therefore needed anyway. But as this trend in thinking spreads to more rural areas, where the child population is generally falling, the demand for separate nondenominational education will not be so simply met—a prospect that neither State nor Church seems yet to have thought seriously about.

What has brought about such drastic changes in the behavior of Irish Catholics? One factor may have been the Church’s own past overprotectiveness of its flock. Having used its influence with the government to secure censorship of books and films in the 1920s, the Irish Church isolated its people from changes gradually taking place elsewhere in the world. With the advent of Irish television, established in 1962, and with ready access also to British channels, the barriers were suddenly gone. It was as if a dam had burst. This same overprotectiveness, incidentally, also helped to foster anticlericalism among the country’s emerging intellectual elite.

Second, it has always seemed to me that the Catholic Church in Ireland made a great mistake in presenting its moral teachings on the basis of its authority, rather than on reason, reinforced by authority. Someone who is told on authority alone that it is a sin to eat meat on Fridays and a sin to steal may not distinguish between these two different sorts of rules. The institutional Church in Ireland has traditionally been shy about explaining to its flock how solidly founded much of its teaching is upon natural morality—as if fearing that such a link would in some way weaken the influence of religion. As a result, it seems to me, there are Irish Catholics—many no longer practicing, many of them young—who have been left without an adequate sense of civic morality. This has greatly weakened the fabric of a society that is today much less strongly infused with Christian morality than it used to be.

The phenomenon may be seen in varying degrees elsewhere, of course, but in Ireland the negative consequences have been aggravated by two special factors: first, the sheer speed of the changes that have taken place in our society since the 1960s and, second, the pre-existing weakness of civic morality in a country whose people were for centuries alienated from and hostile to government by an external power. The Church’s waning moral authority in Ireland is joined by a waning trust in other forms of authority too, in politics, the law, and to some extent policing. Tax evasion, to cite but one ill effect, is encouraged in this climate.

But for all the bad news, there is good news as well. The family remains a strong positive force in Irish society. It might have been feared that the scale and speed of the changes in sexual mores, especially among the young, would have weakened significantly the relationship between the generations. But this does not seem to have happened. One way to measure this is by how far members of the junior generation roam from home when they have the chance.

To an extent that some academics may even see as educationally disadvantageous, Irish students tend to go to the higher education institution nearest their homes, often returning to their families each weekend—not just so their mothers can attend to their laundry, but to maintain family links and participate in local activities, such as sport. If they have ceased to be regular churchgoers when they are away from home, they often care enough for their parents’ sensibilities to accompany them to Sunday Mass when at home.

For example, of university students living in County Cork, no less than 87 percent choose to attend either University College Cork or the University of Limerick (as near for students in the northern fringe of the county as UCC). In Galway, 65 percent attend the National University of Ireland in Galway, and in Dublin 90 percent of university entrants choose institutions in or near that city. Such a pattern of attendance would be inconceivable in, say, England.

Close family ties go a long way toward maintaining the fabric of Irish society. And, despite its weakened authority, I believe that an Irish Catholic Church alert to the sensus fidelium of its laity, willing to abandon remnants of its medieval mindset, and ready to take up a genuinely prophetic rather than merely institutional role, also has an important contribution to make.

For while the institutional Church in Ireland is certainly in trouble, members of the laity have retained much trust and confidence in their local priests, whose dedication and service to their flock is still widely known and appreciated by the younger as well as the older generations.

Such is the best picture I can present of the Catholic Church in Ireland as it enters the 21st century.

Garret FitzGerald served two terms as taoiseach, or prime minister, of Ireland during the 1980s. Since 1997, he has been chancellor of the National University of Ireland. His essay is drawn from a talk he gave at BC on April 20, 2006, sponsored by the Lonergan Workshop and the Church in the 21st Century Center. The event may be viewed in full at www.bc.edu/frontrow.