'Going Deep, Going Forth, Going Together', Part II: Seeking Meaning in a Transformed World

'Going Deep, Going Forth, Going Together', Part II:Seeking Meaning in a Transformed World Brendan Leahy (bio) In the first part of this article,1 I looked at the reception of the Second Vatican Council's teachings, indicating briefly how Pope Francis's papacy is marking a phase in that reception. I want now to offer a reflection on how three of the social and cultural developments in Ireland of the past decades, when read in the light of Vatican II as reflected in Pope Francis's teaching and actions, indicate directions for our deeper reception of the Council in Ireland. In what follows, I acknowledge that my focus is mainly the Republic of Ireland. The Church in Northern Ireland experiences similar developments but with inevitable contextual differences. I also recognise that what I am presenting are broad-brush strokes. The immanent framework of our social imaginary Ireland has undergone an amazing transformation in the past sixty years. A first general comment to make is that there has been a huge change in what the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor calls the 'social imaginary'. He uses this term to refer to how a society understands itself and gives expression to its identity in terms of outlook, institutions and values, customs and laws. In the Western world people today live in what he calls an 'immanent frame' focused on a being-in-the-world, crafting webs of meaning and seeking fulfilment with little or any regular reference to the Transcendent. Human flourishing is viewed as something constructed in terms of 'this world'. Human autonomy and self-determination, freedom of thought and expression are the operative keys in people's daily lives. Ireland is very much located within the Western world and significantly influenced by two major influencers of culture: the USA and the UK. Michelle Dillon speaks of a 'compressed secularism' that has developed here [End Page 352] in course of rapid social change.2 In an interview in 2002, John McGahern commented, 'Ireland is a peculiar society in the sense that it was a nineteenth-century society up to about 1970 and then it almost bypassed the twentieth century'.3 So much of what was previously accepted as 'Catholic Ireland' with a clearly transcendent, theo-directed framework has experienced a rapid disintegration. Louise Fuller writes that a model of Catholicism in Ireland that gained prominence in the historical-political conditions of the nineteenth century, has simply become no longer suitable to our times.4 A certain Catholicism has been 'dethroned'.5 It is said of younger people who make up an increasing proportion of voters that 'their hashtags dismantle what remains of the Irish Catholic consensus'.6 Catholics need, as Charles Taylor puts it, to 'find our voice within the achievements of modernity'.7 This was precisely a major aim of the Second Vatican Council. In his encyclical Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis has relaunched many elements of the Council's vision. Faced with modern sociocultural developments, we need to be careful, he reminds us, not to succumb to a pessimistic 'negative view' of secular trends.8 In his July 2022 trip to Canada, he affirmed: 'If we yield to the negative view and judge matters superficially, we risk sending the wrong message, as though the criticism of secularization masks on our part the nostalgia for a sacralized world, a bygone society in which the Church and her ministers had greater power and social relevance. And this is a mistaken way of seeing things.'9 Quoting both Saint Pope Paul VI and Charles Taylor, he further commented that 'what is in crisis is not the faith, but some of the forms and ways in which we present it', prompting pastoral conversion and engendering new forms of Church life.10 The whole of Pope Francis's encyclical, Evangelii Gaudium can be viewed as a road map that speaks to us in Ireland today on how the vision of the Second Vatican Council can be further received in our times.11 There is much in it yet to be unpacked as helpful to reading our contemporary context. Let's look: Three features of Irish society There are many features of contemporary Ireland worth exploring...

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