At a Mass said in Latin on Sunday, Ireland’s traditional Catholics declared political victory, days after a pair of referendums aimed toward secularizing the Irish Constitution were unexpectedly and resoundingly defeated.
On Friday, the Irish government put two measures to a vote that will have prolonged the rights of single couples within the country’s structure and removed language defining women’s roles “throughout the home.” Both had been widely expected to pass despite having fun with little debate within the Dail, or Irish parliament, and after a rubber stamp by all three of the Irish Republic’s foremost political parties.
Both proposals failed, even in progressive Dublin. When all votes were counted, 67.7% of voters had rejected the family amendment, while 73.9% rejected the measure coping with women’s roles, known as the care amendment. Turnout was 44.4%.
On Sunday, as pundits and reporters struggled to clarify essentially the most strongly rejected referendum within the republic’s history, roughly 200 traditional Catholics, many of their 30s and 40s, gathered at St. Kevin’s Church, Harrington Street, one in every of the few places in the town where the standard, pre-Vatican II Latin Mass remains to be celebrated, for a triumphant celebration and a redoubt of conservative Catholics.
Even as a much smaller crowd arrived for the noon English-language Mass, those that had attended the ten:30 a.m. Latin Mass — men in tweed jackets and girls in long skirts and white, floral head coverings — packed into the tight parish hall for tea, still buzzing with delight on the vote.
The Latin Mass was largely done away with by the Second Vatican Council, when bishops meeting in Rome from 1962-1965 instituted Masses in local languages. However, some traditional Catholics remain drawn to the old Latin rite that dates to the 1500s.
That rite, which was allowed to be said more widely under Pope Benedict XVI, has turn into a flashpoint under Pope Francis, who in 2021 barred priests from saying it without permission from their bishops. Traditionalists have seen it as a logo of the larger battle within the church over matters equivalent to LGBT inclusion and the roles of girls.
This divide was on display at the doorway to St. Kevin’s, in copies of Catholic Voice, a traditionalist newspaper whose latest issue looks forward to St. Patrick’s Day on March 17 while urging Irish Catholics to have the “courage” to declare that “liberalism is a sin” and deriding the “myths created by the homosexualist movement.” In a time when the pope is allowing priests to bless people in LGBTQ unions, the paper maintained that those that don’t oppose “disordered sexuality” are “straddling Satan’s fence.”
The message that Catholic values are under threat from throughout the church has hit home in Ireland, where society was overwhelmingly Catholic a generation ago. As of 2022, Catholics made up just 69% of the population, down sharply from 79% in 2016. Weekly Mass attendance amongst Catholics hovers around one-third nationally, down from over 90% within the Seventies.
Accompanying this transformation have been referendums by which the Irish have legalized divorce (1995), gay marriage (2015) and abortion (2018).
But references to each marriage as a fundamental societal unit and to the roles of girls in the house will now stay within the structure. “It’s an incredible result for girls, for moms, for the homes and for marriage,” said Maria Steen, a distinguished conservative activist. “And I feel it’s an actual rejection of the federal government’s try to, you recognize, delete all of that from the structure.”
Steen ran a transient campaign that framed the removal of motherhood from the structure as each sexist and anti-Catholic. She said Friday’s election result was an indication that the Irish had “gratitude” for motherhood.
At St. Kevin’s, Michelle McGrath, a conservatively dressed woman in her 40s, said she was unsurprised by the vote result. She attributed it partially to the vagueness of the proposals, which might have equated marriage with other “durable” relationships. “Most people were confused about what it was, really,” said McGrath. “I do not know what I’m being asked here.”
Confusion about what can be deemed durable relationships appeared to doom the referendum on marriage. In a televised debate on March 5 between Steen and Ireland’s deputy prime minister, or Tanaiste, Micheál Martin, he suggested that the court would resolve what constituted durability, which might determine parental rights and inheritances.
McGrath said deeper frustrations were also at play. Steen and the “No” campaign suggested repeatedly that the broadened relationship laws would have facilitated greater immigration into Ireland, which has turn into increasingly controversial within the once demographically homogenous republic.
“People are starting to seek out their courage again in Ireland, and the individuals who’ve been silenced for a really very long time are beginning to call out the apparent injustices happening,” McGrath said. “The Irish have been put paddy-last, to make use of the pun, in their very own nation. They have been sent to the back of the queue while minorities get the bulk.”
Meanwhile, Shane Duffley, an early-middle-aged man with an intense stare, said the proposal on women’s roles was “messing with Irish mammies.”
“You don’t mess with Irish women,” he said firmly, eliciting strong nods from two friends — one a European immigrant with a small child in tow and the opposite a tall Irishman who, like many younger traditional Latin Mass Catholics, homeschools his kids.
Maggie, a middle-aged woman who declined to present her last name, said the liberalization of Ireland had “radicalized” the country. “Ireland has modified quite a bit in my lifetime,” she said. “But that doesn’t suggest that every thing that the federal government proposes is something that individuals accept.”
© Religion News Service
