We are not clear on where the role of the State ends and where the role of the individual or some other institution begins.
EVERYBODY
seems to have forgotten the affair of the Lourdes marriages.
Not
surprising, perhaps, because it happened a long time ago, in the 1970s.
But even people who were adults at the time tell me they have no
recollection of it and find it hard to believe the manner in which it
was resolved.
It happened like this: a large number of Irish
couples, possibly in their hundreds, were married in Catholic ceremonies
in Lourdes over a period of several years.
They did not realise that
under French law these ceremonies did not count.
The law required them
to take part in a civil ceremony in order to make their marriages valid.
Eventually
they began to discover, with a shock, that legally they they were not
married at all and that their children were "illegitimate" and had no
automatic inheritance rights. Clearly this had to be rectified, and the
Oireachtas had to legislate.
But the Oireachtas did not take what
the French would have considered the obvious course: to invite the
people caught up in the dilemma to legalise their situation in civil
ceremonies.
Instead, it passed a law which retrospectively
legitimised their situation.
An Irish solution to an Irish problem, you
might say.
It differed from the subsequent "Irish solution" on
contraception in a very important way -- it worked.
Nobody was harmed,
everyone was happy.
And hardly anyone noticed the flaw.
Some years
later, I attended a family wedding in a village near Aix-en-Provence.
The civil ceremony took place in the town hall in the morning, the
church ceremony in the afternoon.
The mayor officiated in the town
hall. He was a little fat man with a twinkle in his eye -- and a
communist, a fact little to the taste of the bride's family, all staunch
Catholics and Gaullists.
A Tricolore was wrapped around the place where
his waist should have been and in his hand he held an a
official-looking document.
When he began to read from the
document, it turned out to be a sort of lecture on the duties and
responsibilities of marriage.
That brought home to me the French
attitude to the subject.
France is a secular state and a secular
society.
In that society, the Catholic Church -- or any church -- is
ignored.
But the state believes that it has a role in marriage.
And
rightly so.
In the traditional phrase, marriage is "the bedrock of
society".
Permanent marriage, preferably; monogamous marriage,
absolutely. These propositions are too well known to need any
elaboration. They apply everywhere in the democratic world.
They apply
equally to a secular state and to one in which any religion enjoys a
dominant position.
Is Ireland a secular state?
Of course it is.
It
has become so gradually, over a period of decades, with the removal
from the Constitution and laws of provisions which reflected the
influence of the Catholic Church, and certainly not because of the
"aggressive secularism" once condemned by Bertie Ahern as Taoiseach.
There
is no aggressive secularism in Ireland.
The public reaction to the
clerical sex abuse scandals demonstrates that.
Atheists, agnostics,
lapsed Catholics, people still practising the Catholic religion; all
have felt pain and grief as well as anger.
Very few rejoice at the
self-destruction of the Irish Catholic Church.
Many lament the
disappearance of an influence which could have been used for good.
That
influence had begun to decline long before the sex abuse scandals.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the case of marriage.
One-third of
all births in this State occur outside wedlock.
The reasons are too
numerous to list, but it is easy to agree that this does not tend
towards the welfare of mothers or children -- or society as a whole.
And
we do not encourage marriage in practical ways.
The proposal to extend
the privileges of married couples to "cohabiting partners" strikes me as
ridiculous.
How can we tell if these partners are in stable
relationships, much less permanent relationships?
And how can we reform
the tax and social welfare systems in favour of married couples?
We
seldom hear questions like these -- to say nothing of answers -- from
the conservative side. Instead, we see what is evidently a campaign
against the forthcoming referendum on children's rights.
Mixed in with
this are rambling, pseudo-philosophical disquisitions on the nature of
society and, even more bizarrely, polemics about "fathers' rights" and
the causes of the riots in England.
The first arose from real or
perceived injustices in the divorce courts.
For that, there is no
remedy. Judges do their best and sometimes get it wrong.
As for
the riots, the causes are complex.
Of course they include, in many
cases, absence of a stable family background.
But they also include
criminality, which David Cameron constantly denounces but, perhaps
wisely, does not explain.
They include relations between the government
and the hard-pressed police, and relations between the police and
minorities.
Thankfully, we don't have this last problem in
Ireland.
We do have plenty of problems of our own.
And very often we can
find their origins in the former church domination.
I don't mean
the suffering caused, for example, by the bans on divorce and
contraception.
That is in the past.
I mean the absence of a secular
morality in a society that took its morals from an authoritarian church
which exercised thought control.
The Catholic Church is not wholly
to blame.
Another major culprit is our outrageous political system,
which encourages localism and individualism at the expense of society as
a whole.
From the social welfare abuses to the inflated public
service pensions to the near-ruin brought upon us by the banks, we have
witnessed the favours lavished on influential interests.
Thankfully,
they have not caused riots.
But they have caused cynicism and defeatism.
And if all this may seem a long way from the Lourdes marriages and a wedding in Provence, a common thread links everything.
The
French take the view that marriage is very much the business of the
state.
They take the same view, most firmly, on education.
We, by
contrast, are not clear on where the role of the State ends and where
the role of the individual, the family, or some other institution
begins.
So confused are we that some might even challenge the assertion
that this must become, or remain, a secular State.
In my opinion, that
argument is over and we should make up our minds how to run it.
No comments:
Post a Comment