Why artists can't quite give up on Catholicism

CULTURE SHOCK:IN MARTIN McDONAGH'S play, The Lonesome West, the ineffectual Fr Welsh complains in anguish that "I'm a terrible priest, so I am". The incorrigible Coleman offers him the best consolation he can think of: "You're a bit too weedy and you're a terror for the drink and you have doubts about Catholicism. Apart from that, you're a fine priest. Number one: you don't go abusing poor gasurs, so, sure, doesn't that give you a head-start over half the priests in Ireland?"

In the immediate aftermath of the Murphy report, McDonagh's black humour may not seem all that funny. But for all its deliberately grotesque comedy, The Lonesome Westdoes seem to capture something very real, not just in Irish life but in Irish art. In the figure of Welsh – decent but, in every sense, hopeless – McDonagh has given us one of the sharpest images of an Ireland in which orthodox Catholicism is a rapidly receding tide. In Welsh's despairing cry, "God has no jurisdiction in this town", there is the sense of a world abandoned by the religious structures that have given it meaning.

It seemed safe to assume that Fr Welsh, who takes his own life in the course of the play, was the symbolic end of the Catholic priest in Irish writing. And yet, if we fast-forward 12 years to Colm Tóibín's novel, Brooklyn, there is Fr Flood, an old-fashioned, practical, good-hearted Irish priest who could comfortably have been played in a black-and-white movie by Spencer Tracy. Reading the book through the lens of the past two decades of terrible revelations, an Irish reader keeps expecting some twist in the tale, some mean way in which Flood will betray or exploit the innocent Eilis. But none comes – he is that most shocking of things, a good priest.

It is hard, in other words, for Irish writers to give up on Catholicism.

This is not, of course, a matter of religion. Most writers tend to be atheists, agnostics or, at best, unorthodox believers. But the world into whose coffin the Murphy report has driven so many nails, the world in which Catholic beliefs and institutions played so central a part, is too imaginatively rich to be dispensed with without deep regret.

Surely the most poignant and beautiful evocation of that world is John McGahern's essay, The Church and its Spire, originally written in 1993 and re-emerging now with a whole new layer of melancholy tenderness in his superb collection, Love of the World: Essays. As a man directly persecuted by the Irish theocracy – both through the insults of censorship and through the loss of his teaching job – McGahern had more reason than most to be bitter about a church in which he no longer believed. Yet his essay is a more vivid and moving tribute to the culture of Irish Catholicism than any believer has managed to put into words.

It is true, of course, that the essay is valedictory. Writers always write best by the pale light of the waxing moon. Institutions and personages in their pomp hold little attraction, but any declining thing is an irresistible magnet for the writer's nib. McGahern could not have written The Church and its Spirein the 1960s – it is suffused with presentiments of a culture's passing and draws its power from that acute awareness of transience.

The essay is, nevertheless, a great hymn of loss. The writer is not dancing on the Church’s grave, but mourning the literal disenchantment of the world left behind by its passing. The Catholic Ireland McGahern evokes is a place of imagery, of ritual and of drama. “My early grammar”, he writes, “was made up of images.” The poor rushy hill behind the house was not a miserable drumlin, but a step towards the sky and “the very gate of heaven”. The universe had a memory: the sun danced in the sky “in remembrance of the Resurrection”. Church buildings and ceremonies were the Bible of the pre-literate child. The Stations of the Cross and the Corpus Christi processions were the theatre of the countryside. The Redemptorist priests, with their blood-curdling sermons were “evaluated as performers and appreciated like horror novels”. The larger-than-life parish clergy – “from a line of swaggering, confident men who dominated field and market and whose only culture was cunning, money and brute force” – were character studies for the incipient novelist.

There is, as that line about priests suggests, nothing nostalgic or soft-focus about McGahern’s conjuring up of this culture. On the contrary, he is sceptical and indeed scathing about the claims of the Church as a community of unworldly devotion. He reports with glee the reaction of a neighbour to whom he explained that he did not go to Mass because, as an unbeliever, he would feel a hypocrite: “But, sure, none of us believe . . . We go to see all the other hypocrites!”

But it is precisely this steely realism that makes McGahern's essay so potent. His interest is in the residue, in what is left over when all the hypocrisy and ignorance and raw power have been sifted out. His fear is that the residue of spiritual need, of the sense of those intangible forces that surround daily life, will be discarded along with the rest. And, as he puts it in another, broadly similar essay, God and Me, written for Grantain 2006, when the process of dissolution was much further advanced, "When a long abuse of power is corrected, it is generally replaced by an opposite violence". That violence is, surely, the idea that the world is simply, in Ludwig Wittgenstein's formulation, "everything that is the case" and not also, as Derek Mahon adds, "everything that is the case imaginatively". We need to live in a richly textured universe and as the layers of Catholic imagery and ritual are stripped away for many by the corrosive effects of corruption, they need to be replaced. The paradox is, of course, that it is the accursed breed so despised by the Church – the writers – who best appreciate this need and come closest to meeting it.