Newest arrivals enliven Irish Catholicism

Daniel Strieff Reporter • Profile • E-mail

DUBLIN, Ireland - Less than two years ago, St. Audeon’s Catholic Church was dying. It offered one sparsely attended weekly Mass in Latin and was on the brink of closure.

Now resurrected as the main home for Polish Catholicism in Ireland, the central Dublin church is one of the most dynamic in the country, providing 18 services a week, 11 of which are in Polish, and drawing up to 5,000 parishioners every Sunday.

The fate of St. Audeon’s illustrates how this country’s recent immigrant wave, roughly half of which is composed of Catholics, is helping to re-energize Ireland’s Roman Catholic Church, an institution that had been in steep decline, caused in part by a series of sex scandals involving priests over the past two decades.

Long among the poorest and most pious countries in Europe, Ireland is now one of the richest — and the level of religious devotion is trending toward the more defiantly secular continental model.

But due to the workforce demands of its thriving economy, Ireland has for the first time become a destination for large numbers of immigrants — the vast majority of them religious — from highly educated physicians to unskilled laborers. Most of Ireland’s newest Catholics come from Poland, Lithuania and the Philippines, with lesser numbers from Nigeria, Brazil and elsewhere.

“They’ve brought an enrichment to our culture, they’ve brought an enrichment to our economy and they’ve brought an enrichment to our church,” said Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin.

“Go out, for example, before Christmas to different carol services and the best singers are the Africans. The children are fantastic altogether,” Martin told Msnbc.com.

International chaplaincies
The Dublin archdiocese alone has 14 international chaplaincies. More than 100 towns and cities across Ireland now have Masses in Polish.

It’s not just the foreign parishioners that are having an impact. Non-Irish priests, too, are tending not just to their expatriate communities but to local Catholics as well.

“This is a very important place for them, the Polish people,” said the Rev. Jaroslaw Tomaszewski, a Polish priest at St. Audeon’s, built for local parishioners in the mid-19th century but which is now the official Polish chaplaincy in Ireland.

“We collect people here not only for religious ceremonies but for national feasts as well,” Tomaszewski said.

“I honor the old Irish tradition in Ireland. Tradition here in Ireland is really much longer than in my country,” he said.

Pope’s visit
St. Patrick is generally credited with introducing Christianity to Ireland in the fifth century, supposedly using a shamrock leaf to demonstrate the doctrine of the Trinity.

Though frequently suppressed during centuries of British rule, the Catholic Church gained a dominating role in society after independence in 1922, running virtually all of the elementary and secondary schools and infusing the state with its conservative ethos.

When Pope John Paul II visited Ireland for three days in 1979, an estimated 2.5 million of the country’s 3.5 million flocked to hear him speak.

But that visit turned out to be the high point for the Irish church.

It was rapidly followed by horror stories of abuse of boys and women by members of the Irish clergy — revelations that accelerated a decline in Irish church-going.

A 2006 survey by state broadcaster RTE found that 48 percent of Irish people attended Mass every week. That is still high by European standards, but far lower than the 81 percent who attended regularly in 1990.

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