I get a knot of anxiety in my stomach when I hear news of another documentary about religion or, rather, about Catholicism in Ireland. It isn’t because I am squeamish and don’t want to face up to the scandals the Church has faced and been part of in Ireland, or because I can’t deal with a good debate.
It is because I know I am going to be gaslit, as modern parlance has it. I am going to encounter half the story, with half-truths and half-lies, and subtle sub-currents of dismissal and disdain.
I should add that I don’t particularly like these modern terms that have entered our lexicon: gaslighting, dog-whistling, stove-piping. They are often a lazy shortcut to dismiss the arguments of another and to try to end an argument, or to establish something as an objective truth while bypassing deeper understanding and the fact that something is more complex. That said, they can be used back at those who wield them so readily in order to push their dubious agendas – as happens all too often with documentaries about Catholicism in Ireland.
But in order to do that, some explanation is needed. Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation to sow self-doubt and confusion – it involves trivialising what someone else finds important, diverting/changing the subject mid-stream, pretending to have forgotten something, or denying what actually happened. Dog-whistling is sending a message with a subtle sub-message for others to pick-up on. Stovepiping is presenting raw information without proper context.
Programmes in Ireland that discuss religion – Catholicism – have a tendency towards all of these. This can be deliberate or accidental, conscious or unconscious. It can genuinely be hard to figure out which is at play. It comes with bias and a narcissistic sense of righteousness – as well as comfort/complacency that what is being presented is part of a popular narrative won’t be challenged in the circles of respectable society.
Aired last week on Ireland’s national broadcaster, RTE, The Lasts Priests in Ireland was followed by The Last Nuns in Ireland a few days later. They did not fail to disappoint when it comes to gaslighting, dog-whistling and stovepiping.
The Last Priests in Ireland was presented by Ardal O’Hanlon, the actor who played the buffoonish priest Fr Dougal McGuire in the hugely popular satirical comedy Fr. Ted. At the start he informs the viewer that he used to be “a pious little boy”, but grew to be “an agnostic, hostile to a disgraced Church”. But, he assures the viewer, notwithstanding the “sickening crimes” and appalling cover-ups, “this is not about giving priests another kicking”.
The Last Nuns in Ireland was presented by Dearbhail McDonald, an Irish journalist who has been critical of the Church, reporting on various scandals in recent history. She opens by letting us know that she voted to repeal the ban on abortion and for same-sex marriage in Ireland, while noting it was nuns who taught her and her classmates to be independent and critical thinkers.
As she describes in an accompanying piece on the documentary in the Guardian: “the Sisters of St Clare in Newry were the first feminists I encountered.Women ahead of their time, who fervently believed that education was the way out of the Troubles that blighted our young lives, they made it their life’s mission to enable us to become financially independent and take our place in the world.”
As such, MacDonald appears more willing to tolerate some nuance, and she devotes much more time listening to and exploring the thoughts, feelings and lives of the Sisters than O’Hanlon affords the priests. Her selection of interviewees is more representative of the Church, of the work and the reality of nuns in Ireland.
O’Hanlon, however, selects a sample of interviewees that can only be described as rather esoteric: a priest who left to be a follower of Celtic druidic spirituality, a former seminarian, an army chaplain, a writer who wouldn’t be considered a friend of the Church, a priest he knew from his youth but now ministering in Wales, a French woman who had a calling to be a priest but was refused by the Church, and one young South American priest who is now a “missionary” to a dying Catholic Ireland.
The two thousand regular, everyday Irish priests are apparently too mundane for a hearing and so almost invisible throughout.
O’Hanlon manages the narrative carelessly: Ireland was a spiritual place way back in the ancient past. We always had our shamans or our druids – the pre-Christian, polymaths and multi-taskers, who tried to “ritualise the metaphysical realm”. And then came Catholicism. That wasn’t too bad initially: we had our Celtic indigenous traditional Christian religion; “from the start we had our distinctive Christianity”. It was Rome that sent it all awry.
Throughout, the underlying tone is one in which we are told that Ireland became “peppered with priests…wearing silly clothes”. O’Hanlon’s underlying internal biases are illustrated when he poses the question to Fr Ted writer Arthur Matthews of whether the comedy helped “bring about the downfall of the priesthood in Ireland?” – as if it was an unarguable good thing to have happened. O’Hanlon goes on to say it was “great and empowering to be part of a wider movement that was beginning to challenge and question and ridicule the Church … Fr Ted was a godsend – it was cathartic for me – lampooning the priests”.
The Last Priests ends with O’Hanlon turning the questioning on himself, when in conversation with writer Michael Harding, and asking whether he is guilty of hypocrisy and cowardice, or complicit with the Church, by having his children baptised by a Catholic priest despite his declaring that he has “renounced my God and my religion”. It is certainly does appear a rather perplexing stance to this viewer.
Both men muse on the human need for “a professional empathiser, a selfless person” while asking if “that person [has] to be a male celibate Catholic priest?” The audience is left in no doubt what the answer to that question is supposed to be.
The Last Nuns, in contrast, ends with Dearbhail MacDonald asking herself a similar question, but with much more honesty and introspection, and certainly more charity.
“I am still angry at the abuse, at the Church, at the state, at society, and how they treated those men, those women, those children,” MacDonald says. “But after this experience I also can’t overlook the achievements of these women who dedicated their lives to God.”
She adds: ‘‘Can I hold two truths? The achievements on one hand and the legacy of abuse on the other?”
Of the two documentaries, The Last Nuns has a much more human and genuinely interested feel to it. It opens with almost ten minutes of footage looking into the life of cloistered nuns at the Monastery of Catherine of Siena, in Drogheda. We later hear a heartfelt appeal for understanding from Sister Helen Culhane, CEO of Children’s Grief Centre, which she ran for 14 years (receiving no salary): “I never had an issue being a nun – I am Helen. I am a human being. Like you. I’m no different. I choose this way of life.”
We hear the voice of Sister Phil Sheerin, who worked in the favelas of Sao Paolo, about the liberation she received in dedicating her life to God, and how, contrary to popular understanding, there is “a freedom in being celibate”.
Most powerful is the obvious distress of Sister Patricia Lenihan of the Religious Sisters of Charity, whose order, after freely offering a site for building the new National Maternity Hospital, was met with abuse, suspicion and accusations of harbouring a nefarious agenda. Sr Lenihan points out that most distressing was to see her fellow Sisters, who gave their lives to their health ministry, being so derisively treated: “Was this to be their legacy, is this what the congregation is to be remembered for?”
She remains haunted by the memory of people burning effigies of nuns outside the Irish parliament and chanting “Keep your rosaries off our ovaries”.
Despite giving airtime to these powerful stories, the narrative repeatedly returns to what the presenter wishes to be the defining identity of the Church and religious: the scandals. Asked if she has any regrets about what happened – the scandals – Sr Lenihan is firm: “I wouldn’t have regrets about trying to answer the needs of the poor”.
The potential witness and testament of Sr Phil Sheerin – relating to the work done by the Medical Missionaries of Mary (MMM) in 19 countries around the world, bringing safe maternity services to women who would otherwise have none – is undermined by the presenter informing viewers of the nun’s apparent inability to reconcile this side of her life with the three “scandals” that occurred at the MMM hospital in Drogheda that the presenter in her journalist role covered, and the fall-out of which Sr Phil had to manage.
What were these scandals? Women who suffered symphysiotomies long after the practice had been abandoned elsewhere, Dr Michael Neary carrying out needless hysterectomies and the employment of a convicted paedophile, surgeon Michael Shine. But these were not scandals of the making of or carried out by the Sisters. They happened in a publicly funded hospital and were caused by trained, professional doctors in the Irish medical system.
There is a fundamental dishonesty that persists in these misrepresentations, yet they are continually peddled – not just in these documentaries, but in almost all mainstream media coverage of these types of stories.
Indeed, MacDonald highlights these “scandals” again in her Guardian article, while also pushing other half-truths and some mistruths: most glaringly, referring to “the excavation of the remains of potentially hundreds of dead babies that were discovered in a septic tank on the grounds of a former home in Tuam, Galway”.
This allegation, a massive conjecture that was halfway around the world as fact before truth even thought about putting its shoes on, continues to be alive in the public imagination through the complicity of the media. It is simply not true to report on “hundreds of dead babies that were discovered in a septic tank”, as clarified in the 5th Interim Report of the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation.
By presenting a disingenuous statement of apparent fact on Tuam, MacDonald’s Guardian article furthers the trope of “evil nuns”, rather than presenting the more complicated reality. This has been the same modus operandi for stories about the Mother and Baby Homes. And despite official Commissions of Investigation into symphysiotomies, the Laundries and the Mother and Baby Homes, all of which tell a more complicated reality. It doesn’t help that these investigations garnered a few days of media attention, with catchy soundbites decontextualised from the overall content, before they were quickly forgotten – and rejected – once the substance of the reports were found to be inconvenient truths that did not fit with the popular narrative.
Towards the end of The Last Nuns, Sister Liz Murphy, former Provincial Leader of the Sisters of Mercy Order, is permitted to ask more complex questions about the intertwined history of religion, state and society:
“Where was the father? Where were the parents? It was society that created the situation. Nuns were foolish to take on the work. Nuns were scapegoated.”
MacDonald goes some way in engaging those questions, but only from a consideration of the welfare ministry that the Sisters took on. There is little effort to understand, to present or to empathise with the spiritual aspect of their lives and mission.
If RTE was genuinely interested in engaging with the decline of the Church in Ireland – where 69 per cent of the population still admit to being Catholic; where there are still 2,000 priests and 4,000 nuns –there are a number of simple steps it could take.
The first step would be choosing presenters who have a genuine interest in priests, nuns, religion and the Faith, and also who are not blatantly prejudiced by previous experiences.
The second step would be to seek out a representative sample of everyday priests and nuns, rather than those with peripheral and esoteric perspectives.
The third step would be to rip up whatever editorial rulebook is out there that feigns empathy, misrepresents facts, omits the full story and continually redirects toward a reductivist and myopic characterisation of religion as being defined by celibacy, the “problem” of not allowing women priests, and abuse cover ups.
The third step is arguably most crucial. We have to hear from this editorial agenda each and every day. The narrative is old, it is oversold, and it is dishonest.
If RTE wanted to do something brave, interesting and genuinely enlightening, it could try to tell the full story of religion in Ireland rather than just the 5 per cent of it that everyone hears over and over again.
Photo: Nuns from the Carmelite order cast their votes during the general election In Dublin, Republic Of Ireland, 17 May 2002. (Photo By Joe Dunne/Getty Images.)
