Pope Francis could hardly be arriving at a more dramatic moment. In the aftermath of the abortion referendum, Ireland seems to be wholly set on the repudiation of its Catholic past. A country where the Church was once ubiquitous has set about reinventing itself as the apotheosis of a modern, secular, liberal state. To put it another way: Ireland is entering the Böckenförde phase of its history.
Let me explain.
Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde was a German constitutional theorist and judge, and also a Catholic. In the 1960s, he described a critical paradox at the heart of Western democracies. The “liberal, secularised state”, he wrote, has a kind of hole at its centre. The “great adventure” it has undertaken for freedom's sake exposes it to a risk that the nation lacks the means to mitigate, placing it at the mercy of a mighty paradox:
