The Guardian: After Ireland’s abortion vote, where does the Catholic church go now?

Many people connected the referendum result in Ireland to the sex abuse scandals that have beset the church there in recent years and caused a loss of authority. While the scandals hastened an end to Catholic Ireland, it is not so clear that they caused it. Rather, it is Ireland’s reinvention of itself that led to this result. When the taioseach, Leo Varadkar, described the referendum result as a “quiet revolution”, he was borrowing a phrase first used about the province of Quebec. It, too, was once devoutly Catholic; it, too, has become remarkably secular in recent times. Both places have a history of being suppressed by the English. Quebec’s people once held on to their French tongue and heritage and their Catholic faith as expressions of being Québécois. But as Quebec province gained more autonomy and the Canadian government gave French equal status with English as the official language, so Catholicism became less prominent a part of Quebec’s identity. In Ireland, as relations with Britain improved, and the Troubles over the border waned, so the need to cleave to the church as part of Irish identity has declined.

For the Vatican, this severing of cultural ties may be at its most dramatic in Ireland and Quebec, but there has been decline in its power and influence elsewhere, particularly in western Europe. Last week, even in strongly Catholic Portugal, parliament voted to reject euthanasia – again opposed by the Catholic church – by a mere five votes. Personal morality and church teaching have been issues for Catholics since Pope Paul VI published his encyclical, Humanae Vitae, in July 1968, which banned artificial birth control. Many Catholics rejected such papal interference in the bedroom. Fifty years on from Humanae Vitae, Paul VI is to be made a saint. [...]

Much of that antipathy is due to the vast numbers of migrants and refugees, including Muslims, flocking across the Mediterranean from Africa and the Middle East. While Pope Francis has long spoken up for refugees – and took a refugee family of Muslims home to Rome with him after a visit to Lesbos in 2016 – his denunciation of what he calls the “globalisation of indifference” to the plight of desperate people has often been ignored. Instead, in many Catholic places, conservative politicians have suggested that migrants, especially Muslims, are a threat to traditional culture. In staunchly Catholic Poland, the Law and Justice party-led government has denied settlement to Muslim refugees, while Bavaria’s premier, Markus Söder, has decreed that the Christian cross should be erected at the entrance of all public buildings to reinforce Christian identity following the arrival of Muslim migrants. Catholic bishops have expressed strong disquiet about it.

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The New York Times: Canada’s Secret to Resisting the West’s Populist Wave

The raw ingredients are present. A white ethnic majority that is losing its demographic dominance. A sharp rise in immigration that is changing culture and communities. News media and political personalities who bet big on white backlash. [...]

Canada is a mosaic rather than a melting pot, several people told me — a place that celebrates different backgrounds rather than demanding assimilation. [...]

Mr. Trudeau’s solution was a policy of official multiculturalism and widespread immigration. This would resolve the conflict over whether Canadian identity was more Anglophone or Francophone — it would be neither, with a range of diversity wide enough to trivialize the old divisions. [...]

That creates a virtuous cycle. All parties rely on and compete for minority voters, so none has an incentive to cater to anti-immigrant backlash. That, in turn, keeps anti-immigrant sentiment from becoming a point of political conflict, which makes it less important to voters. [...]

Political science research suggests that this dynamic may have also made Canada resistant to political extremism and the polarization plaguing other Western countries.

Lilliana Mason, a professor at the University of Maryland, has found that when group identity and partisan identity overlaps, that deepens partisan polarization and intolerance against the opposing party. [...]

Virtually every immigrant to Canada is brought here deliberately. Research suggests that uncontrolled immigration, for example the mass arrival of refugees in Europe, can trigger a populist backlash, regardless of whether those arrivals pose a threat.

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