The Church in Ireland with Robert Nugent
When Pope John Paul II visited Ireland very early in his pontificate, more than ¼ of the population of the entire island and more than 1/3 of the population of the Republic attended the opening mass at Dublin’s Phoenix Park. More than half the entire population, or roughly 2.7 million people, turned out to greet the pope during his visit. One could justifiably conclude that the Irish were as Catholic” as ever. Truth, however, told a different story. As the Second Vatican Council seemed to cause a revolution– and a sharp decline–in the Church, cultural revolutions were also underway in many Western democracies–including Ireland and the U.S.–whose effects are felt to the present day. But the story doesn’t end there. To quote from C.S. Lewis, of all people, from his book Mere Christianity, “Just as critics of the church are patting down the earth on its grave, they suddenly hear that it is still alive and has even broken out in some new place.” Join Tom Caffrey and his guest, Irish Catholic podcaster Robert Nugent, as they explore the Church in Ireland.
Episode Links
https://historyireland.com/a-church-in-crisis/
https://www.catholicsandcultures.org/ireland/introduction
https://www.youtube.com/@thecatholicman/videos
Rush Transcript
Opening Invitation
Narrator: Are you willing to accept Christ’s invitation to know him more intimately, love him more intensely, and follow him more closely, and then go out into the world and live his good news? If you say yes, then you could be the thirteenth apostle. Join Tom Caffrey to share the goodness, beauty, and truth of Jesus Christ and His Church. And now, ladies and gentlemen, the Thirteenth Apostle.
Catholicism in Ireland: Historical Context
Tom Caffrey: When Pope John Paul II visited Ireland very early in his pontificate, more than a quarter of the population of the entire island and more than a third of the population of the Republic attended the opening Mass at Dublin’s Phoenix Park. More than half the entire population, roughly 2.7 million, turned out to greet the Pope during his visit. One could justifiably conclude that the Irish were as Catholic as ever. Truth, however, told a different story. Openness to the world, economic boom, and cultural shocks were changing the people and the Church, often not for the better. While the decline in the Church after Vatican II was rapid throughout the Western world, it was very arguably most dramatic in Ireland, a Catholic nation. The Church in the United States convulsed shortly after the Second Vatican Council, owing mainly to the evolving secularism as part of the sexual and cultural revolution of the sixties and the seventies. It suffered similarly to Ireland, significantly from its own sins. But the story doesn’t end there. They quote from C.S. Lewis of all people, from his book Mere Christianity: “Just as critics of the church are patting down the earth on its grave, they suddenly hear that it is still alive and has broken out in some new place.”
Welcome back, friends, to another episode of the Thirteenth Apostle, where we explore the good, the beautiful, and the true of the Catholic faith and the Church. This is Tom Caffrey, and joining me to discuss Catholicism in Ireland and, to a lesser extent, in the United States, is Robert Nugent of the podcast De Crevi. Robert Nugent, welcome to the Thirteenth Apostle.
Robert Nugent: It’s a pleasure to be on, and it’s great to meet somebody with such a famous surname like yourself that is from where I’m from.
Tom Caffrey: That is wonderful. I’m so glad we have this preserved on recording so I can let people know who don’t think I’m famous that there is fame in my blood, let’s put it that way. To our friends in the audience, I was telling Robert before that my father—his family’s from County Meath. He proceeded to say how many Caffreys he knows. My mother, her maiden name is Caffrey, but as far as I know, she’s from Cork. Her family’s from Cork.
Robert Nugent: Okay. Yes.
Tom Caffrey: I’m ninety-nine percent sure she’s from the Cork area, and I know my father’s family’s from Meath. Do Meathians and Corkians historically get along?
Robert Nugent: Yeah. There was movement of people around Ireland anyway, so surnames are not very static, but Caffrey is a very well-known surname from where I grew up. It’s not very well-known where I currently live now, which is three hours away from Meath, but where I grew up, I remember lots of Caffreys, so I’m not surprised that your family’s from there. That’s amazing.
Tom Caffrey: So if I go there and meet you, and you’re in Mayo, you said, right?
Robert Nugent: Yeah.
Tom Caffrey: Is it possible we could turn that around a little bit so that some of what is known in Meath could be known in Mayo with the Caffrey clan?
Robert Nugent: Absolutely, yes, no problem. You’ll visit lots of shops over in Meath that carry the name Caffrey. I remember a few shops, a few families that had shops that were called Caffrey. You’ll definitely find a lot of connections there.
Tom Caffrey: Any discounts?
Robert Nugent: I’m sure once you claim the long-lost Irish relative, you’ll get a cup of tea at least.
Tom Caffrey: That’s wonderful. So, your life, certainly your faith aspect of it, but not just that.
Robert Nugent’s Background and Family History
Robert Nugent: I’m from County Meath, on the border of County Meath. My family comes from a town called Delvin, which is in Westmeath. I’m the thirty-second generation Nugent. We came to Ireland with the Normans many centuries ago. Kind of turned Anglo-Irish, even though Normandy isn’t really Anglo—it’s in Normandy—so descended from the Vikings many centuries prior to that. A long history there and kind of rooted in that part of Ireland for centuries. Grew up there, went to school in Lobinstown, a little town, and then at eighteen joined the Legion of Christ. I went to seminary novitiate in Italy, seminary studies in Italy and Spain. Didn’t think it was my vocation and left after about eight and a half years in 1999. Then met my beautiful wife, Kinga, who is from Poland, and we have three beautiful children. For the last twenty, twenty-five years, I’ve been working with an American multinational and enjoying life here in Ireland with the family.
Over the last five years, especially since COVID started, the podcast De Crevi—it’s the family motto. It’s what Prince Laval Nugent used when he returned Pope Pius VII to Rome after the Napoleonic captivity, when he defeated Napoleon’s brother-in-law, Murat, at the Battle of Magliano, south of Monte Cassino, just below Monte Cassino, where Pope Leo was just a few days ago. We have deep ties to our deep Catholic roots in our family. A Jesuit, Robert Nugent, was the head of the Jesuits in Ireland during the Reformation. We were some of the first Nugents to give up everything, leave Ireland during the Catholic persecution under Queen Elizabeth and her father. We were directly related to Queen Elizabeth at the time through her mother’s family because of intermarriage, really because of a Norman family. We were the first to write an English-Irish dictionary and taught Queen Elizabeth Irish at the time, which she did speak to some extent because we were wards of King Henry. He would take the first-born Norman boys to stop the Irish families rebelling. But the faith was incredibly important, and they gave up everything to defend the faith—estates, families, lands, everything. Went into exile to Spain initially rather than renegade the faith. There are many different stories touching on the Catholic faith in my family.
One of them was during that time, and this is probably one of the interesting ones: we found out in Delvin there was a Eucharistic miracle where the Nugents go in with the Bishop of Ardagh to celebrate Mass in their chapel, in the Nugent Chapel in Delvin, and they find a host in a chalice on an altar that the priest had left from a previous Mass. When the Bishop goes to try and take the host, it was moving from one side of the altar. Nobody could actually touch the host, so they had to get the priest who said Mass to come and collect the host. This is documented in a book. They must have witnessed this Eucharistic miracle. That exact host was actually taken to France later on by an Irish priest who went into exile. So there were miracles during the time of persecution to confirm people’s faith so that all wasn’t lost. Lots of different stories in different centuries of our family. But I suppose when we saw the nonsense during COVID, I started blogging. That’s really where I stepped in to kind of take up my role in my generation to defend what previous generations held sacred and true and the faith that they defended for so long.
Tom Caffrey: That’s a noble struggle just in light of my introduction about the big changes in Ireland. By the way, in the intro and other sources, there was a frequent reference to Ireland and to the island. The island is the North and the Republic. How do you distinguish it, and how do the Irish distinguish the two nations? If you say Ireland, what do you mean? Is it the Republic? Is that what it really means for most people?
Robert Nugent: No. As a Catholic, whenever we say Ireland, we mean the island. The Catholic Church encompasses the whole island of Ireland as such, so we don’t say “the Northern Irish church” or “the Southern Irish church.” There’s only one Catholic Church in Ireland, and it has dioceses across Ireland. For me, whenever I say Ireland, and most Catholics would mean this, we are referencing the island. That’s what we mean. There isn’t really any border. If you’re driving, which I frequently do up to the North, there’s no border. Sometimes you wouldn’t even know you’re crossing into Northern Ireland. The checkpoints are gone, the border crossings are gone. It’s all very peaceful at the moment.
Connections Through Pilgrimage
Tom Caffrey: It’s interesting you brought that up with the border because we’ll get to how you and I have come to meet. It’s on a pilgrimage that started at the Shetland Islands and now he’s somewhere in England. I told Robert that he’s had amazing experiences, encounters with people, just beautiful relationships that have formed friendships. There’s this one group of women that he refers to, and I don’t know whether he initiated this, but it referred to as the Irish mamas. There’s about five of them, five of these women, who have just developed a fondness for each other—for the women and Kevin. One of them introduced Kevin to your name or to your program, your podcast, and you have a YouTube presence. That’s how Kevin got me your contact information that he got from that particular woman. Do you remember that woman’s name by any chance?
Robert Nugent: Yeah, Kate Downey.
Tom Caffrey: Kate, that’s it.
Robert Nugent: Yeah, she was just helping us with the walk to Knock from Dublin. She lent a few days. She’s an amazing woman. Bye Bibles and doing all sorts—a woman of a lot of faith, definitely. He was privileged to meet her.
Tom Caffrey: Oh yes, he agreed. He would second that immediately. He’s talked a lot about her. Kevin said that in fact, I was talking with him one time on a video call, and he said, “Dad, I think I’ve crossed the border into the Republic.” He’s looking around, and he finally found the sign, an old sign. I remember when I was over in Ireland in the mid-’80s, I was surprised about the street signs. Are they signed Irish?
Robert Nugent: We would just say Irish, yeah. You have dual signage, Irish and English in the Republic and in some places in the North, depending on which part of the North it is.
Tom Caffrey: The names phonetically were almost the same. Dublin, for example, in English—in Irish would be Baile Átha Cliath.
Robert Nugent: There’s a sign that I just saw, and I do remember this from when I was driving around Ireland. It seemed like many of the signs had very similar—there were usually two words, one word in English.
Tom Caffrey: Yeah. I had no trouble driving around Ireland. It was arguably the easiest driving experience I had, and I didn’t expect that.
The Decline of the Church and Societal Changes
Tom Caffrey: Let’s talk about—I mentioned it because you’re doing noble work, you’re doing God’s work in the face of the decline that you know better than I in your country. What is it like for you? How much of the decline of the Church have you experienced? And then how is it that what you’re doing is in your small way to counter that change in the Church?
Robert Nugent: I don’t know if I’m doing anything really apart from just blogging about my own experience, but it’s only as you get older you definitely do see the massive societal changes. I wasn’t blogging at all for many years until about 2018, 2019. Things started to change a lot. In 2018, we had the abortion referendum. Unlike the United States, where it was your Supreme Court that passed Roe v. Wade, and then that kind of cascaded around the states, you never had a national referendum on abortion in the States in the 1960s and 70s. In Ireland, we did. In 2018, it was a popular vote. The question was put to people, and there was a massive manipulation of Irish media by American left-wing movements, George Soros and others—a massive push to manipulate people into voting for abortion, especially using soft logic, some of the rare exceptions, et cetera, to justify what was ushered in. It was extremely sad to see two-thirds of the Irish population, most of them Catholics, voting for this and celebrating it. It was a sea change.
We had the same-sex referendum, gay marriage, three years previously in 2015. Abortion was more popular than same-sex marriage, so people can understand that it was one of the most heavily funded and most debated referendums. The legislation that was passed in 2018 allowed abortion on demand in Ireland. The first year of abortions was 2019, because the legislation came into effect that year, and in early 2020 the first figures came out, and it was 6,666 abortions—that exact number of abortions. You couldn’t invent more demonic. Actually, those figures came out just about when the pandemic was starting, so just when the world was going a bit crazy. There was abortion before the referendum—about two thousand a year, so that women would travel to the UK to get them. But with the referendum, that increased threefold, and then it’s gone up to ten thousand plus a year. You just see this absolute sea change in people’s attitudes. Life means very little, and now we see the invasion of euthanasia across Europe. It’s been debated in England, it’s been passed in the UK, in other countries.
Then obviously we have uncontrolled mass immigration. Again, I’ve nothing against any—every human being is created in the likeness and image of God, and we should treat them with the Christian respect that Christ would ask us to do. But there also has to be a logical, pragmatic understanding of the effects a tiny nation like Ireland will suffer with tens of thousands of people coming into the country. In a little Irish town which twenty years ago was on the west of Ireland, today we have three or four centers where Middle Eastern, Afghan, Iranian, Iraqi, Afghanistan, African migrants are processed through centers all across Ireland. It’s an industry. I don’t like to be labeled anti-immigrant, but it is putting pressure on all levels of Irish society, especially a group that will never integrate with our culture. They won’t eat our food, they won’t intermarry, et cetera. I don’t see how this will pan out in the long run in Ireland.
We’ve seen the loss of faith, we’ve seen the crisis in the Irish Church, a little bit like Saint Vincent Ferrer prophesied when we go towards the end times: we’d see the loss of faith, the fall of the clergy, and then the apostasy in the Church. We’ve seen the loss of faith, we’ve seen the fall of the clergy, and now because it’s so much nonsense with synodality, it’s quite shocking what has happened to the faith. We had a synodal—like every country, they published their synodal synthesis document of all of the stuff that they gathered in Ireland, and it was like the ape of the Church that Fulton Sheen warned about. You’re using the structures to push, usher nonsense, and not a word on abortion—not a single word in the synodal nonsense on abortion. Nothing. It’s as if the Church doesn’t care one bit whatsoever on the pro-life issue. Hindus can defend holy cows, but if Catholics can’t defend the right to life, it is truly sad to see the word Irish Church moved out. But anyway, that’s just some of the things Ireland is facing. I don’t think it’s unknown, these things.
Tom Caffrey: You used a great term: soft logic that was used in the spirit of love now—love to have same-sex marriage in the United States. Abortion was fought from 1973, and finally had some victory at the Supreme Court. But if it’s all in love, well, how can you be opposed to that? Everything is love, love, love. And that did shape—it was brilliant strategy, and it shaped the populace. And now, well, if it’s love, how can you be opposed to it? And not harming anybody. I’m thinking mainly same-sex marriage, but I’m also thinking that when the Church loses—losing is kind of passive; gives up is active. When a Church gives up its morality and its moral standing—and again, this is especially, and I don’t want to beat up on Ireland; it’s just such a stark example of its dominance in the public square and its fall from grace in the public square, where so few, relative to the way it was, listen to the Church speaking in the public square.
Robert Nugent: Well, Christ hated hypocrites, and whether or not people follow Christ, they know, certainly people in Ireland in their upbringing. Although from what I’ve read and heard in podcasts and whatnot, the education of students, youth by teachers who very often don’t believe. Maybe they weren’t unchurched. The children are definitely unchurched. If you give up your faith, if you become a hypocrite, which is what happened with the sex scandal—obviously it was massive in the United States.
Tom Caffrey: I’m wondering if you know about this. You may have heard of the Dallas Charter in the United States, and that was in 2002, I believe, in response to when everything hit the fan in the late nineties and 2000. The extent of the sex scandal in the US, the billions that have paid out instead of going to Peter’s Pence, instead of going to the poor, went to settle these cases. While at the same time parishes were consolidating and closing. But the Dallas Charter and then subsequent charter to that has been a big success in the United States, where the third party, which for the longest time was the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, evaluating the United States Church at the request of the USCCB, US Conference of Catholic Bishops—the third party has shown the dramatic improvement in the reports of credible accusations. The figures have plummeted since the institution of all these guards. I’m wondering if something similar has happened in the Irish Church.
Robert Nugent: Oh yeah. But they were dragged kicking and screaming to doing that. In Ireland, there was an ex-priest—he was a gay ex-priest actually, Pat Buckley—and he used to expose every piece of filth of the Irish Church. He’s dead about two years. He would go after everything, every piece of hypocrisy, even though he had lived it. But I suppose he knew where the dead bodies were lying. He brought down the head of the Cistercians at one stage because of some of the nonsense. The nonsense was being shoved under the carpet, but it wasn’t being dealt with, wasn’t being managed. I suppose the Church seminary formation. All of the seminaries in Ireland closed, bar one. So we’ve one diocesan seminary, we have the Neocatechumenal seminary, and that’s really it, because the formation ten to fifteen years ago was appalling. Any normal straight man with a minimal level of piety and devotion just wasn’t going to fit in with the liberal nonsense that was being pushed in those seminaries. They went off to other seminaries—some of them went to the Fraternity of Saint Peter or to other places where you could get just normal manly priestly formation.
Things have changed over the last—I would say since COVID especially things have changed, and there are some excellent, good priests in Ireland, but the numbers are very, very few. Ordinations in Ireland at one stage, during COVID, there were more bishops being ordained in Ireland than priests. That was the situation. It was the low point and things are picking up, but God is allowing all this to happen because you’re either going to be for Him or what you stand for. What Catholics are looking for are authentic men that live the faith, not the fake stuff that was happening in Ireland. It’s going to take a while for things to renew, but just as things were starting to get up, then we had the nonsense of synodality being pushed, and all the liberals in charge in the Church, the James Martins. James Martin came to Ireland, and he gave a talk to all of the Irish bishops—all of the Irish bishops he had them in Knock, of all places, because these were allowing him to have a voice, whereas if you asked for anything traditional, it seems that wasn’t so much supported. But anyway, look, we live in definitely interesting times in the Church, and we just have to remain, know our faith and remain faithful and see what happens.
Tom Caffrey: Amen. To emphasize that final point and C.S. Lewis’s comment, in the United States, there’s areas of bust—the old areas in the Northeast, where I am. But in the South, in the West, it’s boom time. So I know you said with humility that you don’t know necessarily what your program is doing, the goodness of your program, but I’m absolutely certain about the goodness of programs like yours and this one, and that guys like us just keep at it. You’re De Crevi, right?
Robert Nugent: Yeah. Determined. We must persevere. And we will. Yeah, absolutely.
Closing
Tom Caffrey: Robert, thank you so much for coming onto the program. It’s a real pleasure to meet you, to have this good conversation. I’m confident we’ve just scratched some of the surface, so I hope we can do this again. I would love to have you back on.
Robert Nugent: It’s a pleasure, absolutely. Hoping to touch base again.
Tom Caffrey: Wonderful. Friends, that was Robert Nugent, De Crevi, and that is both a podcast and a YouTube channel, right, Robert?
Robert Nugent: That’s it, yeah.
Tom Caffrey: Okay. So stay tuned for the Angelus, followed by your prayer intentions, wqphradio.org. Thanks for your support, friends. We need it. We support each other. Robert and I are supporting each other, and we need your support as well. So thank you for all that you’ve done, Marianne, Jean, and James, and the crew, thank you. God bless you, Robert.
Robert Nugent: God bless.
Narrator: Thank you for listening to the Thirteenth Apostle with Tom Caffrey. Tom’s website is faithpilgrims.com or email trcaffrey@faithpilgrims.com. How about you? Will you be the Thirteenth Apostle?
