The anger is really fear: fear that you may be able to place the truth before them in such a way that they will have no choice but to leave the bunker, and find themselves. Nothing terrifies them as that does.

The quote is from John Waters, a journalist who had a 30-year career in Ireland. He left journalism, as he says, because it became an “ideological cesspit.” Mr. Waters engaged in an email discussion with a freelance writer named Michael Duggan, and the discussion was published by the Catholic Herald. The Catholic Herald serves Catholic readers in the United Kingdom and Ireland.

Chesterton once wrote that a religion is dead “when it has ceased to dwell on the positive and happy side of its visions, and thinks only of the stern or punitive side.” Does this description fit the fate of Irish Catholicism, at least in part?

JOHN WATERS: In part, yes. In the post-famine period, the Church was forced into the role of moral government and required to restore order in what had become a deeply chaotic situation. One of the legacies of this is that the moralistic note became dominant in Irish Catholicism. In truth, we were told very little about the joyousness of the Christian proposal. We were never taught to connect Christianity with the wonder and mystery and glory of life. We just assumed that reality was some dark and forbidding state that was ameliorated by the prospect of the next life. Nobody told us that eternity had actually begun.

The Church was placed in a position to provide any number of social services, a Church that was not any more fiscally sound than Ireland itself. Ireland lost approximately 2 million souls to starvation. An Irish population of around 8.8 million was reduced to about 6.6 million. To be sure, there was some overreach and abuse.

Before one becomes overly critical of the Church, the Irish Famine was not dissimilar to the Soviet starvation of Ukrainians in the 1930’s. Cereal, grains, and meats were still exported from Ireland to Britain as a matter of government policy in spite of the fact that the Irish were starving to death.

In light of today’s anger, and lack of civility in politics, let’s return to the bunker analogy, an analogy that applies to the United States, as well as Ireland.

Returning to Chesterton, he found his way to his adult faith by reconnecting with childhood and the “submerged sunrise of wonder.” You have also written about the feelings of wonder you felt as a child. They gave you “a profound sense of the religious reality,” but nobody ever told you that this is what it was. However, given all of the antagonism that surrounds discussion about religion in Ireland now, are you still able to tap back into wonder as the wellspring of faith?

JOHN WATERS: Yes. Pseudo-rationality has become the core form of thinking in our culture now: what Pope Benedict characterised as the thinking of the bunker: the bunker that man has built for himself to live in, excluding Mystery, including the Mystery of himself. But I can exit the bunker at will, simply by going through a series of rational steps.

I imagine that I have just arrived here, having perhaps tumbled through space. I think: what if I had never existed until now, and suddenly had the opportunity to be here, to have this life? This enables me to bypass the logic of the world, the culture, the media, even the everyday sense that we depend upon to engage in our essential transactions.

When I do this, I become astonished, as though for the first time. I cannot believe I am here. I start to wonder where “here” is? What is it? What am I? What or Who makes me? I become conscious of myself as governed from without, because I know I do not make myself and have no memory of coming up with the idea that I should look like this and speak like this and arrive in this place.

This is the natural state of man, but the conditioning of the bunker hides this from us. We take everything for granted. We are all-knowing; but all-knowing only about the bunker and its logics. In this state of wonderment, I can look backwards at the bunker, having left it, and see it for what it is: a construction designed to deny man’s true nature.

Like Ireland, the United States has been proficient in constructing bunkers. From college campuses, government offices, popular culture, to the media the construction of bunkers is much easier to do than to encourage critical thinking skills. The self-examination of one’s own conscience is not any easier. Navel gazing is not critical thinking, and is not a substitute for the self-examination of conscience. It is however a wonderful tool for building bunkers.