Unfortunately, whether due to the superficialities of television histories where there isn't the time to go into detail, or the editorial stance of the makers, it seriously misrepresented the power of the Catholic Church in the 19th century in Ireland.
It created the impression of a passively accepting congregation doing as priests ordered. That simply is not true. Go through the archives and you find constant evidence where the church was disobeyed and mocked.
For example, one of the reasons the church was against wakes was because people at them consistently mocked the church and the sacraments - holding mock masses to the fury of the clergy. Sex outside marriage was commonplace. Illegitimacy was commonplace. In tracing ancestors in Navan parish I was shocked to find in the baptismal registers around 80% of children baptised in the town were illegitimate in the 1850s. I literally came across pages of the register that listed nothing but children with the word 'illegitimate' in a side column. I began to wonder if I had found some register of illegitimate births - but it seems to be the normal register.
In rural areas, illegitimacy was much lower, but still surprisingly common.
The Catholic Church in the 1870s tried to set up a Catholic Party - but it flopped miserably as ordinary Catholics voted for the Home Rule League under the Protestant Isaac Butt rather than Cardinal Cullen's party. The fact that his new party was created almost directly after the passage of the Secret Ballot Act added to the freedom of voters to do what they wanted, not what they were told to do.) That also contradicts the McDowell narrative.
In the 1890s the church took a strongly anti-Parnellite stance. The clear majority of the population were on that side too - but it is not clear how influential the church stance was. The party also took an overwhelmingly anti-Parnellite line. So did the main newspaper, the Freeman's Journal. Did they turn on Parnell because they were appalled at his long-time relationship with a married woman? The fact that he was the father of her children? The condemnation of the bishops? Or the fact that they resented his dismissive treatment of critics in the party? Or that the Liberals were taking a holier-than-thou stance based on their own religious base and threatening to abandon home rule? Perhaps it was a combination of some or all of them. It is way too simplistic to conclude that they simply took their instruction from the bishops. They had been frequently ignoring instructions from bishops for years on issues like the Plan of Campaign.
What is striking is how openly many people took their pro-Parnell line literally in front of their priest - again contradicting the McDowell thesis of an obedient populace. In my parish, the parish priest, Fr. Cole, was a particular hardliner. At one stage he denounced Parnellites from the altar and ordered his parishioners Not to go to a Parnellite rally in I think Kells. A brass band was assembling outside, and directly after mass a sizeable chunk of the massgoers assembled behind it, as the furious priest stared at them, and set off to march to the Parnellite rally in Kells. Again, that contradicts the image of an obedient loyal membership of the church. They openly disobeyed the priest and the bishop. (The bishop lived in Navan.)
In a court case which recounts in detail the open disobeying of priests, possibly involving Cole (I forget but have the impression it was him), a story was recounted of an angry parish priest hitting his parishioners with his blackthorn stick at a Parnellite rally. One of them took the stick off him and whacked him hard across the body with it. Another man took great pleasure in telling the court how the priest had bribed him not to attend the Parnellite rally but to go to an anti-Parnellite one instead. He took the money and went to the Parnellite rally anyway, spending the money in the pubs afterwards.
My great-grandfather, Patrick Duffy, was anti-Parnellite. Two of his closest friends and next door neighbours were Parnellites. The priest may have been calling Parnellites the devil incarnate but Patrick maintained his friendship with the Kane and Collins families, and Joseph Collins was a witness to Patrick's mother's will.
Cole banned Joseph Collins from holding the traditional station mass in the Collins home. It made no difference. Joseph Collins stuck to his guns and remained a Parnellite, while still going to mass in the local church. Eventually Cole was moved by the bishop as he was too disruptive in the parish. Again the experiences in the 1890s in my local area, and numerous other areas, contradicted the thesis of parishioners passively obeying the church. They were not the sheep McDowell seemed to think.
In the 20th century there was widespread disobeying of instructions of the priests, and open contempt shown for the Bishop of Meath. The bishop lived in Navan, though officially based in Mullingar, and the church in Navan was known informally as 'the cathedral'. The bishop stormed off to live permanently in Mullingar because locals in Navan, a Parnellite town though the Parnellite split had officially been healed, flung horse dung in on him in his carriage. Flinging horse dung in the face of a bishop again hardly supports the theory of a subservient obedient Catholic populace.
The clergy in 1916 were openly hostile to the Easter Rising. So were most people. The support for the priests and people was shown when the local priests in Navan carried the bodies of the R.I.C men killed in the so-called Battle of Ashbourne into the County Infirmary, as hundreds gathered outside in a show of support. Clerical condemnation made no difference to the Irish republican minority at the time. (Due to the chronic mishandling of the aftermath, the British managed to turn public opinion against them, allowing republicans then and since to spin the myth that the rising had popular support. It didn't.)
Church condemnation of the Plan of Campaign, of the Land League, of boycotting and other issues in the 1880s had also made no impact. In 1923 the church condemned the anti-Treaty IRA and threatened members with excommunication. It made no difference. It was lack of public support, not church condemnation that forced the anti-Treatyites to end their campaign and that lack of support long predated the condemnation by bishops. Deeply religious figures like Sean T O’Kelly and de Valera didn’t suddenly quit the anti-Treatyites the moment the excommunication threat was made. They ignored it.
In the 1930s, de Valera refused to support the Nationalists in Spain under Franco, earning a furious condemnation from the church. The Irish public were strongly pro-Nationalist but there is no clear evidence that was due to church pressure but was just the wholesale fear of communism that was a feature across Europe, with the Republicans seen as communists. Yet de Valera went on to win the general election in Ireland in 1937. He lost seats. So did the pro-Nationalist Fine Gael. Labour, which was split between pro-Nationalists and pro-Republicans, gained seats. Though priests called on people to go to Spain to defend religion by supporting the Nationalists, and support for Nationalists far outweighed support for Republicans, only a small number joined Eoin O'Duffy's Greenshirts. (No. That isn’t a typo. Contrary to myth, it was not the Blueshirts who went to Spain, not least because the Blueshirts were abolished two years before the start of the Spanish Civil War. It was O’Duffy’s new group, the Greenshirts, and his National Corporate Party, that went to Spain.)
You will probably have heard how the Catholic Church got what it wanted in the 1937 constitution. That is another myth. In fact, its key demands were all rejected. In particular, the demand from Maria Duce and Fr. John Charles McQuaid that Catholicism be made the established church was ignored (leading to a temporary rupture in the friendship of de Valera and McQuaid). McDowell made a point of how the 1922 constitution was more secularist than the 1937 one. Of course it was. All constitutions drafted in the 1920s tended to be. They were a product of the quite secularist revolutions across Europe. The only problem was that they were very much liberal elite documents wildly out of touch with public opinion – which was one of the reasons why so few constitutions of the age had public support. By the 1930s, new constitutions adopted Europewide tended to be more religious - reflecting the grassroots opinions of voters. That was not unique to Ireland. It simply reflected the fact that across Europe the revolutionary elites that took power from 1918 on tended to be much more liberal and secularist than their populations. While I may prefer the 1922 constitution’s secularism (though the 1937 one is better written), it undoubtedly wasn’t reflective of the views of the Ireland of the time, whereas the 1937 one was closer to the views of ordinary people. Indeed it does pose a rather difficult fundamental problem in democracies - what happens if the majority of the public hold views that are the antithesis of the minority elite liberal democratic fringe?
The scale of how much liberal commentators fundamentally misunderstand the church and the time period is captured in the 1937 constitution. Liberals think the “special position” of the Roman Catholic Church in the constitution reflects the church’s control over the text. They entirely misunderstand that article and Catholic teaching at the time. The church believed it was the embodiment of divine revelation and truth. Whether it had one member in a country, or 100% of citizens were members, was irrelevant. As the supposed embodiment of truth and divine revelation it had a right to superiority in law. In church teaching at the time, “error has no rights.” All other faiths had broken away from the truth church, Catholicism. Therefore they had No rights.
Yet what did the “special position” article, Article 41, say?
1. The “special position” was not based on the church being the “true church”. It was based on being “the Faith professed by the great majority of the citizens.” That was an outrageous line for a church who believed its authority came from right as the “true church” - not simply a head count.
2. The article said:
It created the impression of a passively accepting congregation doing as priests ordered. That simply is not true. Go through the archives and you find constant evidence where the church was disobeyed and mocked.
For example, one of the reasons the church was against wakes was because people at them consistently mocked the church and the sacraments - holding mock masses to the fury of the clergy. Sex outside marriage was commonplace. Illegitimacy was commonplace. In tracing ancestors in Navan parish I was shocked to find in the baptismal registers around 80% of children baptised in the town were illegitimate in the 1850s. I literally came across pages of the register that listed nothing but children with the word 'illegitimate' in a side column. I began to wonder if I had found some register of illegitimate births - but it seems to be the normal register.
In rural areas, illegitimacy was much lower, but still surprisingly common.
The Catholic Church in the 1870s tried to set up a Catholic Party - but it flopped miserably as ordinary Catholics voted for the Home Rule League under the Protestant Isaac Butt rather than Cardinal Cullen's party. The fact that his new party was created almost directly after the passage of the Secret Ballot Act added to the freedom of voters to do what they wanted, not what they were told to do.) That also contradicts the McDowell narrative.
In the 1890s the church took a strongly anti-Parnellite stance. The clear majority of the population were on that side too - but it is not clear how influential the church stance was. The party also took an overwhelmingly anti-Parnellite line. So did the main newspaper, the Freeman's Journal. Did they turn on Parnell because they were appalled at his long-time relationship with a married woman? The fact that he was the father of her children? The condemnation of the bishops? Or the fact that they resented his dismissive treatment of critics in the party? Or that the Liberals were taking a holier-than-thou stance based on their own religious base and threatening to abandon home rule? Perhaps it was a combination of some or all of them. It is way too simplistic to conclude that they simply took their instruction from the bishops. They had been frequently ignoring instructions from bishops for years on issues like the Plan of Campaign.
What is striking is how openly many people took their pro-Parnell line literally in front of their priest - again contradicting the McDowell thesis of an obedient populace. In my parish, the parish priest, Fr. Cole, was a particular hardliner. At one stage he denounced Parnellites from the altar and ordered his parishioners Not to go to a Parnellite rally in I think Kells. A brass band was assembling outside, and directly after mass a sizeable chunk of the massgoers assembled behind it, as the furious priest stared at them, and set off to march to the Parnellite rally in Kells. Again, that contradicts the image of an obedient loyal membership of the church. They openly disobeyed the priest and the bishop. (The bishop lived in Navan.)
In a court case which recounts in detail the open disobeying of priests, possibly involving Cole (I forget but have the impression it was him), a story was recounted of an angry parish priest hitting his parishioners with his blackthorn stick at a Parnellite rally. One of them took the stick off him and whacked him hard across the body with it. Another man took great pleasure in telling the court how the priest had bribed him not to attend the Parnellite rally but to go to an anti-Parnellite one instead. He took the money and went to the Parnellite rally anyway, spending the money in the pubs afterwards.
My great-grandfather, Patrick Duffy, was anti-Parnellite. Two of his closest friends and next door neighbours were Parnellites. The priest may have been calling Parnellites the devil incarnate but Patrick maintained his friendship with the Kane and Collins families, and Joseph Collins was a witness to Patrick's mother's will.
Cole banned Joseph Collins from holding the traditional station mass in the Collins home. It made no difference. Joseph Collins stuck to his guns and remained a Parnellite, while still going to mass in the local church. Eventually Cole was moved by the bishop as he was too disruptive in the parish. Again the experiences in the 1890s in my local area, and numerous other areas, contradicted the thesis of parishioners passively obeying the church. They were not the sheep McDowell seemed to think.
In the 20th century there was widespread disobeying of instructions of the priests, and open contempt shown for the Bishop of Meath. The bishop lived in Navan, though officially based in Mullingar, and the church in Navan was known informally as 'the cathedral'. The bishop stormed off to live permanently in Mullingar because locals in Navan, a Parnellite town though the Parnellite split had officially been healed, flung horse dung in on him in his carriage. Flinging horse dung in the face of a bishop again hardly supports the theory of a subservient obedient Catholic populace.
The clergy in 1916 were openly hostile to the Easter Rising. So were most people. The support for the priests and people was shown when the local priests in Navan carried the bodies of the R.I.C men killed in the so-called Battle of Ashbourne into the County Infirmary, as hundreds gathered outside in a show of support. Clerical condemnation made no difference to the Irish republican minority at the time. (Due to the chronic mishandling of the aftermath, the British managed to turn public opinion against them, allowing republicans then and since to spin the myth that the rising had popular support. It didn't.)
Church condemnation of the Plan of Campaign, of the Land League, of boycotting and other issues in the 1880s had also made no impact. In 1923 the church condemned the anti-Treaty IRA and threatened members with excommunication. It made no difference. It was lack of public support, not church condemnation that forced the anti-Treatyites to end their campaign and that lack of support long predated the condemnation by bishops. Deeply religious figures like Sean T O’Kelly and de Valera didn’t suddenly quit the anti-Treatyites the moment the excommunication threat was made. They ignored it.
In the 1930s, de Valera refused to support the Nationalists in Spain under Franco, earning a furious condemnation from the church. The Irish public were strongly pro-Nationalist but there is no clear evidence that was due to church pressure but was just the wholesale fear of communism that was a feature across Europe, with the Republicans seen as communists. Yet de Valera went on to win the general election in Ireland in 1937. He lost seats. So did the pro-Nationalist Fine Gael. Labour, which was split between pro-Nationalists and pro-Republicans, gained seats. Though priests called on people to go to Spain to defend religion by supporting the Nationalists, and support for Nationalists far outweighed support for Republicans, only a small number joined Eoin O'Duffy's Greenshirts. (No. That isn’t a typo. Contrary to myth, it was not the Blueshirts who went to Spain, not least because the Blueshirts were abolished two years before the start of the Spanish Civil War. It was O’Duffy’s new group, the Greenshirts, and his National Corporate Party, that went to Spain.)
You will probably have heard how the Catholic Church got what it wanted in the 1937 constitution. That is another myth. In fact, its key demands were all rejected. In particular, the demand from Maria Duce and Fr. John Charles McQuaid that Catholicism be made the established church was ignored (leading to a temporary rupture in the friendship of de Valera and McQuaid). McDowell made a point of how the 1922 constitution was more secularist than the 1937 one. Of course it was. All constitutions drafted in the 1920s tended to be. They were a product of the quite secularist revolutions across Europe. The only problem was that they were very much liberal elite documents wildly out of touch with public opinion – which was one of the reasons why so few constitutions of the age had public support. By the 1930s, new constitutions adopted Europewide tended to be more religious - reflecting the grassroots opinions of voters. That was not unique to Ireland. It simply reflected the fact that across Europe the revolutionary elites that took power from 1918 on tended to be much more liberal and secularist than their populations. While I may prefer the 1922 constitution’s secularism (though the 1937 one is better written), it undoubtedly wasn’t reflective of the views of the Ireland of the time, whereas the 1937 one was closer to the views of ordinary people. Indeed it does pose a rather difficult fundamental problem in democracies - what happens if the majority of the public hold views that are the antithesis of the minority elite liberal democratic fringe?
The scale of how much liberal commentators fundamentally misunderstand the church and the time period is captured in the 1937 constitution. Liberals think the “special position” of the Roman Catholic Church in the constitution reflects the church’s control over the text. They entirely misunderstand that article and Catholic teaching at the time. The church believed it was the embodiment of divine revelation and truth. Whether it had one member in a country, or 100% of citizens were members, was irrelevant. As the supposed embodiment of truth and divine revelation it had a right to superiority in law. In church teaching at the time, “error has no rights.” All other faiths had broken away from the truth church, Catholicism. Therefore they had No rights.
Yet what did the “special position” article, Article 41, say?
1. The “special position” was not based on the church being the “true church”. It was based on being “the Faith professed by the great majority of the citizens.” That was an outrageous line for a church who believed its authority came from right as the “true church” - not simply a head count.
2. The article said:
The State also recognises the Church of Ireland, the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, the Methodist Church in Ireland, the Religious Society of Friends in Ireland, as well as the Jewish Congregations and the other religious denominations existing in Ireland at the date of the coming into operation of this Constitution.
In other words, while Roman Catholicism believed all other faiths were “in error” and “error has no rights”, the article in the constitution that gave the Catholic Church a largely meaningless recognition based on a sectarian headcount, also said quite frankly that “error Has rights” by recognising all the other religions as valid.
So, the idea that the article, since amended, embodied Catholic power, is a nonsense. In almost every way it contradicted Roman Catholic teaching. As a result, yet again, what Michael McDowell and many liberals think the past was is actually based on a fundamental lack of knowledge.
Michael McDowell also suggested that Ireland in a host of ways was the odd one out in Europe, with a more powerful Catholicism ruling the roost. One of the many fundamental flaws in McDowell's thesis about the past is that it fails to grasp that society in general worldwide was quite religious in the 19th century. Ireland wasn't the odd one out, but quite typical. It was spoken of as if the grotesque Catholic idea that its canon law is superior to the law of the state was unique to Ireland. In fact, that has been the Roman Catholic Church's view in every state.
I was surprised to hear McDowell claim he only discovered this as Attorney General. Seriously? I’m not a lawyer yet I knew that decades ago. It was hardly a secret. Roman Catholicism believes that as a divine-created organisation it outranks secular organisations and states. That is why popes claimed the right to crown Holy Roman emperors centuries ago. Anyone who ever studied history or law should always have known it. It was not remotely a secret. That has been at the core of the clerical abuse scandal – the belief that Catholicism outranked all secular organisations, so it didn’t have a duty to report crimes committed by its clergy to ‘inferior’ secular states. In other words, their laws are god’s laws, and therefore outrank man’s laws. It has believed that for two thousand years and has been at the core of almost every clash between Catholicism and any state. If McDowell didn’t know that he was astonishingly ignorant about history and law, and the relationship between Catholicism and law in countries worldwide. How on earth did a senior counsel not know something like that, let alone imagine it was unique to Ireland?
McDowell also showed no understanding of why Catholicism was so important in independent Ireland. Catholicism over the centuries had become the central badge of identity to differentiate Ireland from Britain. Even if they didn’t believe in Catholicism as a religion, people used it as a badge to stress its difference to Britain: Protestant Britain, Catholic Ireland. Many independent states adopt a unique symbol - and in Ireland, the role of Catholicism as being the voice of the ordinary suppressed Irish person right through the penal laws gave it that badge of being a unified cultural symbol. Had the Irish language not largely died out in the 19th century it may well have been that badge of difference.
So, the crowds going to the Eucharistic Congress weren’t just making a religious statement, but also a political statement about their own nationhood. It was independent Ireland’s first chance to host a major world event - and Eucharistic congresses were big world events. It was, in some ways, Nationalist Ireland’s first chance to party on the world stage as an independent state. The papal legate was being welcomed by the Irish Air Corp flying overhead, the Irish flag flying, the Irish prime minister (and Irish governor-general, though de Valera tried to marginalise him). There was nothing British about it.
To caricature the 1932 Eucharistic Congress as simply about triumphalist Catholicism, and not understand that the event was as much a badge of political identity as religious identity, shows very poor historical knowledge. It was as much a celebration of independence as it was a celebration of Catholicism. That is why it was the Irish flag, and not just the papal flag, that flew everywhere. It was a symbolic assertion of independence.
A critical flaw in McDowell’s programme was that it presumed a hierarchical structure of authority from bishops and priests down to obedient Catholics. In fact that wasn’t the case. As mentioned, people regularly ignored diktats issued by those at the top if they didn’t like them. McDowell mentioned the banning of divorce, and the introduction of censorship.
Neither of those, however, were top-down diktats of the hierarchy. Far from it. They came from ordinary people. It was often grassroots demands that produced them. It wasn’t Rome being enforced on the state, but grassroots citizens, many Catholic, some of other faiths or none, who lobbied to say “we don’t want these. We want you to ban them.” In the 1925 all Ireland election for the Seanad (the only popular election for the Seanad to take place), Gaelic League founder Douglas Hyde, expected to be a shoe-in, was humiliatingly defeated by ordinary citizens because they thought he was pro-divorce. There was no instruction from Maynooth to defeat him. In fact the bishops found many ordinary Catholics reported them to Rome – accusing them of being too liberal, or “modernist” (to use the idiotic phrase so loved of Pope Pius X). It was the ordinary citizens who instead of electing Hyde, or another respected figure, chose as a poll-topper a non-entity councillor from Monaghan.
One final flaw in the McDowell thesis was the idea of not just the uniqueness of the Irish relationship with Catholicism (he obviously doesn’t know about the similar relationships in a host of countries across Europe throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Italy only legalised divorce in the 1970s) but that Catholicism’s abuse of power was unique, as well as being unique to Ireland. The clerical abuse scandal is closely associated with Catholicism (and I am one of its victims) simply because it was the first one caught. Since then almost every other religion has been caught up in similar scandals – the most recent one being Mormonism. Indeed, strikingly, figures from John Hopkins University show that the scale of abuse in Catholicism is almost identical to every other religion. Each has a sexual abuse rate of 5% - which does disprove the theory that Roman Catholic clerical sexual abuse is linked to the male priesthood or celibacy, as the percentage remains the same whether religions have a married or unmarried clergy, whether they have a male clergy or male and female clergy. Given that sexual abuse is slightly lower in religions than in the general population, it seems to suggest that all organisations will reflect the popular prevalence of sexual abuse, with in or around 5-6% of their staff abusers.
The truth about Catholicism in Ireland is a lot more complicated than the rather clichéd, cartoonish liberal version portrayed by McDowell in his programme on RTÉ. The Irish historically were far less under the thumb of Catholicism than he seems to think. They were more than able to ignore it when it suited them – whether it be in not voting for Cardinal Cullen’s Catholic Party, ignoring papal condemnations through the 19th and 20th centuries, ignoring the Church on the Plan of Campaign, boycotting, Parnell, or their sex lives. They could blame the church where necessary to avoid personal responsibility – as when they decided to put relatives into mother and baby homes for convenience and pretended it was under duress (contemporary accounts contradict the duress claim). The image of the obedient masses doing what Father said because Father said it is wildly, almost comically, exaggerated.
Overall, while McDowell’s programme was an interesting polemic, it was dubious history. It made sweeping generalisations that simply aren’t supported by the detail. It presumed a special relationship between Catholicism and Ireland that actually occurred in many states. It presumed uniquely appalling behaviour by Catholicism in Ireland that was in fact neither unique to Ireland or indeed unique to Catholicism. It presumes a rather clichéd image of ordinary Catholics in the past as obedient sheep ready to be hunted wherever their shepherd priest or bishop wanted them to go. In that, it had no idea of just how independent ordinary Irish Catholics have tended to be throughout history, and how many times Catholics entirely ignored and often disrespected the priests and bishops (and you can hardly get any more disrespect than flinging horse dung into the face of the Bishop of Meath!)
The reality in Ireland was much more complicated, and far more independent-minded and nuanced than McDowell’s thesis allowed for. As a polemic, the programme was interesting. As an accurate understanding of the history of Ireland, it was cartoonish and superficial.
➽ Jim Duffy is a writer-historian.
So, the idea that the article, since amended, embodied Catholic power, is a nonsense. In almost every way it contradicted Roman Catholic teaching. As a result, yet again, what Michael McDowell and many liberals think the past was is actually based on a fundamental lack of knowledge.
Michael McDowell also suggested that Ireland in a host of ways was the odd one out in Europe, with a more powerful Catholicism ruling the roost. One of the many fundamental flaws in McDowell's thesis about the past is that it fails to grasp that society in general worldwide was quite religious in the 19th century. Ireland wasn't the odd one out, but quite typical. It was spoken of as if the grotesque Catholic idea that its canon law is superior to the law of the state was unique to Ireland. In fact, that has been the Roman Catholic Church's view in every state.
I was surprised to hear McDowell claim he only discovered this as Attorney General. Seriously? I’m not a lawyer yet I knew that decades ago. It was hardly a secret. Roman Catholicism believes that as a divine-created organisation it outranks secular organisations and states. That is why popes claimed the right to crown Holy Roman emperors centuries ago. Anyone who ever studied history or law should always have known it. It was not remotely a secret. That has been at the core of the clerical abuse scandal – the belief that Catholicism outranked all secular organisations, so it didn’t have a duty to report crimes committed by its clergy to ‘inferior’ secular states. In other words, their laws are god’s laws, and therefore outrank man’s laws. It has believed that for two thousand years and has been at the core of almost every clash between Catholicism and any state. If McDowell didn’t know that he was astonishingly ignorant about history and law, and the relationship between Catholicism and law in countries worldwide. How on earth did a senior counsel not know something like that, let alone imagine it was unique to Ireland?
McDowell also showed no understanding of why Catholicism was so important in independent Ireland. Catholicism over the centuries had become the central badge of identity to differentiate Ireland from Britain. Even if they didn’t believe in Catholicism as a religion, people used it as a badge to stress its difference to Britain: Protestant Britain, Catholic Ireland. Many independent states adopt a unique symbol - and in Ireland, the role of Catholicism as being the voice of the ordinary suppressed Irish person right through the penal laws gave it that badge of being a unified cultural symbol. Had the Irish language not largely died out in the 19th century it may well have been that badge of difference.
So, the crowds going to the Eucharistic Congress weren’t just making a religious statement, but also a political statement about their own nationhood. It was independent Ireland’s first chance to host a major world event - and Eucharistic congresses were big world events. It was, in some ways, Nationalist Ireland’s first chance to party on the world stage as an independent state. The papal legate was being welcomed by the Irish Air Corp flying overhead, the Irish flag flying, the Irish prime minister (and Irish governor-general, though de Valera tried to marginalise him). There was nothing British about it.
To caricature the 1932 Eucharistic Congress as simply about triumphalist Catholicism, and not understand that the event was as much a badge of political identity as religious identity, shows very poor historical knowledge. It was as much a celebration of independence as it was a celebration of Catholicism. That is why it was the Irish flag, and not just the papal flag, that flew everywhere. It was a symbolic assertion of independence.
A critical flaw in McDowell’s programme was that it presumed a hierarchical structure of authority from bishops and priests down to obedient Catholics. In fact that wasn’t the case. As mentioned, people regularly ignored diktats issued by those at the top if they didn’t like them. McDowell mentioned the banning of divorce, and the introduction of censorship.
Neither of those, however, were top-down diktats of the hierarchy. Far from it. They came from ordinary people. It was often grassroots demands that produced them. It wasn’t Rome being enforced on the state, but grassroots citizens, many Catholic, some of other faiths or none, who lobbied to say “we don’t want these. We want you to ban them.” In the 1925 all Ireland election for the Seanad (the only popular election for the Seanad to take place), Gaelic League founder Douglas Hyde, expected to be a shoe-in, was humiliatingly defeated by ordinary citizens because they thought he was pro-divorce. There was no instruction from Maynooth to defeat him. In fact the bishops found many ordinary Catholics reported them to Rome – accusing them of being too liberal, or “modernist” (to use the idiotic phrase so loved of Pope Pius X). It was the ordinary citizens who instead of electing Hyde, or another respected figure, chose as a poll-topper a non-entity councillor from Monaghan.
One final flaw in the McDowell thesis was the idea of not just the uniqueness of the Irish relationship with Catholicism (he obviously doesn’t know about the similar relationships in a host of countries across Europe throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Italy only legalised divorce in the 1970s) but that Catholicism’s abuse of power was unique, as well as being unique to Ireland. The clerical abuse scandal is closely associated with Catholicism (and I am one of its victims) simply because it was the first one caught. Since then almost every other religion has been caught up in similar scandals – the most recent one being Mormonism. Indeed, strikingly, figures from John Hopkins University show that the scale of abuse in Catholicism is almost identical to every other religion. Each has a sexual abuse rate of 5% - which does disprove the theory that Roman Catholic clerical sexual abuse is linked to the male priesthood or celibacy, as the percentage remains the same whether religions have a married or unmarried clergy, whether they have a male clergy or male and female clergy. Given that sexual abuse is slightly lower in religions than in the general population, it seems to suggest that all organisations will reflect the popular prevalence of sexual abuse, with in or around 5-6% of their staff abusers.
The truth about Catholicism in Ireland is a lot more complicated than the rather clichéd, cartoonish liberal version portrayed by McDowell in his programme on RTÉ. The Irish historically were far less under the thumb of Catholicism than he seems to think. They were more than able to ignore it when it suited them – whether it be in not voting for Cardinal Cullen’s Catholic Party, ignoring papal condemnations through the 19th and 20th centuries, ignoring the Church on the Plan of Campaign, boycotting, Parnell, or their sex lives. They could blame the church where necessary to avoid personal responsibility – as when they decided to put relatives into mother and baby homes for convenience and pretended it was under duress (contemporary accounts contradict the duress claim). The image of the obedient masses doing what Father said because Father said it is wildly, almost comically, exaggerated.
Overall, while McDowell’s programme was an interesting polemic, it was dubious history. It made sweeping generalisations that simply aren’t supported by the detail. It presumed a special relationship between Catholicism and Ireland that actually occurred in many states. It presumed uniquely appalling behaviour by Catholicism in Ireland that was in fact neither unique to Ireland or indeed unique to Catholicism. It presumes a rather clichéd image of ordinary Catholics in the past as obedient sheep ready to be hunted wherever their shepherd priest or bishop wanted them to go. In that, it had no idea of just how independent ordinary Irish Catholics have tended to be throughout history, and how many times Catholics entirely ignored and often disrespected the priests and bishops (and you can hardly get any more disrespect than flinging horse dung into the face of the Bishop of Meath!)
The reality in Ireland was much more complicated, and far more independent-minded and nuanced than McDowell’s thesis allowed for. As a polemic, the programme was interesting. As an accurate understanding of the history of Ireland, it was cartoonish and superficial.
➽ Jim Duffy is a writer-historian.
A very engaging and evidentially supported review. Nuance and shading is the stuff of real life.
ReplyDeleteQuality piece, Jim. Thanks for that. Any other examples of liberal constitutions being out of step with popular opinion post WW1? Poland? Spain (significant parts of it anyway) might also be in there?....... Remember reading in Breandán Mac Suibhne's The End of Outrage (great book by the way) that weekly attendance at mass in Ireland dates only from the mid to late 19th century.
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