Catholic Ireland, as we knew it, is finished, it seems. When did this happen? The same-sex marriage referendum result – and, just as importantly perhaps, the way in which the debate unfolded – provides a clear marker, hard to quibble with. But Mary Kenny was already waving goodbye to Catholic Ireland in a book first published in 2000, in which she said that the game was up (for most of the younger Irish, at least) by the end of the 1990s.
The excellent blogger Irish Papist provides a typically idiosyncratic but arresting account of when the penny dropped for him: “I was walking down Grafton Street, Dublin’s showpiece street. From a shop’s sound system I heard Frank Sinatra (or was it Bing Crosby?) singing: ‘Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel, Born is the king of Israel.’ And, out of nowhere, I was crushed by the realisation that Ireland had been a Catholic country in my childhood, and was so no longer.”
No doubt there will still be attempts to save Catholic Ireland or to finish it off, to mourn it or to dance on its grave. We wait to see what takes its place or whether it might even one day return and, if so, in what form.
But surely a little space is opening up to ask and answer the question: what kind of place was old Catholic Ireland really – a place that was once dear to so many but which is now passing from view under a cloud of shame and disrepute?
One rich source of evidence can be found in the religious pamphlets and periodicals that rolled off the presses of publishers such as the Irish Messenger and the Catholic Truth Society of Ireland in the first half of the 20th century. In Goodbye to Catholic Ireland, Mary Kenny reports that the circulation figures of the devotional magazine The Messenger of the Sacred Heart made a staggering leap from 7,000 to 300,000 over the space of 30 years prior to the 1920s.
So, what do these pamphlets tell us? There is, no doubt, evidence for the worst of Catholic Ireland: insularity, authoritarianism, sanctimoniousness, faults that even many of its defenders often now accept were present to some degree.
But what also strikes me when leafing through these pamphlets is the sheer seriousness they convey, pulsing away at the heart of popular culture. Not just seriousness about the pressing questions of the day, but deep, dogged seriousness about the purpose of life and the soul of the nation. Catholic social doctrine is particularly prominent, revealed in titles such as The Church and the Working Man (1937), written by the assistant secretary of the Irish National Teachers Organisation; or The Rights and Duties of Labour (1935) by the Very Rev Canon J Kelleher. In them, one finds the same mixture of themes as in Rerum Novarum, the 1891 encyclical by Pope Leo XIII: rage against those whom we would now call fat cats; implacable opposition to socialism; the promise of a golden mean.
The 1950s is sometimes said to represent the high watermark of Catholic Ireland. In 1952, James Devane felt able to write, somewhat smugly: “Perhaps the Republic of Ireland is the only integral Catholic state in the whole world: a Catholic state as it existed in the Middle Ages.”
The same writer struck a different note in an edition of The Irish Rosary three years later. In a literate yet keening piece called “The End of Old Ireland”, displaying a sympathy for cultures across a wide canvas of time and place, we hear a note of rage – rage against the dying of the lux aeterna as it had shone in Ireland. In a tavern in the west, Devane listens to old people singing, playing the fiddle, telling stories. With “that easy grace that cannot be bought for gold nor learned from books, they walked into the night to oblivion and to seeming death”.
And yet this same edition of The Irish Rosary was teeming with life: scores of advertisements for a range of products that suggest the magazine was destined to end up in homes from every stratum of society; earnest articles on subjects such as science under communism or the Renaissance painter Fra Angelico.
How were these pamphlets received? This is a question for another day and greater research, but one wonders whether respect for Church authority was so strong and widespread that articles published under the banner of the Catholic Truth Society, for instance, were sometimes taken to be simply that, the truth and nothing but. (There is no letters page in The Irish Rosary.)
Perhaps, then these pamphlets give us the key to Catholic Ireland. It was a most paradoxical place. A place where there was an abundance of serious thought, but a dearth of serious debate; a place, perhaps, where sincere high-mindedness eventually undid itself through sheer high-handedness?
Michael Duggan is a freelance writer. Examples of pamphlets discussed in this article can be found on the website lxoa.wordpress.com/catholic-pamphlets
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