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Irish Nationalism and Irish Catholicism: A Study In Cultural Identity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Lawrence J. McCaffrey
Lawrence J. McCaffrey
Affiliation:
Mr. McCaffrey is professor of history in Loyola University of Chicago, Illinois
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Extract

Seven years ago the Irish people celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Monday Rebellion: the “Blood Sacrifice” that inspired the Anglo-Irish War leading to the Treaty, the Free State and finally the Republic. During the festivities, politicians paid homage to the memory of Padraig Pearse, James Connolly and their colleagues in the Volunteer and Citizen Armies; towns and villages erected monuments to men who died for Irish freedom; professional and amateur historians produced volumes of description and analyses of the brave deeds of Easter Week; bands played and singers sang patriotic airs; and someone blew up Nelson's Pillar in O'Connell Street.A prominent politician, a hero of 1916, allegedly described the last event in newspaper headline style as ‘noted British admiral leaves Dublin by air.’ The 1916 commemoration was more than a hymn to the past; it was also a tribute to the values and successes of physical force nationalism. Ireland in 1966 seemed a model of productive revolution: a stable community with viable democratic institutions and an expanding economy; an example for other countries emancipated from the scourge of imperialism. This was the consensus of a confident nation.

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 42 , Issue 4 , December 1973 , pp. 524 - 534
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1973

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References

1. Shaw, Francis S.J., “The Canon of Irish History—A Challenge,” Studies 61 (Summer 1972): 113–153Google Scholar. Shaw's case reflects a clerical perspective. He condemned Tone as a man who admired French Revolutionary ideology and hated England more than he loved Ireland or her peasant masses. He also emphasized Tone's antagonism to things Catholic. Shaw deplored Pearse's confusion of Celtic pagan mythology with Christian doctrine and holiness with patriotism. This muddled thinking involved Christianity as an accessory in two moral evils: blood letting and hatred between peoples. Shaw insisted that abstract ideological nationalism was never a feature of the Irish mentality: “The Irishman fought for his religious beliefs, he fought for his home and land, and he fought for life itself or the food to sustain that life, but he did not belong to the world in which national sovereignty was maintained by standing armies; the Irish national consciousness was more subtle, more spiritual and, I am glad to say, more peaceful” (p. 145).

2. Newsweek (European Edition), 09 4, 1972, p. 56.Google Scholar

3. Speech before aggregate meeting, September 18, 1810, The Select Speeches of Daniel O'Connell, ed. John O'Connell (Dublin, 1846), 1:23.Google Scholar

4. Kee, Robert, The Green Flag (London, 1972), p. 403.Google Scholar

5. O'Faolain, Sean, King of the Beggars (London, 1938), p. 29.Google Scholar

6. O'Farrell, Patrick, Ireland's English Question (New York, 1972), p. 306Google Scholar. O'Farrell's book is based on a thesis that religion is the fundamental issue dividing Britain from Ireland. He insists that Catholicism shaped the Irish personality and is the essence of Irish nationalism. He argues that the liberal democratic values of Repeal and Home Rule nationalism were alien in character and irrelevant in the Irish situation. O'Farrell's insights are often brilliant but he tends to be more the advocate than the historian and distorts the realities of both Catholicism and nationalism.

7. O'Faolain, Sean, The Irish (London, 1969), p. 88.Google Scholar

8. British no-Popery, anti-Irish nativism is analyzed and discussed in Cahill's, Gilbert “Irish Catholicism and English Toryism,” Review of Politics 19 (01 1957): 62–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “The Protestant Association and the Anti-Maynooth Agitation of 1845,” Catholio Historical Review 43 (10 1957): 273–308Google Scholar. During the preparation of this essay, I had the good fortune of reading Professor Cahill's book length manuscript, “Popery, Nativism, and Nationalism in Great Britain: The British Reaction to the Irish Question, 1800- 1848.” Norman, E. R., Anti-Catholicism in Victorian England (New York, 1968)Google Scholar, also discusses nineteenth-century British xenophobia in relationship to Catholicism.

9. Interview with Jim McDonald, member of the Orange Order in Belfast, by MacEoin, Gary, Chicago Today, 10 23, 1972Google Scholar. McDonald believes that Catholic strategy in Northern Ireland is planned in the Vatican because the pope fears that Communists will take over Italy and he wants to use a United Catholic Ireland as a base to launch an offensive to give the church world domination.

10. Ibid.

11. Recently there have been a number of interesting studies on the crisis in Northern Ireland, but it is difficult for historians, sociologists and political scientists to probe and expose the attitudes of Six County Protestants and Catholics. Creative writers often do a better job of character analysis and revelation. Tomelty, Joseph, The Apprentice (1953)Google Scholar, Moore, Brian, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955)Google Scholar, The Feast of Lupercal 1958) and The Emperor of Ice Cream (1965) and the poetry of Seumas Heaney and John Montague describe the Catholic mentality and persecution complex. In an age when civil rights are an international concern, the Catholic minority is a more sympathetic group than the Orange faction, and most of the writing talent resides in the Catholic community. The Protestant ascendancy is “An ugly race…. No poet will ever sing for them—of them” (Leitch, Maurice, Poor Lazarus (1969), p. 186)Google Scholar. But two Protestant writers, Leitch, Maurice, Poor Lazarus and Liberty Lad (1965)Google Scholar, and Harbinson, Robert, No Surrender (1960)Google Scholar, Song of Erne (1960) and Up Spake the Cabin Boy (1961) have revealed the fears, anxieties, violence and alienation of the Ulster Protestant community.

12. British and American Anglo-Saxon, Protestant anti-Catholicism evolving into racism has been defined and described by Billington, Ray Allen, The Protestant Crusade, 1800–1860 (New York, 1938)Google Scholar, Higham, John, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New York, 1965)Google Scholar, Jackson, John Archer, The Irish in Britain (London, 1963)Google Scholar and Curtis, L. P. Jr, Anglo-Saxons and Celts: A Study in Anti-Irish Prejudice in Victorian England (Bridgeport, 1968).Google Scholar

13. Irish-American nationalism as reaction to American nativism has been discussed by Brown, Thomas N., “The Origins and Character of Irish-American Nationalism,” Review of Politics 18 (07 1956): 327–358CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Irish-American Nationalism (New York, 1967)Google Scholar; and McCaffery, Lawrence J., “Pioneers of the American Ghetto,” Illinois Quarterly 34 (09 1971): 31–42.Google Scholar

14. Recently the Irish people by plebiscite overwhelmingly voted to eliminate article 44 from the constitution. The voter turnout, however, was light.

15. New York Times, February 27, 1972.

16. O'Casey, Sean, Innisfallen Fare Thee Well (New York, 1949), pp. 320–321.Google Scholar

17. O'Faolain, Sean, “The Dali and the Bishop,” The Bell (06 1951): 5–13.Google Scholar

18. Irish Times, August 19, 1972.

19. Ibid., August 12, 1972. Cardinal Conway in his September 4, 1972 Newsweek interview assured Protestants that in a United Ireland they would be permitted to follow their consciences on such matters as divorce and birth control. The implication of the Cardinal's statement is that Catholics would not have such an opportunity. He does not explain how the state could make such distinctions in law.

20. Fenianism is perhaps the best example of the reluctance of Irish nationalism to become involved with social reform. James Stephens and John O'Mahoney, the cofounders of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, became sympathetic to socialism during their post1848 Paris exile. Their movement for Irish freedom attracted the support of the poorer classes in Ireland and immigrant proletarians in Britain and America. Charles Kickham, perhaps the most talented Fenian journalist and author of a number of influential agrarian novels, mainly Knocknagow, had a deep understanding of the grievances of Irish tenant farmers and agricultural laborers. Still people like Stephens, O'Mahoney and Kickham were convinced that the advocacy of social reform would split the Republican movement and antagonize potential Protestant recruits.

21. The quote is from a statemeńt by Cornelius Lucy, bishop of Cork, justifying clerical guidance in the political arena. After many Irish nationalists, including Dali politicians, rejected the implications of this pretentious claim, Lucy clarified his original position. He said that while the church interprets divine law and has the right to instruct laymen on moral questions, it does not have the sanctions to enforce compliance to its teachings. He also emphasized that the church's power “extends only to the religious and moral implications of what goes on”, and that she “has no competence to control public affairs itself or indicate the practical ways and means of dealing with current problems.” Lucy reminded Catholics that the “church no more supersedes the individual conscience in public life than it does in private life” (Whyte, John, Church and State in Modern Ireland, p. 313Google Scholar). Of course in Ireland the church broadly defines the religious and moral implications of political conduct, and, as Sean O'Faolain has pointed out, in a country where the people believe that the sacraments are essential for salvation, spiritual weapons can be more powerful than legal or political ones (The Bell, June 1951). In a country ninety-five percent Catholic, almost all practicing, the church can exert more influence on the public consciences of the politicians than on the private consciences of ordinary citizens.

22. Pietism and puritanism are accepted characteristics of modern Irish Catholicism, but Larkin, Emmet in “The Devotional Revolution in Ireland,” The American Historical Review 77 (06 1972): 625–652CrossRefGoogle Scholar, has established that both were products of a post-famine Romanization movement sponsored by Cullen, Paul Cardinal. The Changing Face of Catholic Ireland, ed. by Fennell, Desmond, (London, 1968)Google Scholar, supports Larkin's thesis and emphasizes the impact of British and American Protestant values in the development of an Irish Catholic puritanism.