The fact that so much bunkum has been written on the subject tends to obscure the fact that it is an issue of considerable importance. Whether or not the Catholic Church has contrived to infringe the rights of the randy within the Saorstát, the only matter that seems to interest the intellectuals and the journalists, is of very minor significance compared to the way the Church supports the colonial exploitation of Ireland.
One great issue sharply divides the Church’s officialdom from the Catholic laity in Ireland, and this is the issue of English domination. The institutional Church maintains that England’s involvement in Irish affairs is legitimate, and always has done. The great bulk of lay believers reject this outright.
The bishop of Rome, traditional ‘first among equals’, gradually was elevated into a supreme authority, ruling the Church as the Roman emperors had once ruled the empire, with bishops resembling the old Roman provincial governors. The popes came to assume that they were also the supreme political authority in Europe, could depose rulers and donate thrones to their favourites.
The Normans who conquered England in 1066 were an irreligious bunch, but they recognised that religion was a powerful political force. In the Middle Ages when a bishop died his successor was elected by the diocesan clergy.
The Normans introduced the Statute of Praemunire (still in force!) with the ruling that there would only be one candidate in such elections: the king’s nominee.
The first Norman Primate of England, Archbishop Lanfranc, straight away began meddling in Irish affairs: he claimed jurisdiction over all the Scandinavian settlements in Ireland.
Over the following century Anglo-Norman rulers and bishops were regular visitors to Rome; telling horror stories about the terrible state of Ireland and offering to sort the place out if only the Pope would give the go-ahead. These were collectively known as ‘Rome-runners’ and their activities over the centuries were to do Ireland a great deal of harm.
All the bishops of Ireland accepted this grant of Ireland to the English monarch and when Henry visited Ireland they each in turn swore an oath of loyalty to him. Henry and his successors were not able to conquer the whole country. After the initial shock of the invasion the Irish began to get organised and to fight back and it was not until the Cromwellian war that the country was completely over-run.
The Anglo-Normans attempted to impose the Statutes of Praemunire in Ireland and nominate their own Primate, but in this matter the Irish ecclesiastics defied them and elected their own archbishop of Armagh. The dispute went to Rome and the Papacy resolved the problem by appointing a sequence of Germans and Italians to Armagh. These nominees however always acknowledged England’s claim to over-lordship.
The Pope forwarded the letter to the king of England (the debauched Edward II) who replied that it was all lies.
Edward Bruce was in fact defeated and killed at the Battle of Faughart and the scheme came to nothing, and the Popes continued to support English rule over Ireland.
In practice, in areas where the English were dominant Englishmen were imposed as bishops while elsewhere Irish bishops were elected. No love was lost between the two.
For more than two hundred years the Catholic faith was cruelly persecuted by the English government, but towards the end of the 18th century this slowly slackened off.
Priests had been trained in seminaries in France, Belgium and Spain and with the decay of the old Gaelic society they became community leaders. Inevitably while living in continental Europe they picked up some of the radical ideas emerging there, and this so frightened both clerical and lay authorities in Ireland that a pact was made between the two to open in Ireland a seminary in which priests could be trained under close supervision, with any seen as potential trouble-makers weeded out.
Hence Maynooth was founded.
O’Connell made an alliance with the Catholic authorities: he would obtain ‘Catholic Emancipation’ and they would support his campaign for ‘Repeal’. Both campaigns were bogus: Catholic Emancipation merely allowed Catholics to sit in the Westminster parliament, where they were outnumbered and powerless: while Repeal if it had been obtained would have brought no benefit.
He deliberately set out to harness the sectarian division of Ireland, hitherto the tool of the government, to his own ends: and organised a political machine made up largely of Catholic priests. To finance his political activities he had the priests impose a levy on the laity; the ‘Catholic Rent’.
For the first half of the 19th century O’Connell dominated the political scene in Ireland and directed the political energies of the Irish people entirely in the pursuit of the will o’ the wisp of Repeal. O’Connell and his party at Westminster made no effort to bring in any kind of reform in the administration of Ireland: indeed at Westminster O’Connell joined with the most reactionary elements in opposing progress and reforms.
The end result of the life career of the ‘The Liberator’ was not Repeal but Famine.
In mid-century there were two opposing strands of thought within the hierarchy in Ireland: and a bitter cold war between them. One, represented by Archbishop Murray of Dublin, sought accommodation with the administration and stoical acceptance of misrule. The other, championed by Archbishop MacHale of Tuam, tried to oppose and frustrate the colonial exploitation of Ireland. The disagreement was public knowledge and the Vatican was determined to do something about it, and when in 1850 the Archbishop of Armagh died, Paul Cullen was appointed his successor.
Cullen was a native of County Tipperary but had lived permanently in Italy from the age of twelve. He had been a professor of Hebrew and then the rector of the Irish College in Rome.
It seems clear that Cullen, who became the first ever Irish cardinal, was sent to bring the Irish to heel. As soon as he arrived he called a general synod, the first since the Norman invasion, and used it to make clear who was boss.
To the cardinal, the Church was everything. He simply had no interest in Ireland or its people except in so far as they could be useful to the Church. He even tried to turn the Irish Party at Westminster into a Catholic Church agency.
When Archbishop Murray died in 1852 Cullen resigned the See of Armagh and took over Dublin instead. This was a strange move; a self-demotion, but he knew what he was doing. Dublin was at the centre of things: the Castle and the Viceroy were there.
He publicly opposed priests getting involved in politics, but by this he meant party politics. He himself was involved in politics all the time.
Cullen came to Ireland after living in Italy for most of his life, and unlike the clergy in Ireland he was not afraid of either the government or the Protestants. The assumption he worked under was that the Catholic Church and the English Crown were in some way joint owners of Ireland: each with its own sphere of influence. The administration, for devious reasons of its own, played him along and this approach has been basic to the political stance of the Church in Ireland ever since.
The long rule of Cardinal Cullen (1850-1878) saw the Catholic Church in Ireland develop into a much more rigid and authoritarian organisation, and saw the laity reduced to a role of passive submission, with three functions only: to pray, to pay and to obey. The clergy withdrew into a narcissistic isolation, with the minimum of contact with the laity, over the communion rail and through the confession-box grille. In churches the clergy conducted ceremonies in the sanctuary in bad Latin while the faithful knelt fingering rosary beads in the benches.
Barriers of distrust slowly built up. Issues like the Church condemnation of land agitation, the Plan of Campaign and the Fenian movement helped increase the isolation of the clergy from Irish society. Be civil and vague with the clergy ran an old saying.
Once priests were ordained, or religious took vows, they assumed that they had passed through a kind of invisible boundary, similar to the one that separates an adopted child from its natural parents, and that Ireland no longer had any claim on their loyalty.
This was the situation at the beginning of the struggle for independence, and it was to have tragic consequences.
In the next issue the part played by the Catholic Church in creating the Free State and in maintaining English domination over Ireland will be described.
Before leaving Maynooth, final year students held a lottery in which they drew for seniority and this lottery determined who would be first to get a parish, a deanery and so on. Hence, as in so many other walks of life in Ireland, promotion in the Church did not depend on ability.
Maynooth was a fee-paying institution and though bursaries did exist the bulk of the students came from families that could afford to pay for their training. Seminarians therefore tended to be the sons of the better-off classes: professional people, employees of the British administration, shopkeepers and the wealthier farmers.
For the sons of poorer families there were two possible routes into the priesthood, either join a missionary order or else take a bursary offered by a diocese in America or Australia, and after ordination serve there as a priest. This resulted in the element in the Irish priesthood most likely to have radical ideas being siphoned off abroad: indeed there were complaints from Australia about the number of troublesome priests arriving there from Ireland.
It became the custom to send newly-ordained priests to England for a few years to help out as parish dogsbodies. The effect of this on young men with little experience of the world was not good: they returned to Ireland influenced by the mind-set they had encountered there, in an insular and self-acclaiming society.
In contrast the ‘Western Allies’: England, France, Belgium and later Portugal, Italy and USA, all had governments dominated by Freemasonic elements and all had given the Catholic Church a greater or lesser amount of trouble. So, though the Church endorsed John Redmond’s ill-advised decision to place his Irish Party behind the war effort, there was no real enthusiasm, and Cardinal Logue even discouraged priests signing on as chaplains.
Bishop O’Dwyer of Limerick, previously rather hostile towards nationalism, issued a supportive statement. Archbishop Walsh of Dublin intervened privately on behalf of Roger Casement.
But the hierarchy still opposed separatism. Though this opposition tended to be expressed in the form of moral syllogisms it is clear it was really based on the conclusion that England was too strong and the Republican cause had no chance of success. Cardinal Logue himself dismissed the Sinn Féin programme as ‘...an impossible dream which no man in his sober senses can hope to see realised.’
In the two years after the Rising Republican support slowly grew, and peaked when in 1918 the British government attempted to introduce conscription in Ireland. It was an issue on which the hierarchy could not sit on the fence: they were obliged to come down on the anti-conscription side, which was being spear-headed by Sinn Féin. The Anglican Archbishop of Dublin, Dr. Bernard, cynically and accurately said that the Catholic bishops had decided to throw in their lot with Sinn Féin for fear of losing all their influence if they did not.
That it was an exercise in self-preservation was exposed by Fr Walter MacDonald, professor of Moral Theology at Maynooth, who published a book full of learned quotations in Latin showing that as far as the Catholic Church’s teachings were concerned England’s rule over Ireland was legitimate and the Irish had no case for independence.
In his memoirs MacDonald wrote: “I saw, with disgust, Irish bishops, both here and in the United States and elsewhere, use claptrap phrases about self-determination, rights of nations, government by consent, and other such . . . unworthy of men who are supposed to have mastered the science of ethics as taught in our schools . . . who must know that all through the Middle Ages, when Europe was ruled according to the mind of the Church, little heed was given to the consent of subject peoples!”
An exacerbating element was the fact that during the previous war the Protestant Churches in Britain and Ireland had thrown all their energies into the war effort and by 1918 they had shot their collective bolt: nobody took them seriously any more. As a substitute for religion the British establishment cultivated a cult of loyalty to the monarchy, and this made Republicanism a dirty word.
Cardinal Logue repeatedly assured the British that apart from a very small number of ‘extremists’ the Catholics of Ireland were devoted to their royal overlord. The leaders of the Church were of course also against breaking the connection with England for fear this would hamper the missionary and other activities of the Church in other parts of the far-flung British Empire.
Republican successes resulted in falling Church hostility and even some supportive gestures, but there was no unified position even among the bishops. The bishops behaved no differently to the other members of the gombeen class from which they were exclusively drawn: they wanted above all to be on the winning side and when the Republicans looked like winners they were prepared to go along with them.
For more than 50 years, the Church was the single most important internal force in the Free State. The rulers of the Saorstát needed the Church: they needed all the support they could get. The leaders of the Church took the view that superior to the State’s laws there is a moral law laid down by God, of which the bishops are the guardians and interpreters.
Bishops therefore frequently made pronouncements on issues of public interest and the State almost always took heed. The Saorstát began increasingly to take on the attributes of a theocracy.
Of course the early leaders of the Saorstát were such a despicable collection that prodding from the clergy in many cases did good rather than harm. Also, conflicts between Church and State and disagreements between them about ethical matters are as old as Christianity itself and are probably destined to last to the end of time. Church leaders have been severely criticised for speaking out on some matters, and reproached with equal venom for failing to speak out on others.
In the context of the Saorstát, they tended to intervene most often in two circumstances: firstly whenever they detected a threat to their powers and secondly relating to concerns arising from their excessive middle-class prudery.
An example will suffice. In 1943 the Saorstát’s Department of Health bought an old manor house outside Galway City with the intention of converting it into a sanitorium. Nearby stood a large building, the novitiate of the Redemptorist Order. The prior objected strongly to the project, on the grounds that his novices would be distracted from their prayers by the sight of nurses passing in front of the windows. The Chief Medical Officer thought this concern far-fetched, but offered to pay to have all the windows facing the hospital fitted with frosted glass, but this was rejected.
Unknown to most people, De Valera had a younger brother who was a Redemptorist priest in the USA. Though it was the middle of World War II, the prior arranged to have this man flown across the Atlantic to intervene personally with Dev, which he did and the scheme was cancelled and the building eventually became a factory. That episode was quite typical of the sort of mullarkey the clergy constantly got up to.
The Saorstát had to go along with it: Church support was vital to its survival. The nearest parallel situation arose in France under the Vichy regime. After the débâcle of 1940 France was reduced to a German puppet State and the French government had been completely discredited. It immediately began to grant all sorts of concessions to the Catholic Church, whose support it needed. In the long run this collaboration did the Church in France no good at all.
It has been a common mistake to assume that the Catholic Church in Ireland was a monolith. In fact even the hierarchy was rarely able to agree on anything. Individual bishops simply had too much power within their own dioceses. One Papal Numcio was to complain to Rome “. . . there are no bishops in Ireland. In Ireland I found 26 popes”.
Looking at primates alone, there have been men with a wide variety of outlooks on colonialism. There have been ones with genuine patriotic leanings, like Cardinal Ó Fiaich and Cardinal MacRory, chancers like Cardinal Logue, supporters of the British like Cardinal Conway and ‘messers’ like Cardinal Daly.
The religious orders were independent of the hierarchy and pursued their own agendas.
Nevertheless it is permissible to make generalizations about the mind-set of the Catholic clergy, as formed predominantly in Maynooth. It is interesting in this connection to consider the subsequent careers of two Maynooth students who left without taking ordination: Kevin O’Higgins and John Hume.
In the area of most immediate impact, that of ‘liturgical reform’ the Irish bishops let the English ones call the tune, and an insipid English-language liturgy was imposed.
And throughout Ireland, from St. Patrick’s cathedral in Armagh to remote village churches, sanctuaries were gutted and superb stonework and metalwork smashed up and dumped, destroying the aesthetic unity of each building and leaving it a monument to the philistinism of the clergy.
The vandalization of Killarney cathedral was not the least of the sins of ex-bishop Casey. (It should be noted that churches controlled by religious orders have on the whole suffered less.)
It must of course be recognised that for as long as England holds the six counties the hierarchy has a knife at the throat and its freedom of action is restricted. That said, there is no doubt that the condemnations have mostly been sincere and indeed reflect the thinking of the social class from which the clergy is mostly drawn.
In recent years a string of scandals, coupled with developments in the world they find difficult to adjust to, has caused the Catholic clergy to flounder despondantly about, unable to make their minds up as to where they are going or what they are doing. Pride cometh before a fall! Pride and arrogance there was, and the fall came in due course.