from England and as having to cast his lot with the Irish. The manner in which he did so and the genius with which he expressed his own and Ireland’s predicaments canonised him for generations as a model patriot and as the architect of Anglo-Irish identity. But Swift’s relationship with Ireland remained ambivalent. As put in a 1727 poem, written at the port of Holyhead, awaiting passage to the land of his birth:
Remove me from this land of slaves,
Where all are fools and all are knaves,
Where every knave and fool is bought,
Yet kindly sells himself for nought…
BF
Notes
1Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of poor People in Ireland from being a Burden to their Parents or Country, and for making them beneficial to the Publick (Dublin, 1729).
2Jonathan Swift, A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture in Cloaths and Furniture of Houses, & c. Utterly Rejecting and Renouncing Every Thing wearable that comes from England (Dublin, 1720).
3Jonathan Swift, An Answer to Several Letters sent to me from Unknown Hands (Dublin, 1729).
4Jonathan Swift, Answer to Several Letters from Unknown Persons (1729) (first published, London: William Johnston, 1765).
5Jonathan Swift, A Sermon on the Causes of the Wretched Conditions of Ireland in The Sermons of Rev Dr Jonathan Swift (Glasgow: Urie, 1763).
6Jonathan Swift, The Truth of Some Maxims in State and Government examined with reference to Ireland (Dublin, 1729).
5
Andrew Dunleavy, The Catechism of Christian Doctrine (1742)
Long before the invention of PowerPoint and frequently asked questions on websites, Catholics were instructed in their faith by means of question and answer booklets setting out Church doctrine. The standard reference for pre-Vatican II catechesis (religious instruction given in advance of baptism or confirmation) was the Catechism of the Council of Trent, 1566, also known as the Roman Catechism. This emerged in response to catechisms devised by Lutherans. Printing had made the Reformation possible by making Scripture available to literate laypeople. Protestantism emphasised the primacy of the Bible and its unmediated study by the faithful, Catholicism the primacy of doctrinal interpretations of Scripture by the priesthood. In the centuries since, the Reformation printed Catechisms tailored in different editions for children and the general population; these so-called Penny Catechisms were far more influential than the Bible in shaping Irish Catholicism.
The Penny Catechisms were derived from longer ones designed for the education of priests. An early Irish example, The Catholic Christian Doctrine for the use of pastors and Catechesis in order to instruct Children and Illiterate Persons, attributed to Rev. F.W. Devereux of the Diocese of Ferns, drew on the text of the Douay Catechism, published in Rheims in France in 1648, the town where the standard Catholic English-language Bible was first printed. Both answered similarly a question about how children, the old, blind people and the lame would be represented on Judgement Day. All would be restored as if they had reached the perfect age of thirty-three years , because that was reportedly the age at which the saviour died.
One authored during the 1770s by James Butler, Archbishop of Cashel, remained in print into the twentieth century. A 1922 Butler catechism published in Waterford was described on the front cover as ‘Revised, Enlarged, Approved and Recommended by the Four R.C. Archbishops of Ireland.’ The earliest full-length catechism to be published in both English and Irish was composed by Andrew Dunleavy (or Donleavy) in the early 1740s. Dunleavy was Director of the Irish College at the time. He had grown up in Sligo under the Penal Laws but escaped to France in 1710 to study for the priesthood. His catechism appeared in both Irish (Gaelic) and English: The Catechism of Christian Doctrine by way of Question and Answer Drawn Chiefly From The Express Word of God and Other Pure Sources. It was published in its third edition for the Royal Catholic College of St Patrick, Maynooth in 1848 after which it was adopted by a number of dioceses. An early edition was accompanied by a 1741 testimonial to its excellence by Michael O’Gara, Archbishop of Tuam. A near-copy of the Dunleavy Catechism attributed to Michael O’Reilly, who became Archbishop of Armagh in 1749, remained in use in Derry well into the twentieth century. 1
Dunleavy set out his text in both languages on facing pages and the 1848 Maynooth edition included an appendix that explained the spelling, typeface and pronunciation of the Gaelic alphabet. It also reproduced Dunleavy’s original 1742 foreword which argued that children’s catechisms were inadequate for the spiritual education of lay adults. Dunleavy explained that his work had been prompted by the great scarcity of full catechisms in Ireland. Unlike many other catechisms which began with the question, ‘Who made the world?’ Dunleavy’s first question was, ‘What is the Catechism?’ He defined it as ‘a plain and intelligible explanation of the Articles of the Christian Faith necessary for salvation; and of other points belonging to the service of God’.
Unlike subsequent abbreviated Penny Catechisms, Dunleavy cited specific passages from Scripture in support of answers to questions. And again, unlike later ones, responses to some questions took the form of scholastic disputations and discussions of social norms. For example, what became a simple question later on whether to fast on the Sabbath opened up into a discussion of fasting as mandated by the ‘Jewish Church’ and ‘the modern Churches of England and Holland’. Dunleavy recommended restricting the faithful to one midday meal during periods of fasting with further moderate consumption permitted at night or at the end of a long day. He exempted sick people, weakly older people, young people under twenty-one years of age, women big with child and people who undertook hard labour. In Dunleavy then, doctrine, custom and practice were not presented as one and the same.
Many catechisms from other English-speaking countries also circulated in Ireland. A collection of these is to be found on the shelves of the Central Catholic Library in Dublin. Moral instruction in the shorter versions aimed at children and the uneducated poor tended to be stern and forcefully put. For example, the Abridgement of Christian Doctrine for the Lower Classes (1906) by Thomas Byrne, Bishop of Nashville, declared in response to a question on mortal sin that one such sin would merit hell. But in Byrne’s longer Abridgement of Christian Doctrine for the Higher Classes (1906) no such simple question was posed. Instead the emphasis was on how those in mortal sin may be deprived of the sacraments. What, Byrne asked, ought a Christian to do if a Bible should be offered him by a Protestant? He ‘ought to indignantly spurn it, because it is forbidden by the Church; and, if he should have accepted it without adverting to what it was, he should at once pitch it into the fire, or fetch it to his Pastor’.
Penny Catechisms offered a mechanism for standardising the means by which doctrine was to be taught to children and full-length catechisms were preferred for the instruction of the educated classes to Bible study. An appendix on the history of Catholic religious education in a 1943 Religious Knowledge Course for Primary Schools, published by the Archdiocese of Glasgow, explained that the teaching of the Bible seemed ‘unrelated to the scheme of religious knowledge; it leads nowhere. And yet, being God’s Revelation to man, the Bible is largely the source of dogma.’ It argued against teaching ‘Bible history’ (‘perversions of historical truth that do so much to warp the outlook of Catholic children’) declaring that ‘we, as Christians, have little interest in the history of the Jewish race’. The Old Testament afforded stories showing the beauty of virtue and the punishment of sin and contained much that