were disturbed by what they thought were signs of an unravelling moral fabric in a society which had experienced revolution and warfare and which was riskily open to the influence of rapidly developing mass media. Their concern was premature, however, for the great majority of the faithful were to remain loyal to the church practice of the devotional revolution until the late 1960s. Neither the political stance of the hierarchy during the Civil War nor the influence of an increasingly libertarian climate outside Ireland disturbed the religious devotion of Ireland’s Catholic believers. That it was maintained well into the modern period is attributable not only to the power of the church’s apologetic but also to the ways in which Irish Catholicism was precisely adapted to Irish social reality in the period.
Crucial to the institutional and popular achievements of the church in the period following the Famine until the 1960s was the role played by Catholicism in confirming a sense of national identity. The church, with her formally regularized rites and practices, offered to most Irishmen and women in the period a way to be Irish which set them apart from the rest of the inhabitants of the British Isles, meeting the needs thereby of a nascent Irish nationalism at a time when the Irish language and the Gaelic culture of the past were enduring a protracted decline. And the Catholic faith was peculiarly suited to play a role in that nationalist awakening. Bound up in the past with the traditional Gaelic way of life to which the Famine had largely put paid, historically associated with the repression of the eighteenth century, when the native priesthood had heroically resisted the proscription of their faith, permeated with that profound sense of the supernatural which had characterized the countryside for centuries, Catholicism was richly endowed with attributes appropriate to its modern role in the nation’s life. Strengthened by the Roman vigour of the devotional revolution, given a distinct tincture of Victorian respectability by the new discipline imposed on popular expressions of piety, the Catholic faith of the majority of the Irish people became therefore intimately linked with national feeling. Accordingly, from the years of the devotional revolution onward Irish Catholicism increasingly became a badge of national identity at a time when the church also felt able to propound doctrines that enshrined the rights of private property. In a nation where nationalist aspiration was so often rooted in the farmer’s rigorous attachment to his land, all this was to help ensure the church’s continued role in Irish life, even though at difficult moments during the Land War and the War of Independence ecclesiastics felt obliged to oppose the tactics employed by political activists.
It is true, one must point out, that nationalist ideologues, at least from the time of the Young Irelanders of the 1840s, always strove to define Irishness in more comprehensive terms than the merely religious, seeking national distinctiveness in language and culture. But despite brief periods when enthuasiasm for Gaelic revival showed some signs of translating itself into a major social force, transcending sectarian divisions (in the first decade of the twentieth century), Irish nationalists sometimes found themselves acutely embarrassed by the lack of immediately obvious marks of Irish identity apart from a devout, loyal Catholicism. Indeed, some of the strenuous efforts made on behalf of the Irish language were perhaps partially rooted in such embarrassment.
By contrast, few efforts were required for most of the twentieth century to develop Catholicism as a mark of national distinctiveness; the church was incontrovertibly part of Irish reality and the practice of religion an evident feature of national life. In 1926, 92.6 percent of the population of the Irish Free State were returned as Catholic in the census. From all the impressionistic evidence available, we can assume that the great majority of their number were regular in their duties and obligations. Sir Horace Plunkett must be representative of the many writers who have looked on Irish piety in the twentieth century and wondered. “In no other country probably,” he wrote in 1904, “is religion so dominant an element in the daily life of the people as in Ireland.”16
The Irish church was also successful because in spite of its ultramontanist tendencies, it was a national church in the sense that it drew its bishops from its priesthood and its priesthood in the main from the people. It therefore offered opportunities in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries for preferment and power in a society that had hitherto had little chance to avail itself of the one or to exercise the other.
This statement requires some expansion. Almost all observers of religious life in the latter half of nineteenth-century Ireland are agreed that during this period, significant numbers of the sons of farmers and shopkeepers were entering the national seminary at Maynooth, County Kildare, to study for the priesthood, as they were in other ecclesiastical colleges in the country. Furthermore, literary and journalistic sources suggest that the social tone of Maynooth in this period and in the early twentieth century was somewhat boisterous and uncultivated, dominated as it was by young men from the land, and that the education provided was rather less than culturally enlarging in its anti-intellectualism and sexual prudery, confirming the rural values in which so many young men had been reared. It seems many a farmer’s son emulated William Carleton’s hero Denis O’Shaughnessy, taking the road to Maynooth with more success than he. Gerald O’Donovan’s interesting novel Father Ralph allows us a glimpse of Maynooth in the 1890s (it is important to remember that priests trained in this period would have exercised their ministry well into the 1930s). The novel, largely autobiographical, recounts the progress of a young boy of a wealthy Catholic family (they have houses in Dublin and in the country) from days of cloistered piety as a child to the tough practicalities of priesthood in a depressed Irish village. Ralph O’Brien at Maynooth discovers the intellectual poverty of the theological education offered in the 1890s.
During the few free days before the arrival of the general body of students Ralph…explored the College: the poky, ill-supplied divisional libraries, without catalogue, order, or classification, or any book that one wanted to read; the rather fine College library, not quite as despicable as the admirer of Marie Corelli found it, but still pitifully unrepresentative of any general culture.17
Ralph finds theological speculation of any kind dismissed by professors and students alike, all religious mystery apparently comprehended in a facile scholasticism. The best among them have a simple uninquiring faith, while the worst employ orthodoxy as a means of personal advancement in the church. For the religious thinker there is nothing:
After a lecture in dogmatic theology by Father Malone, who demolished all the thinkers of four centuries with an axiom culled from Aquinas, delivered in a loud self-satisfied voice and accompanied by much table-thumping, Ralph often sat in his room, limp and confused, hopeless of his own future and of the future of the Church…
Ralph once ventured an opinion contradictory of Dunlea’s notes. The Professor flushed angrily, but said suavely – “What is good enough for St Thomas and me ought to satisfy you Mr O’Brien. I’d advise you to read my notes carefully. They contain everything necessary to be known on the subject.”
That evening during study Ralph read these meagre notes, the fine flower of Maynooth teaching, a superficial application of a knowledge theory to religion that carried no conviction. If this book was the best Maynooth could do, why had he wasted the best years of his life there? It reduced God to a series of abstractions, unreal and meaningless.18
The upper-class Ralph O’Brien also finds himself socially ill at ease in a church that appears to be dominated by the acquisitive prudery of farmer and shopkeeper. Both Father Ralph and a later O’Donovan novel, Vocations (1921), describe a social order in which church, farmer, grocer, and gombeen publican comprise a corrupt and corrupting alliance, intent on social advancement.
O’Donovan, a supporter of the Irish cooperative movement founded by Sir Horace Plunkett, and keenly interested in rural renewal, presents the church as an institution dedicated neither to spirituality nor the intellectual enhancement of the faith, but to material and social advantage. Other much less tendentious commentators suggest that his portrait of Maynooth as intellectually deficient and the church as lacking a constructive social vision was not wholly unfounded. Canon Sheehan, the priestly novelist and a really sympathetic observer of Irish ecclesiastical life, remembered in an unfinished manuscript his own days at Maynooth in the 1870s, where