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23 1 ‘The times they are a changin’ ’: Tracing the transformation of Irish Catholicism through the eyes of a journalist Patsy McGarry It was towards the end of May 2009 that the Church of Ireland Bishop of Cork, Most Reverend Paul Colton said that Ireland was in the midst of a ‘a national trauma’. That followed publication of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse report. Chaired by Mr Justice Seán Ryan, it followed a decade of investigations by the Commission and contained revelations of truly shocking and systemic sexual, physical and emotional abuse
Catholic Church was in no position to voice its concern about these developments at the time, in the wake of the child- abuse and Magdalene laundry revelations. Moreover, the response in the public forum to the litany of Church-related offences has been to reject the institutional Church and, consequently, impede the creation of a space for the evaluation of the cultural legacy of Irish Catholicism. As a result, attempting to explore aspects of the Catholic Church without falling into outright condemnation of the entire institution and of its members is deemed insular
the subtlest hermeneutical differences have disturbed this remarkably consistent characterisation. Thus where writers in the older tradition saw in the archbishop’s action the inevitable awakening, from its late medieval slumber, of a robust, native Irish Catholicism, their revisionist successors observed that it marked the effective endpoint of what had hitherto been a thriving indigenous flirtation with the Tudor Reformation, especially in its Henrician form. Both schools were united in drawing a link between the doctrinally conservative Dowdall’s rejection of the
checked by a spectacle of festivity. Death is noteworthy for its absence. Significantly, British sponsorship of Irish Catholicism is referenced when the question of who is to officiate at a wedding is raised. ‘Nelly’, the proud mother of four sons, three of whom are in the British armed forces and one of whom is a freshly minted priest, speaks up
. There are many different reasons why this happened, but some of them relate specifically to the Catholic Church’s teachings about sexuality, the culture of silence and the power and governance structures of the Church. This raises questions about the robustness of Irish Catholicism. It would seem that what makes Irish Catholics similar to other European Catholics, and different 4147 Inglis–Are the Irish different_BB_Layout 1 29/07/2014 09:26 Page 6 6 Tom Inglis from American Catholics, is that the clerical sex abuse scandals have led to a distaste for and
’Donnell and Eoin O’Sullivan, ‘Introduction’, in Eoin O’Sullivan and Ian O’Donnell (eds), Coercive Confinement in Ireland: Patients, Prisoners and Penitents (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), pp. 12, 13, 26. 12 Mike Milotte, Banished Babies: The Secret History of Ireland’s Baby Export Business (Dublin: New Island, 1997), p. 16. 13 Michael Carroll, Irish Pilgrimage: Holy Wells and Popular Catholic Devotion (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1999). 14 Eugene Hynes, ‘The Great Hunger and Irish Catholicism’, Societas, pp. VIII (1978), pp. 81–98. 15 Joseph
destroy the roots of family life and any semblance of moral decency. Archbishop John Charles McQuaid’s 1967 Lenten Regulations for the Dublin Diocese included the missive: ‘Parents have the serious duty to be vigilant and to supervise the use by their children, especially their adolescent children, of the modern means of communication: books, magazines, press, radio, television, stage and cinema’.71 Cold suspicion of critical reflection and foreign influence distinguished traditional Irish Catholicism with narrow-minded, anti-intellectual and morally rigorist Political
19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 2007), pp. 119–34, at p. 125. See also Emmet Larkin, The Historical Dimensions of Irish Catholicism (Washington, DC, and Dublin: Catholic University of America Press and Four Courts Press, 1984), pp. 91–130. INTRODUCTION 3 of republicanism, with secret societies plotting armed rebellion, it was firmly repudiated by bishops and priests alike. Whatever common bonds tied Irish separatists to the church, the violent means they used from time to time were never endorsed by the majority of the clergy. On the
–1943’, in M. G Valiulis and M. O’Dowd (eds), Women and Irish History: Essays in Honour of Margaret MacCurtain (Dublin: O’Brien Press, 1997), pp. 173–88; L. Ryan and M. Ward (eds), Irish Women and the Vote: Becoming Citizens (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007), pp. 231–50; C. Clear, Women of the House: Women’s Household Work in Ireland, 1922–61 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2000), pp. 13–91, 202–16. 42 Clear, Women of the House, pp. 27–67. 43 J. H. Whyte, Church and State in Modern Ireland (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1971); L. Fuller, Irish Catholicism since 1950
distorting temporal coincidence. The colleges’ demise, or at least that of a substantial number of them in France and the Austrian Netherlands, overlapped with the French Revolution and the imposition of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. Prima facie, this suggested that the Revolution and its secularist principles brought the curtain down on the Irish colleges. On these two temporal accidents, Catholic nationalist historiography constructed a mighty interpretative edifice according to which the colleges, as conciliar institutions, saved Irish Catholicism from English