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end of the 1960s, many congregations and orders were accepting (though perhaps not really celebrating) the critical faculties of their new entrants, proposing that her personal attributes would be necessary to address the needs of the secular age. These shifts over the 1940s to the 1960s demonstrate how understandings of the Modern Girl influenced the training of female religious in British congregations and orders. The institutional Church and female religious reacted to this discourse and took steps to restructure the lived experience of religious life to
Irish Women and the Creation of Modern Catholicism is the only book-length study of lay Catholic women in modern Irish history. Focusing on the pivotal century from 1850 to 1950, it analyses the roles that middle-class, working-class, and rural poor lay women played in the evolution of Irish Catholicism and thus the creation of modern Irish identities. This project demonstrates that in an age of Church growth and renewal stretching from the aftermath of the Great Famine through the early years of the Irish Republic, lay women were essential to all aspects of Catholic devotional life, including both home-based religion and public Catholic rituals. It also reveals that women, by rejecting, negotiating, and reworking Church dictates, complicated Church and clerical authority. Irish Women and the Creation of Modern Catholicism re-evaluates the relationship between the institutional Church, the clergy, and women, positioning lay Catholic women as central actors in the making of modern Ireland. It also contests views that the increasing power of the Catholic Church caused a uniform decline in Irish women’s status after the Great Famine of the 1840s, revealing that middle-class, working-class, and rural poor lay women fought with their priests, dominated household religion, and led parish rituals, thus proving integral to the development of a modern Irish Catholic ethos and culture.
feminised landscape in Irish history was an effort to constrain the female body in space and place. In the nineteenth century, people in Ireland and in the Irish Diaspora called on long-standing beliefs and oral traditions to map bodies and landscapes. Before the advent of a strong institutional Church, they also used beliefs about the landscape to regulate female sexuality. Fairy belief was one of the strongest oral traditions upholding gender norms and dictating female behaviour. Popular subjects in storytelling, the fairies were mischievous beings that took human form
challenge some prevailing conventions by analysing religion as an empowering belief system. The ambiguity that existed in the relationship between women and the institutional church is recognised. Women’s involvement within any religious hierarchy is a problematic paradigm in the nineteenth century. Apologetic and promotional church histories are an intrinsic part of the chronicles of ecclesiastical scholarship, particularly in the early part of the twentieth century. Their partisan content and lack of self-criticism have made it difficult to assess critically the
possessed supernatural powers, sometimes using these powers to punish wayward parishioners; others, however, were bested by parishioners, their attempts at asserting authority mocked.38 Legends about priests and wise women are particularly revealing. A thorn in the side of the institutional Church, the wise woman or healer stood as the priest’s main parish enemy. In reality, both priests and wise women were traditional local authorities who sometimes competed for the loyalty of parishioners. In oral tradition, this struggle for power is displayed through a confrontation
’ hit full stride; and second, in the 1920s and 1930s, as the Irish Catholic nation-state came into being. During both of these eras, the institutional Church and, in the latter case, the new state intensified pressure on women to conform to Catholic gender introduction 3 norms. In the 1870s and 1880s, increased centralisation of the Catholic Church inspired abundant literature urging Irish lay women to confine themselves to the home and thus isolate themselves from the enormous political, economic, and cultural changes of the post-famine era. In the 1920s and
independent Irish state and the entrenchment of a post-colonial ethos enhanced devotion to the Virgin and more firmly linked both her and Irish mothers to the idea of the nation.26 By the early twentieth century, Irish Catholics across the island, in both urban and rural areas, made her the centre of their devotions. What was the intended goal of this veneration of Mary for the institutional Church, and what did her ascent mean for lay Irish Catholic women? The Irish Church hierarchy viewed the Blessed Virgin as a figure who could bolster, not challenge, existing gender
’s attempts to reform Catholicism included eliminating private, home-based masses altogether. According to Cullen and some of his allies, holding the sacraments outside of the chapel represented problems for a Church whose goals included containing and controlling parishioners, enforcing priestly and male domination, and moulding devotion into a mechanism for peace and order. Particularly troubling to the institutional Church was the practice of confessions at the stations. Beginning in the late the holy household 159 nineteenth century, as the legislation of the Synod
historically embraced and propagated a patriarchal Catholicism. They supported and collaborated with the male institutional power of the Holy See, and their own local ecclesiastical hierarchy. Historian Phil Kilroy writes of the institutional church ‘colonizing’ women religious: religious communities were ‘offered security on condition of submission and cooperation. If women religious complied they were rewarded, given status, and they were expected to execute all the policies of the colonizer. If they objected they were silenced or cast out, certainly side-lined.’ 15
and Passion would be spent ‘living’ their rule and constitutions. Further changes could be recommended by the congregation, and once these were approved, the congregation would receive juridic status. The rule and constitutions were an important source of authority for congregations and women religious. It was the rule and constitution that women religious first turned to in a dispute with a local bishop. The authority to act with or react against official representatives of the institutional church, be it a bishop or a member of the clergy, was found in the