Search results
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
religious revival, or, as Knight put it, the ‘large outpouring of the spirit’, failed to materialise. 1 Knight’s response to cholera shows that institutional churches had much invested in special displays of public worship. For the devout, divine visitations and deliverances, and the accompanying days of fasting and thanksgiving, represented opportunities for evangelism and mission. It is true that some religious groups refused to participate because they did not recognise state authority in spiritual matters. For others
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
changed since the nineteenth century. The role of the institutional churches and public worship was diminished. The private and personal aspects of prayer was once more emphasised, though in a nod to the ancient tradition of ‘common prayer’, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation began each silent prayer session with a short invocation, agreed on by the Commonwealth’s religious leaders. 22 This book was completed as the world struggled to a contain a Covid-19 pandemic that had killed hundreds of thousands and sent billions of
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
colonial territories where clergy were few the authorities had to rely on a culture of lay-led ‘informal family worship’. It has already been noted that civil officials in early nineteenth-century Quebec delivered forms of prayer to heads of families if a district had no clergyman. Here, perhaps, is evidence that the patriarchal family ‘functioned in symbiosis with the institutional church’. 40 Clergy remained important figures, however, and it was they who delivered the sermons that made sense of the causes of fasts 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