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17 Catholic Unionism: a case study: Sir Denis Stanislaus Henry (1864–1925) Éamon Phoenix In the quiet Catholic churchyard at Straw, near Draperstown, Co. Derry, a plain rectangular stone marks the grave of the Rt Hon. Sir Denis Henry, Bart., the only Roman Catholic ever to have become an Ulster Unionist MP and the first lord chief justice of Northern Ireland. Denis Stanislaus Henry was born on 7 March 1864, in the townland of Cahore, Draperstown, Co. Derry, the sixth son of James Henry, a wealthy merchant and landowner, and his second wife, Ellen (née Kelly
2 Catholic girlhoods Sara Hyland, who came of age in the 1900s and 1910s, later reminisced about a visit she made to Connemara when she was fifteen. After a friend died, the devoutly Catholic Hyland attended the woman’s Church of Ireland funeral. ‘I was so bewildered at having to take part in the funeral’, Hyland later wrote, that I did not see where I was going until I heard or felt the church doors close behind me. I was almost distraught with fear that I would lose my religion and that when I came out of the church, people would see a difference in me. I tried
6 Catholic intellectuals The Jesuits launched their journal Studies in March 1912. In its first decade Studies reflected the Catholic constitutional nationalism that became displaced by Sinn Féin. After the war of independence and the civil war it hosted the mainstream social, economic, constitutional and political debates that shaped the new state. Both the conservative and liberal wings of the Catholic bourgeois who dominated politics and academia set out their thinking in Studies. A catholic intent was signalled by its initial subtitle: ‘An Irish Quarterly
standards of clerical behaviour, but he accepted the intercessory role of the Virgin Mary and rejected the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith alone. 2 In short, Lyndsay had complex views befitting a complex time. As a Catholic critic of the Catholic Church, he was not alone in early sixteenth-century Scotland. Contrary to what many books on Scottish history would suggest, religious life in pre
5 Catholic furies T he scale of the generalised murders of Protestants unleashed in Paris early in the morning of 24 August and in several cities across France during the following days and weeks cannot but cause surprise. Their nature, and especially their motivation, raises questions. The characteristics of massacre were mixed with those of war. These two types of violence, it has been observed, belong to different categories: the first to the realm of the instinctual, while the second ‘belongs to the world of rationality’.1 The irrational was certainly at
Identity is contingent and dynamic, constituting and reconstituting subjects with political effects. This book explores the implications of Protestant and 'British' incursions for the development of Irish Catholic identity as preserved in Irish language texts from the early modern period until the end of Stuart pretensions. Questions of citizenship, belonging, migration, conflict, security, peace and subjectivity are examined through social construction, post-colonialism, and gendered lenses from an interdisciplinary perspective. The book explains the issue of cultural Catholicism in the later middle ages, by way of devotional cults and practices. It examines Catholic unionism vis-a-vis Victorian politics, military and imperial service, the crown, and the position of the Catholic Church with relation to the structures of the state in Ireland. In particular the North American experience and especially the importance of the USA for consolidating a particular interpretation of Irish Catholic nationalist identity, is explored. Children studied in English Catholic public schools like Stonyhurst and Downside where the establishment Irish Catholics and rising mercantile classes sought to have the characteristics of the Catholic gentleman instilled in their progeny. The book sets out to detect the voices of those Catholic women who managed to make themselves heard by a wider audience than family and friends in Ireland in the years between the Act of Union of 1800 and independence/partition. It considers what devotional interests both Gaelic Irish and Anglo-Norman actually shared in common as part of a wider late medieval Catholic culture.
8 English Catholic martyrs Lucy Underwood I n January 1887, The Times published its response to the beatification by Leo XIII of fifty-four English Catholic martyrs of the Reformation era. It gave most space to Thomas More (1478–1535) and John Fisher (1469–1535), declaring itself ‘gratified at any opportunity of recalling to the world the fame of two eminent countrymen’. As for this particular honour, Beatification and canonization meant more formerly than now. Sir Thomas More’s most fervent admirers will hardly pray to him or implore for his mediation. Not
3 • The Catholic Church It is generally agreed that the Catholic Church played a highly significant role in almost every dimension of the life of Irish migrants in nineteenthcentury Britain.1 Nonetheless, two caveats should be borne in mind. First, whilst a good deal of attention will be focused on the social, cultural and political impact of the church, its prime self-defined function was spiritual, namely to preach its version of the Christian message and provide the faithful with opportunities for worship, spiritual solace, instruction and guidance.2 Second
2 The Catholic Virgin Mary T he Virgin Mary described by Victorian Catholics is a familiar figure. She is the default image most have of the Virgin Mary: the young woman who is a fixture in crèche scenes, who lovingly cradles her divine son in Renaissance and Baroque images, and who later in life stands stalwartly and sorrowfully at the foot of the cross. She is the woman to whom Roman Catholics have traditionally turned for intercession, aid, and comfort. This image was developed by medieval Christians and elaborated on by their successors, so that by the
1 Women and Catholic culture Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ireland boasted a vast body of prescriptive literature that instructed women how to lead proper Catholic lives.1 A key example, Bernard O’Reilly’s 1883 advice book The Mirror of True Womanhood, conflated women’s religious and domestic duties: There is nothing on earth which the Creator and Lord of all things holds more dear than [the] home, in which … a mother’s unfailing and all-embracing tenderness will be, like the light and warmth of the sun in the heavens, the source of life, and joy