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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
4 2 April 2016
Religion in Ireland
was another form of
love of country
Re-Ligion!
'Christianity' may be a way to grow out of
our religious and nationalist past into a
fair and environmental future
M
ichel Aflaq (1910-1989) was the principal
ideologue of the pan-Arabist Ba’ath
Socialist party which still rules Syria, as it
previously did Iraq under Saddam Hus-
sein. Although born Christian, he believed
Islam to be proof of Arab genius and allegedly con-
verted before his death in Baghdad.
The Arabs were a motley collection of illiterate war-
ring tribes inhabiting the Arabian Peninsula until the
Prophet Muhammed (570-632 CE) and his successors
built an enduring empire with extraordinary speed. The
early Muslims were not only successful warriors con-
quering territory from Spain to Persia but also projected
a ‘soft’ power allowing them to convert subjugated peo-
ples. The era brought great advances in philosophy, art
and mathematics and was marked by a tolerance
unknown in Christendom.
The Qu’ran itself was the first book written in Arabic,
and according to the historian Albert Hourani Muslims
believe Arabic is revealed in it; it certainly ushered in a
great era of literacy. It is perhaps unsurprising that con-
temporary Arabic political movements have expressed
themselves in the idiom of Islam however diverse that
inheritance is.
Furthermore the failures of
Arab nationalism especially
under Egypt’s Gamal Abdel
Nasser (1918-70) appeared to
make Political Islam the answer
to the project of throwing off the
economic and cultural shackles of imperialism, and
confronting Israel. The brutalisation of the Middle East
through internal repression and outside intervention
has shaped the emergence of ISIS, but its unsophisti-
cated ideology has an historical trajectory.
Likewise Christianity has had a lasting influence on
the idea of Irishness: first because Christianity’s arrival
in Ireland brought with it literacy (Ogham script hardly
qualifies) that generated a seismic cultural awakening;
second, and another source of pride, Irish Christians
performed vital missions in restoring Christianity to
Britain and other parts of Europe; third, the Reforma-
tion in Britain occurred simultaneously with its second
wave of colonisation of Ireland, creating an effective
method of creating a ruling caste; fourth, the decline of
the Gaelic language left Catholicism as the most obvi-
ous point of cultural differentiation between the Irish
and English.
Thus in George Moore’s novel ‘The Lake’ Father
Moran opines: “Religion in Ireland was another form of
love of country and if Catholics were intolerant to every
form of heresy, it was because they instinctively felt
that the questioning of any dogma would mean some
slight subsidence from the idea of nationality that held
the people together”. He continues: “Like the ancient
Jews, the Irish believed that the faith of their forefathers
could bring them into their ultimate inheritance”.
Moore himself eventually renounced Catholicism,
just like the main character in the novel Father Gogarty
who says: “my moral ideas were not my own. They were
borrowed from others and badly assimilated”. Gogarty
bemoans the Church’s attitude to women, recalling how
“at Maynooth the tradition was always to despise
women”.
Well before Irish independence in 1922 the Catholic
Church held a firm hold over Irish society especially in
the crucial sphere of education. Maynooth was estab-
lished in 1795 and Irish primary education had become
increasingly denominational by the end of the nine-
teenth century. To some extent this suited the British
administration as it recognised the Church as a force of
conservatism that would protect private property
by Frank Armstrong
1916
April 2016 4 3
against social revolutionaries.
James Joyce also violently repudiated Catholi-
cism. He wrote to Nora Barnacle in 1904:
“Six years ago I left the Catholic Church,
hating it most fervently … Now I make war upon
it by what I write and say and do. I cannot enter
the social order except as a vagabond”. In ‘Por-
trait’ he resolves: “I will not serve that in which
I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my
home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will
try to express myself in some mode of life or art
as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using
for my defence the only arms I allow myself to
use – silence, exile and cunning”.
It took artists of the stature of Joyce and
Moore to escape their Catholic upbringings.
Unfortunately most of the revolutionary gen-
eration rapidly conformed and thereby stamped
out the pluralism, feminism and even vegetari-
anism that animated the more free-thinking
period before hostilities began. One of the most
powerful ministers in the first government,
Kevin O’Higgins, remarked: “we were probably
the most conservative-minded revolutionaries
that ever put through a revolution”.
That it should have been an 'Easter Rising'
that kicked off the affair is revealing. There was
an obtuse connection drawn between the cru-
cifixion and resurrection of Jesus and the blood
sacrifice and emergence of an Irish nation state.
Remarkably, in the wake of the Rising such illus-
trious revolutionaries as Roger Casement,
Countess Marckievicz and James Connolly con-
verted to Catholicism.
The Civil War between two children squab-
bling over the spoils of a new state imported no
relevance for the relationship with the Church.
Observers were already noting the “sombre
bodyguard of priests” surrounding de Valera as
he ascended political platforms in the early
1920s; and the first Cumann na nGaedheal
administration (1922-32) alienated many erst-
while progressive supporters, including WB
Yeats, by bringing in a ban against divorce in
1925.
We now know that the Catholic Church was
virtually untouchable in its position of power in
Ireland until the 1990s when the staggering
effect of sexual repression and a culture of
impunity became apparent. The same-sex mar-
riage referendum last year affirmed that the
once vice-like grip was no more: only Roscom-
mon voted against the proposal, despite the
Church’s opposition.
It remains firmly entrenched in education but
such is the prevailing distrust for priests in par-
ticular that this situation is unlikely to endure
much longer.
Moreover, Irish people are no longer drawn
to the priest's house or convent as they were in
droves. The Church simply does not have the
personnel to project its message any longer.
Of course there are residual defenders of
Catholic conservatism in the Iona Institute and
the broader Pro-Life movement. But the abuse
scandals seem to have changed most Irish peo-
ple’s outlook and the Pro-Life movement now
looks more like a pale shadow. Considering the
margin of victory – the vote in favour was 62%
– in the same-sex marriage referendum it
seems likely that even the eighth amendment
will eventually be repealed.
But we may ask what is left when we throw
away the chains? If Irish politics is anything to
go by Irish people are quite lost at this point,
electing parties that oversaw the country's
delivery into the hands of the Church, and then
the IMF, alongside a raft of vacuous independ-
ents. The far left is a shrill irrelevance and the
nationalist left fatally compromised by direct
participation in atrocities during the Northern
Troubles.
Could something be recovered from Ireland’s
longstanding relationship with Christianity?
Might the revolutionary ideas expressed in the
Gospels and the lives of the saints rejecting
materialism, promoting equality and pacifisms
– and even containing seeds of environmental-
ism in the legacy of St Francis – actually inform
a new political consciousness.
The Irish people are increasingly mired in
neo-liberal confusion, which could be linked to
the spiritual void in most of our lives. Increas-
ingly Eastern thought is turned to for assurance
Just as the key to
defeating ISIS will emerge
from within Arab-Islamic
idiom the key to creating
a more compassionate
and thoughtful Irishry
may be re-engaging with
our mythical inheritance
The past/future
4 4 April 2016
and contemplation; but perhaps we have native
idioms more comprehensible to us in our midst.
I do not write this as a spiritual person but as
one who wishes to see a change of heart in the
country which will allow us to realise a society
that it is fairer and more sustainable. It seems
to me that the language of religion, conjoining
poetry and prophesy, speaks to people in a
more powerful way than empiricism. Even Marx
acknowledged the elixir.
One does not have to Believe in order to
believe in its effect, though perhaps a measure
of faith helps. As the philosopher Bartholomew
Ryan puts it in his book ‘Kierkegaard’s Indirect
Politics’: “There is no completion, but for point-
ing towards the elusive faith, but that faith
remains incommensurable and we forever falter
when we try to talk about it (otherwise it would
not be faith)”
People sometimes grow nostalgic about
pagan Europe. At a musical festival you might
be urged to embrace your pagan spirit. But life
was often brutish in pre-Christian Europe. Here
is an account of human sacrifice by an Arab trav-
eller to Scandinavia in the tenth century:
“Then the girl was pulled into the tent and
the men started to beat on the shields so her
screams could not be heard. Six men entered
into the tent to have intercourse with the girl,
after which they put her onto her master’s bed.
Two men grabbed her hands and two men her
wrists. The angel of death put a rope around
her neck and while two men pulled the rope,
the old woman stabbed the girl between her
ribs with a knife”.
Undoubtedly even worse atrocities were com-
mitted in the name of organised Christianity
from Cortez to the Crusades but those acts were
utterly at variance with the ideas expressed in
the gospels, rather than a component of ritual
or doctrine as in many pagan practices. In par-
ticular by dignifying each life Chrisitianity was
crucial to the demise of slavery. Ireland, as a
land of saints and scholars helped to extend
that idea, and early Irish nationalists drew on
this as a source of inspiration. We should be
loath to dispense with it peremptorily.
There have been many powerful critiques of
organised Christianity not least from Edward
Gibbons who wrote that: “The pure Deism of the
first Christians … was changed, by the Church
of Rome, into the incomprehensible dogma of
the trinity”.
One of the most savage attacks on the Church
of Rome came from Fyodor Dostoyevsky whose
omniscient ‘Idiot’ exclaims:
"In my opinion Roman Catholicism isn’t even
a religion, but most decidedly a continuation
of the Holy Roman Empire, and everything in it
is subordinate to that idea, beginning with
faith. The Pope seized the earth, an earthly
throne and took up the sword; and since then
everything has gone on in the same way,
except they’ve added lies, fraud, deceit, fanat-
icism, superstition, wickedness. They have
trifled with the most sacred, truthful, inno
-
cent, ardent feelings of the people, have
bartered it all for money, for base temporal
power. And isn’t that the teachings of the
Antichrist?”.
But Dostoyevsky was a deep believer and his
novels invariably invoke the redemptive power
of a Christian faith removed from temporal
power.
Frederick Nietszche went much further, opin-
ing that: “Christianity has been up till now
mankind’s greatest misfortune”.
In response the Irish poet-philosopher John
Moriarty writes: “As though the Europe he grew
up in was purely idolatrous Mexico and he a
Cortez who came ashore. Nietzsche proceeded
to smash and roll Christianity down the steps
of its own pyramid temples. In its place he set
up actuality, recurrence and will to power”. And
ultimately Nietzsche’s vision is associated with
madness and Fascism.
Moriarty proposes that: “It is as necessary
that we realise a past out of which to grow as it
is to realise a present and future into which to
grow”. In his ‘Dreamtime’ he paints an ecumeni-
cal mythological inheritance out of which this
growth in individuals and across society might
be realised. The Christian experience is
reclaimed and reordered.
It seems that just as the key to defeating the
doctrine of ISIS will emerge from within Arab-
Islamic idiom rather through sustained
bombing campaigns, similarly the key to creat-
ing a more compassionate, thoughtful and
proactive Irishry may be re-engaging with our
mythical inheritance, and that includes a re-
imagined Christianity.
1916
171
Ordinations in 1984
THE IRISH CATHOLIC CHURCH IN CURRENT DECLINE
14
Ordinations in 2015
5055
2020
2030
PARISHES
Tuam diocese in
Tuam diocese in
PRIESTS
3055
PARISHES PRIESTS
Statistics: Brendan Hoban
www.associationofcatholicpriests.ie
55 75
In Killala diocese
there are 7 priests
under
In 20 years there
will be 7 priests
under
