Re-Ligion! - Village 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

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