This isn’t the first time we’ve been out of step with Rome on religion
IF YOU ever wander through the National Gallery it is worth pausing at Aloysius O’Kelly’s large and prominent canvas ‘Mass in a Connemara Cabin’.
I will leave its aesthetic merits to those better qualified, but as a piece of social history it tells us more than a cursory glance might suggest.
Painted in 1883, its depiction of a peasant community at worship contains wonderful tell-tale detail.
The further you draw your eyes away from the painting’s focal point to the back of the cramped room the more it intrigues.
O’Kelly, a Fenian, wasn’t interested in depicting piety, but instead quietly and subversively cast a cold eye on the power and influence of a re-invigorated Catholic Church a few decades into what historian Emmet Larkin called the ‘devotional revolution’.
The young priest saying Mass is depicted not as one of the people but a man apart. He’s obviously prosperous, his top hat and frock coat carefully set aside. His congregation, on the other hand, is supplicant. Another master for them to serve.
This fresh-faced curate would be what historian JJ Lee described as one of the new breed of ‘strong farmers in cassocks’, graduates of Maynooth who were the vanguard of a new sort of Catholicism.
They would be pioneers of a new social order destined to have an unyielding grip until Vatican II in the 1960s.
The accepted narrative that Ireland’s current crisis of faith is a break with an unbroken tradition going back to Patrick is erroneous.
Irish people may have always held steadfast to the faith of their fathers, but it wasn’t until the middle of the 19th century that any sort of consistent harmony was established with Rome.
Up until then we tended to do things our own way and perhaps what we are seeing now is a return to that sort of contrarianism.
Rome had been trying to ecclesiastically colonise this island since Pope Celestine I in the fifth century.
Later, Pope Gregory VII was a flea in the ear of King Toirdelbach Ua Briain, resulting in a series of 11th century synods.
Much of this was to do with squeezing Godly taxes out of us and discouraging extra-marital carry-on.
Famously, it is Pope Adrian’s Papal Bull a century later, possibly a forgery, which was blamed for the Norman invasion.
A root cause of this medieval disconnect is that Ireland lacked the imperial framework upon which Latin diocesan administration depended. The Roman Empire had never paddled this far.
So back to the 19th century and a common refrain.
Paul Cullen was sent home from Rome as Archbishop of Armagh by Pope Pius IX to put manners on bishops, clergy and faithful alike. A man of action, he immediately called the Synod of Thurles, which set about establishing a new ecclesiastical discipline. A survey in 1835 showed that Mass attendance in some Gaelic-speaking areas was as low as 20pc. Sacramental observance was equally sketchy.
While the vast majority of peasants were nominally Catholic, they often did not practice in the traditional way.
In the west, where priests were few, most people did not attend Mass or confession regularly and many expressed their devotion through an eclectic range of customs.
The belief in fairies and banshees was common and pilgrimages to holy wells were frequent, as were pattern festivals and harvest days.
Rome was eager to eradicate these outings, not only because they were pagan but as they were opportunities for illicit sex and copious drinking.
In 1800, there was one priest for every 2,100 parishioners. By 1911, after the Cullenite revolution was truly embedded, there was one priest for every 210.
If fewer than half of Catholics went to Mass in the pre-Famine Ireland, by the end of the 19th century Mass attendance was virtually universal.
Faith may not have been made stronger, but under Cullen’s strict ultramontanism (where the Pope has ultimate power), it was now both orthodox and disciplined.
But as Karl Marx’s theory of historical materialism teaches, it pays for the curious to follow the money. A series of Land Acts from 1870, which replaced the despised tenant system, is an important pointer. In all, a staggering 414,000 tenants became full owners of their lands. In total, a massive 14 million acres exchanged hands in a few decades.
In a largely rural society, this amounted to a massive social revolution. The failed system of subsistence and land sub-division was replaced by something more progressive but grasping.
Rome’s unbending rules on sexual mores, marriage and fidelity now had a powerful economic imperative too: sex and illegitimate babies not only threatened your immortal soul but the farm too.
The Church, family and State now found themselves bound together in something of any unholy alliance; a symbiotic relationship that would serve all three well into the 20th century.
A half-empty Phoenix Park two Sundays ago was further proof of how a contract built on blind faith, discipline and convenience, subsequently sundered by decades of scandal, indifference and cover-ups, has now become just a sour memory.
God only knows what Paul Cullen would make of it.
The accepted narrative that our current crisis of faith is a break with an unbroken tradition is erroneous