THE HARROWING CHRONICLE OF IRISH
CATHOLICISM
Jerry Harkins
It is an unspeakable irony of
history that Ireland would have been better off—culturally, economically and
morally—had it never embraced Roman Catholicism or, failing that, had it joined
the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century. By adhering to
Rome, it subjected itself to sixteen hundred years of treachery, deceit and debauchery.
I
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n the year 449 AD, disaster befell England. The
last Celtic High King, Vortigern (Wyrtgeorn), invited several hundred Saxons to
come to his kingdom from Germany as mercenaries. God knows he needed a constabulary. The country, grown used to a certain
domesticity after nearly 500 years as the westernmost outpost of the Roman
Empire, had become ungovernable after the legions withdrew in 416. There was little memory of the ancient
Brehon law and, thus, without the Roman praetors or magistrates, the many clans
that constituted the Britons had no legal infrastructure and no way to
arbitrate disputes save mayhem. But
the dour Saxons were a poor choice as peacekeepers. They did have a semblance of law based on the iron rule of
petty chieftains but they much preferred lex
talionis with its extravagant
opportunities for bloodshed. For
one thing, only warriors killed in action could enter Valhalla after death. The idea of sitting down and reasoning
together was thought to be effeminate and irreligious. Why Vortigern failed to anticipate
trouble is incomprehensible. Saxons
had been raiding the English coast for at least two hundred years, making no
secret of their bellicose nature. Invited
in, they overran the country in short order and pushed their hosts south and
west until, finally, the survivors made their last stand at Camelot. After about 500, Germanic tribes held
sway everywhere south of the River Tweed.
Unlike the mostly Christian Britons, the conquering Saxons remained in
pagan darkness until 597 when the Pope, Gregory the Great, sent his Roman
colleague Augustine to convert them and establish what would become the Primacy
of Canterbury. Augustine’s
missionaries quickly worked their way north until they encountered the Irish
monks of Iona who were working their way south for the same purpose of soul
saving among the Saxons living north of the Humber River and south of the Tweed
in what is today Northumbria. Actually, these were Angles, a fact
known to Bede but ignored by everyone else in the certainty that all Germans
look alike.
The
Celtic Britons, as subjects of the Emperor in Rome, had already been
Christianized shortly after the Edict of Milan in 313. They were, therefore, children of the Council of Nicea and of
the dour religion of Augustine of Hippo and Jerome. The Irish, on
the other hand, were converted later and knew little of Rome or Constantinople
or Nicea. Their best known missionary was Saint
Patrick, a Briton whose father was a deacon and whose grandfather had been a
priest. Patrick did his best to convert the pagan Irish kings in the Roman
observances but recognized the wisdom of incorporating the beliefs and
practices of the Druids wherever possible. Thus, the Christian camel
got his nose inside the Celtic tent.
The
Celtic version of Christianity remained different from the theology then coalescing
in Rome and its satellite, Canterbury.
Some of these differences were significant, including the Roman
insistence that the Celtic monk Pelagius had been a heretic for refusing to
believe in predestination. But
most of the spats were trivial and it was over these that the battle was first formally
joined. The Northumbrian King Oswy was married to Rieinmellt, a
Scotch-Irish descendant of Old King Cole and a born Christian. When she was celebrating Easter as calculated by the Romans, the
king might still be keeping the Lenten fast. This conundrum defeated the Saxon imagination so Oswy
convened a great council to debate whether they should follow the Celtic or the
Roman practice and liturgy. This
convocation, attended by princes and prelates from near and far, came to be
known as the Synod of Whitby. It met at the great abbey of
Streoneshalh in 664, an event that can now be seen as the opening battle of a
500-year war between Celtic Christianity and the more rigorous version being
preached by Rome in the aftermath of the irrational anti-Pelagian pronouncements
of Saints Augustine and Jerome.
Oswy
decided the contest for Rome and the Roman party completed its takeover 508
years later when King Henry II forced the Irish church to submit to Canterbury
at the second Council of Cashel. Henry didn’t much care about theology,
but he was trying to placate Pope Alexander III who was still in a snit over
the assassination of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas à Becket. Alexander’s predecessor, Adrian IV, had “given” Ireland to
Henry in 1155 and now, seventeen years later, Henry thought to ingratiate
himself with Rome by stamping out various Irish heresies. These were many and grave.
Following
the Synod of Whitby, the Irish persisted in their errors and continued to
preach them as their monks re-converted much of Europe from the paganism that
had returned after the fall of Rome.
They continued to date
Easter in relation to Passover. They continued to follow Pelagius in
rejecting the doctrines of predestination and original sin. Their priests and bishops continued to marry. Most importantly, the Irish church was dominated by the
abbots of great monasteries, not by the bishops. This resulted
in a horizontal power structure which was a reflection of the tribalized
society in which petty kings and chieftains could appoint close relatives to
abbacies thereby consolidating their own power. But it was also
a challenge to the hierarchical system being promoted by the papacy which
envisioned the pope as the absolute ruler in both sacred and secular realms.
For
nearly a century after Whitby, Rome was in no position to capitalize on its
victory because both church and state were in disarray. The government had long since decamped to Constantinople and
the Pope was generally a Greek appointed by the Byzantine Emperor. The language of “Rome” was Greek and, often as not, the
Bishop of Rome was located not in Rome but in the Exarchate of Ravenna 222 miles to the north on the Adriatic. Thus, it was not until 745 that the church could strike again
against its Irish flock. In a series of letters to a series of
Popes, Saint Boniface denounced an Irish bishop named Clemens for all the usual
reasons. He used a heretical system for dating
Easter and, of course, he followed the teachings of Pelagius. Boniface maintained that Clemens and the Irish generally were
the spawn of the devil even though it was the Irish who had only recently
rescued the Germans from their restored worship of the pagan gods.
It
was around this time that the church developed an antipathy toward the ancient
Irish legal system known as Brehon Law.
Irish justice laid the
emphasis on restitution. It lacked prisons and the death penalty
and it embraced women’s rights to a degree remarkable for the time. It provided for several kinds of marriage including a form of
bigamy, several grounds for divorce and even a kind of no fault divorce. Its version of criminal law was especially offensive to
church and state which were in the process of developing gruesome punishments
for hundreds of civil and ecclesiastical offenses. The Roman
authorities regularly denounced the Irish system as primitive, barbaric and
heretical but it was several hundred years before it was able to enlist the
help of an English monarch in stamping it out. That monarch
was Henry II.
Ironically,
Henry himself was known as a liberal reformer of English law having introduced
the grand and the petit jury to replace trial by ordeal. But he also wanted to appoint all English bishops and he
wanted clerical criminals to be subject to civil justice. As Lord of a kingdom that stretched from the Scottish border
to the Pyrenees, he found it expedient to ignore principle and compromise with
the church. Thus, he sought to eradicate Brehon Law
for purely pragmatic reasons. With the help of the self-proclaimed
High King Murchetach O’Brien, Henry achieved limited success in this, mostly in
the eastern counties of Dublin, Wexford, Waterford, Cork and Limerick. In these places, European style dioceses were established and
the bishops were able to exercise power over the traditional monasteries and,
to some extent, over the local chieftains and clan leaders. Elsewhere, the Irish remained stubbornly committed to their
ancient and successful legal system.
The
Archbishop of Dublin, Laurence O’Toole, tried to mediate between Henry and the
Irish kings. Laurence was a member of the royal
O’Donnell family of Leinster. His distant relative Dermot MacMurrough had been deposed as King
of Leinster and had asked for Henry’s help in regaining his office. This gave Henry a convenient reason for
invading Ireland and a way of involving Laurence in his schemes involving the
Pope. In essence, Laurence became a puppet of both of them. Among other things, he engineered the
transfer of the Irish primacy from Armagh to Canterbury and acquiesced to the
elevation of Henry’s son John who was named Lord of Ireland in 1177. The Pope sent John a gold crown with
peacock feathers to mark the occasion.
But John was a disaster. A later Pope, Innocent III, came to his rescue after he was
forced to sign the Magna Carta. His Holiness declared the charter
heretical and excommunicated the 25 barons who had been appointed to enforce it. Laurence died in1180 and was canonized only 45 years later by
a grateful Vatican.
From
1172 forward, Anglo-Roman politics came to be the driving force in the
collusion of both parties against the Irish. As the English proceeded from one barbarous suppression to
another, the Popes, one after another, supported them, sometimes openly and
sometimes surreptitiously. Even
after Henry VIII turned England into a Protestant kingdom, the Vatican remained
solicitous of England’s interests in Ireland. It might occasionally appear otherwise. In 1580, Pope Gregory XIII sent 50
soldiers to Ireland in a convoluted plot to overthrow Elizabeth I and replace
her with Mary Queen of Scots. The
Irish welcomed them in the belief that Mary, a Catholic, would be an
improvement. The invaders, of
course, were slaughtered and the only thing they accomplished was to remind
Elizabeth of the danger the Irish posed.
The
Irish responded to increasing English repression by trying to become more Roman
than the Romans. They became
compliant, genuflecting deeper, praying more often, confessing in greater
detail, and contributing more generously than any other nation. This might easily be mistaken for
obsequiousness were it not for the well established courage of the Irish. They never faltered in their hopeless
struggle against their British overlords.
They feared nothing, not even hell. They embraced Rome on the simplistic theory that the enemy
of their enemy was their friend. But
the Popes, who were first and foremost the rulers of a mighty temporal realm,
feared political rebellion even more than Protestantism. They regarded the kings of Europe as
vassals and supported them against revolutionaries even when they were
despotic, deranged or heretical. The
papacy fought—literally—against any threat to the divine rights of established
kings and these battles invariably took precedence over any legal or doctrinal
problems the popes might be having with their vassals.
For
the next 300 years, the English were preoccupied by continental wars and
internecine feuds. Henry VIII really did think Brehon Law
was a heinous crime against the divine right of kings and the Vatican agreed
with him. He tried to stamp it out by conquest but
he gave the task to a pair of incompetents one of whom was an Irish traitor who
sold out for a meaningless English earldom. Henry himself had too much on his mind to worry greatly about
his Irish neighbors: six wives,
two of whom he had beheaded on trumped up charges, ten legitimate children and
at least twenty bastards and, of course, the break with Rome and dissolution of
the monasteries. In this, he was aided enthusiastically
by the majority of the bishops. The
church meanwhile took the Irish for granted, as unlettered peasants, as pawns
to be manipulated and, if necessary, sacrificed in the interest of the
Vatican’s geopolitical plots and plans.
Using forged documents, Pope Adrian IV had “donated” Ireland to Henry II
in 1156. With few exceptions, it
appointed as Archbishops of Armagh and Primates of Ireland men it could count
on to suppress, oppress and repress any hint of dissatisfaction with English
colonialism. The Irish barely
noticed such outrageous ripples in the sea of outrage that was their patrimony. That the church was the dominant
institution in the country seemed natural and, in any event, it was safer to
take one’s marching orders from the representatives of God than those of the
King of England.
Henry’s
reign was followed those of his children Edward, Mary and Elizabeth who waged
bloody wars of religion ending with the beheading of King Charles I on
suspicion of being a closet Catholic.
Enter Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell was a Puritan whose hatred of the Vatican and all
things Catholic knew no limits. To
this day, the English regard him as a hero in spite of the fact that he
virtually invented genocide as an instrument of God’s will and state policy. When Irish Prime Minister Bernie Ahern visited Tony Blair in
London in 1997, he walked out of the conference room vowing not to return until
the Brits removed the portrait of “that murdering bastard.” It is amusing to follow the
intellectual gymnastics of modern revisionist historians who somehow try to
intellectualize their way around slaughter, rapine and terrorism.
Cromwell
waged war with a viciousness rarely seen even in the bloody theater that is
British history. In Ireland, he perfected the strategy of
terror not only by massacring men, women and children, but also through a
policy of “transplantation” or what would be called today ethnic cleansing. The property of Irish owners was seized
and turned over to English Protestant settlers. Those who could
prove they had not engaged in rebellion were sent “beyond the Shannon” to Mayo
and Donegal. All others were “turned out” to become
wanderers or emigrants. The
population of Ireland was thereby reduced by about two-thirds. While this was happening, the popes, Innocent X and Alexander
VII, took no notice. They were busy quarreling with Ireland’s
ally, Catholic France, and had no interest in offending England which was
France’s historical enemy. After Cromwell, of course, there was no
institutional Catholic presence in Ireland so the Vatican’s benign neglect was
a blessing. It, the neglect, did
not last long.
In
1688, James II, King of England, Scotland and Ireland, under suspicion of
pro-Catholic sentiments, was deposed and exiled to France. He raised an army in an effort to regain
the crown and began the good fight by trying to incite rebellion in Ireland. He had no love lost for the Irish but
hoped they would support his cause against the English Protestants. In this he was quite right. Parliament appealed to the Dutch Prince
William of Orange and his wife Mary who happened to be James’ daughter. They defeated James in 1690 at the
Battle of the Boyne and he beat a hasty retreat back to France. It was not the great victory the
Protestants have celebrated ever since but it was important because it was the
first victory achieved by the League of Augsburg which had been formed to
resist French aggression in Europe.
The League was the first (but not the last) formal alliance between the
Protestant nations and the Vatican.
Once again, the Pope, Alexander VIIII, deserted the Catholic side—the French,
the Irish and his former ally James.
The politics shifted and, when James died in 1701, the church instituted
a cause for canonization under the aegis of the Archbishop of Paris. But then the politics shifted again
rendering the canonization process a cause without an effect.
Throughout
the seventeenth century, there was no shortage of anti-Catholic laws passed by
Parliament. The Treaty of Limerick
which ended what the English call the Glorious Revolution resulted in the exile
of up to twenty thousand Irish soldiers (the Flight of the Wild Geese) but it
also guaranteed the civil rights of the remaining Irish population, especially
the landowners. Before the ink was
dry, however, the English revoked the treaty and in its place enacted a set of
formal Penal Laws. Among other
things, Catholics could not vote, study or practice law, possess arms, rent
land worth more than 30 shillings or own a horse worth more than five pounds. They were barred from elementary
schools and from the universities. They were required to attend Church of England services every
Sunday. They had to tithe to the
local Protestant parish. Being a
priest was a capital offense. These liabilities and those imposed by the amendments of 1699
were actually a liberal compromise. The conservative elements of Parliament wanted to exterminate
all Catholics whom they regarded a irredeemable heretics. The Irish appealed to the Pope, Clement
XI, but their petition never gained a spot on his agenda. Instead, he renewed the church’s recognition
of the hapless and by now demented James II which the English took as more
evidence that the Irish Papists were a fifth column which required further
brutal suppression.
In
1703, a law was passed authorizing “transportation,” a form of exile, for petty
crimes that would otherwise have merited the death penalty. These included the stealing of fewer
than two cows or ten sheep or goods worth less than one pound. Initially, convicts were sent to the
American colonies and later to the Caribbean plantations. Beginning in 1787, the vast majority
were sent to Australia by secret English tribunals which therefore came to be
called “kangaroo courts.” Secrecy
was an integral part of the terror.
People simply disappeared from communities. It is not known how many Irish men and women were transported. English estimates are lower than Irish
ones which tend to cluster just over 150,000. Of these, about 10,000 were young women who would
deliberately steal something small in the hope of being shipped off to
Australia where they might eventually find their husbands who had been
previously transported. When they
arrived, they were often rented out as slaves and, when their terms had been
completed, they would be lined up after Sunday church services for the
inspection of marriage-minded male settlers. The churches actively supported this “reform” effort. Both Catholic and Protestant clergy
were paid for their support by landlords who wanted to clear their lands of
peasants and slave ship masters who wanted passengers.
Transportation
had been invented by Cromwell and was so successful it was used in several
places. After the English defeated
Bonnie Prince Charlie Stuart at the Battle of Culloden in 1746, there were
5,000 Scottish survivors. About
1,000 wounded were slaughtered on the battlefield and another thousand hunted
down and executed in the following weeks.
The remaining soldiers were transported to Nova Scotia where the British
made room for them by transporting the resident French Canadians to New Orleans and the
American colonies. This became the context for Longfellow's epic poem Evangeline. Once more, the
landlords and bishops were in league as supporters.
The
Irish rebelled against British tyranny, mounting campaigns throughout the
eighteenth century. These were,
for the most part, easily and brutally suppressed but, toward the end of the
century, Prime Minister William Pitt (the Younger) realized that his English
problem was becoming intractable.
Against all logic, he decided the best solution was to unite England and
Ireland politically under a single sovereign, Crazy George III. Thus, the Acts of Union were passed in
the summer of 1800 and came into effect on January 1, 1801. They replaced the “personal union” that
had set Ireland under the English monarchy since the time of Henry VIII which,
in turn, had replaced the overlordship of Ireland as a papal possession English
monarchs had enjoyed since the reign of Henry II. The “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland” now had
one Parliament.
Simultaneously,
the Penal Laws were strengthened. Catholics
still could not vote and now it became a capital crime to wear green clothes. To counter such absurdities, Daniel
O’Connell founded the Catholic Association in 1824, financing it with the
so-called Catholic Rent, a membership fee of one penny a month. He was elected to Parliament in 1828
but, as a Catholic, was ineligible to take his seat. The bishops denounced his Association as a secret society and
ordered the priests to preach against it although some continued to support it. Membership grew and there was serious
agitation at the grass roots which led to O’Connell’s admission the following
year. In 1838, he achieved repeal
of the tithing system but in the early 1840’s he was imprisoned by the British
for sedition. Released after a few
months, he tried to re-establish his campaign against the Act of Union. Soon, however, everything changed as
the potato famine took hold in 1845.
It was an unprecedented human disaster costing the lives of 1,500,000
Irish men, women and children. Another
million or two were forced to emigrate mostly to the United States and
Canada. Even the Pope took
notice. Pius IX issued an
encyclical, Praedecessores Nostros,
which recommended three days of public prayers for Ireland.
The
famine reduced the population of Ireland by about 25%. With fewer mouths to feed, the economy
improved in the 1850’s and the church prospered. The Primate of Ireland at the time was Archbishop Paul
Cullen who had previously enjoyed the patronage of Pius IX as a member of the
Roman Curia. Cullen was a strong
supporter of papal supremacy and set out to reform the Irish church by casting
it more than ever in the Roman mold.
One of his first acts was to convene the Synod of Thurles, a meeting of some
30 Irish bishops. It was convened
on August 22, 1850 and met for three and a half weeks of intense debate and
elaborate ceremonies. Although all
attendees were theological conservatives, they were pretty evenly divided
between the Roman party and a group of between 10 and 15 nationalists led by
Archbishop McHale of Tuam. Both
sides agreed for different reasons that no Catholic could have anything to do
with the new public universities being established and no child could attend
any school not run by priests. On
other issues, the voting was close but what emerged was a puritanical,
authoritarian, pietistic and subservient church that, for the next 130 years dominated
Irish education, morality, social life and politics. Cullen became the first Irish Cardinal.
Still
the Vatican opposed every effort the Irish mounted in the nineteenth century to
overturn the infamous Act of Union which bound them in poverty to England. Irish resistance was expressed in a
series of land reform agitations organized by county associations, national
political parties and international movements. The Vatican viewed all these organizations as secret societies
and pronounced its anathema on each in turn over a period of 75 years,
culminating in a papal encyclical issued by Pope Leo XIII on June 24, 1888. The weakening of land reform gave rise
to a more militant but still non-violent brand of politics. Under the leadership of the Protestant
nationalist Charles Steward Parnell, the Land League became the National League
which the church also opposed. When
Home Rule seemed certain to pass in 1890, Captain William O’Shea was persuaded
to sue his wife Katherine (Kitty) for divorce naming Parnell as co-respondent. O’Shea had known about their affair for
years (Kitty had, after all, borne three of Parnell’s children) and had done
nothing about it. The marriage had
been in trouble long before she met Parnell but now someone bought him off. Willie, as he was known, was a wastrel,
always in debt frequently to lenders of dubious character. But to the opponents of home rule, he
was a hero. Most but not all
bishops, Catholic and Protestant, English and Irish, had a field day with their
scandal mongering and both the bill and the government went crashing down to
defeat.
In
August of 1913, 20,000 impoverished Dublin workers threatened to go out on strike
and were met with a corresponding lockout. The church, as usual, was on the side of management and, as
the months went by, conditions in the Dublin slums deteriorated to the point of
starvation. Sympathetic families
in England and Scotland offered to take in the children of the workers until
things returned to normal. However,
Archbishop William J. Walsh of Dublin would have none of it. “I can,” he said, “only put it to them
that they can no longer be worthy of the name of Catholic mothers if they so
far forget [their] duty as to send away their little children to be cared for
in a strange land, without security of any kind that those to whom the children
are to be handed over are Catholics, or indeed are persons of any faith at
all.” The upshot was that mobs led by priests physically stopped the children
from going. One of the few to
denounce the Church's stance was W. B
Yeats who declared at a public meeting, “Some day we will have to reckon
with those who have fomented fanaticism in Dublin to break up the organisation
of the workers." But not in his lifetime which ended in 1929.
Independence
came about in stages between 1921 and 1949. But it did not bring prosperity. In 1947, the government noticed that Ireland had the highest
rate of infant mortality in Europe, three times that of England. Prime Minister John Aloysius Costello
endorsed a program advanced by His Health Minister, Noel Browne, that would
provide comprehensive health care for pregnant women and their children. Archbishop John McQuaid of Dublin was
enraged. He sent a note to Rome
saying, “The attack is directed from Communist elements in Europe and in the
Irish Workers League ... When I
broadcast on the issue I took occasion to give the warning that the attack on
the church in Ireland would come under the guise of social reform.” He then set up an inquisitional court,
composed of himself and the bishops of Ferns and Galway. They summoned the Health Minister
before the tribunal and later issued their predictable finding: “…the
powers taken by the State in the proposed Mother and Child Health Service are
in direct opposition to the rights of the family and of the individual and are
liable to very great abuse... If
adopted in law they would constitute a ready made instrument for future
totalitarian aggression. Gynaecological
care may be, and in some countries is, interpreted to include provision for
birth limitation and abortion. We
have no guarantee that State officials will respect Catholic principles in
regard to these matters. Doctors
trained in institutions in which we have no confidence may be appointed as
medical officers under the proposed services, and may give gynaecological care
not in accordance with Catholic principles...”
There
you have it. Communism, birth
control and abortion are the certain results of providing health care to women
and children. Saving lives is not
worth the risk. What’s more, this
satanic view prevailed! As Costello said, "As a Catholic, I obey my Church
authorities, and will continue to do so.
There is going to be no flouting of the Bishops on Catholic morals and
social teaching." I wish I
could think of some excuse for this craven submission to the murderers of women
and children but it has been beyond my imaginative powers. Costello no doubt felt that
disobedience would result in his eternal damnation but that the psychopathic
God of the prelates would forgive the slaughter of the innocents.
Before
leaving this sad chapter, note should be taken of His Excellency, Dr. John Charles McQuaid who served as
Archbishop of Dublin from 1940 until his death in 1972. It turns out he was one of the
multitude of Irish clerical pedophiles who was finally exposed in the aftermath
of the Murphy Report of 2009. The
report itself was highly critical of the Archbishop but did not mention him by
name in connection with two incidents of abuse of pre-pubescent boys. However, on December 8, 2011, Patsy
McGarry wrote in the Irish Times that the unidentified cleric was McQuaid
himself. This was confirmed by a
spokesperson for the Murphy Commission.
Only
over the past 30 years has some change come about. The first tremor was the introduction of television in the
early 1960’s much against the wishes of the hierarchy and its lackeys in the
government. Broadcasting began on
New Year’s Eve 1961 with sermons by Prime Minister Eamon de Valera and the
Primate John Francis Cardinal d’Alton, both warning against the sinfulness of
the new medium. As predicted, TV
promoted the forces of modernism and secularism, slowly but irresistibly. The main battlefield was, of course,
sex. In 1962, a guest on the Late
Late Show admitted that she had not worn anything to bed on her wedding night. Michael Browne, the horrified Bishop of
Galway, raised a holy ruckus and the issue became a political hot potato for
months. The wanton had sinned by
appearing naked in the presence of her husband and, by inference, by enjoying
the sex act. This may well have
been the first time since the days of the High Kings that sex had become a
subject for public discussion. It
was an absurd dialogue of course but it did let a little fresh air into Irish
minds and Irish bedrooms.
In
1972, the Catholic church was finally disestablished and, in 1974, the Supreme
Court in the case of McGee versus Attorney General declared that Irish citizens
were entitled by right to “marital privacy.” It was not clear exactly what this
meant because the ruling said that marital privacy did not include the right to
abortion but nonetheless McGee terrified the clergy and led to a massive effort
to ban all abortions by constitutional amendment. The church’s position included the fanciful notion that
contraception which had been legalized in 1979 is a form of abortion. The amendment without the ban on
contraception passed with 70% of the vote in 1983. Nine years later in what has come to be known as the X Case,
the Supreme Court held that, the infamous amendment notwithstanding, Irish
women have a right to information about abortion and that the state could not
prevent them from going to England to procure one. Thus, it allowed X, a 13-year old rape victim, to end her
pregnancy in an English clinic. Once
again, the hierarchs were beside themselves, convinced that Ireland was turning
into a perpetual bacchanalia. X is
pretty much where the law stands today.
Ireland has made modest progress but still has the most restrictive
abortion laws in Europe.
A
similar trajectory was played out when the church turned its attention to that
other great scourge of modern times, divorce. It campaigned for a referendum that would ban it entirely in
Ireland, and it won in 1986 with 63% of the vote. When the referendum was repeated ten years later, however,
the church, for the first time, went down to defeat even if by only a small
margin. Something was afoot. That something could be measured in
church attendance which had plummeted 14% in five years. Of course two-thirds of all Irish
citizens still attend services compared to an average of 25% for all EU
countries. But the decline in
Europe has been going on for more than 200 years while, in Ireland, it started
in 1994.
Part
of the reason, of course, is the combination of education and prosperity which
are the traditional enemies of superstition and subservience. And, as the hierarchy had feared, it
was made possible by the devil’s medium of television. Without warning, a vast scandal erupted
and was broadcast into every living room in the country. The church was exposed as the
perpetrator of horrific crimes on such an immense scale and over such a long
period that they could not be attributed to the sins of individual clerics. Sexual perversion, child abuse, and
forced labor—slavery—were nothing less than an integral part of a corporate
profit making strategy. They even
sold babies, children and pregnant women to pharmaceutical companies for use as
guinea pigs in the testing of vaccines and delivery methods. The thousands of victims were almost
universally poor women and their offspring. The hypocrisy was sensational. Here you had a gang of Roman collar criminals preaching medieval
sexual morality while living lives of the most extreme debauchery. It was too much even for the Irish. This was, after all, the same church
that had long taught that the oppression of the poor is one of the sins that
cry to heaven for vengeance.
There
is no pleasure in re-hashing here the gross, degrading evils of the Industrial
Schools and the Magdalene Laundries. But it must be remembered that virtually all the victims were
innocents. Their “crimes” were
mainly being orphans or being born out of wedlock or, in the cases of some of
their mothers (called “Maggies”), of being “fallen women” or “prostitutes” by
which the law often meant they were homeless. Some little girls were impressed for the crime of being too
pretty—they were likely to become an occasion of sin for others. Which is exactly what happened. The “others” were priests, brothers and
nuns. The state paid the church to
sweep problem children under the rug and it paid on a per capita basis. The church, in turn, hired bounty hunters
to round up an ever increasing supply of wards. These parasites were called “the cruelty men” in the
countryside. Their job was to
ferret out illegitimate children and orphans being hidden by relatives. The business was profitable for the
church and the victims could serve also as objects to gratify the perverse
sexual fantasies of the clergy. The
victims could easily be beaten into silence. When they died, their bodies could be tossed without
ceremony and without notifying anyone into unmarked mass graves one of which
was located in the heart of Dublin. In Tuam, a County Galway town of some 8,300 souls, there was
a laundry for fallen women and their children run by the Bon Secours sisters. It had one of the highest infant death
rates in Europe between 1925 and 1960, many from malnutrition and general
neglect. In that period, the
sisters appear to have buried 796 children in an unmarked septic tank. Archbishop Michael Neary said he was
horrified but that the Diocese of Tuam had nothing to do with the laundry and
had no records regarding it.
Apparently it offered no pastoral care to the women and children in its
midst.
The
Industrial Schools and the Magdalene Laundries persisted in Irish culture for
150 years until the mid-1990’s. In
all that time, there were no innocent churchmen, no innocent nuns, no innocent
politicians. There were a few
citizens who did whatever they could to alleviate the suffering, one child at a
time. There were some families who
successfully hid their own orphans and bastards, often placing them with an
aunt and uncle who gave them a new name.
And, of course, ordinary Irish men and women simply could not imagine
the massive sexual abuse, the iniquity of the clergy or the wickedness of the
government procurers. But make no
mistake about it: what occurred was a national abdication of moral
responsibility.
Was
the evil really so pervasive? Did not a majority of the clergy continue to
serve admirably? No. If only half
the Irish Christian Brothers and half the Sisters of Mercy were depraved
sadists, the other halves certainly knew about it and did nothing. If the bishops were truly unaware of
what was going on, they were failing in their most sacred obligation. Of course they knew. But those who were not themselves slaves
to perversion were addicted to the profits of slavery. The laundries were a major source of
income for the entire church. Celibate
bishops were, in effect, pimps.
The
criminal debauchery practiced in the penal institutions was mirrored in the schools
which, in Ireland, are still operated by the Church under contract to the
government. Once the floodgates of
revelation had spewed forth the story of the Magdalene Laundries, people began
to look under the rocks covering the schools. One diocese after another was forced to admit widespread
sexual abuse of every kind. In the
Diocese of Ferns, for example, between 1962 and 2002, there were more than a
hundred allegations made against 21 priests. Ferns is a tiny diocese of some 100,000 souls in County
Wexford and if the true incidence is several times the number of reported cases
it seems that its patron is not Saint Aiden but Satan himself.
If
we are ever to establish minimum standards of human behavior, it is imperative
that we try to understand how Ireland sank so low. Ireland was and is the land of saints and scholars, of music
and dance and poetry. Why, in the
name of God then, did they allow their priests to destroy so many of their most
defenseless children?
One
part of the answer lies in a thousand years of harsh colonial repression that
coarsened the people’s awareness of tragedy and their capacity for sympathy. It was analogous in some ways to the
so-called Stockholm Syndrome in which hostages begin to buy into the logic and
morality of terrorists. It is the
same reason that 250,000 Irishmen volunteered for the British army in World War
I, most doing so after the 1916 uprising.
Fifty thousand gave their lives.
The Irish were bound to their other oppressors, the clergy, for similar
reasons.
Another
part of the answer can be ascribed to pusillanimous politicians who probably
thought the hierarchy was divinely inspired. Many of them had a Utopian vision of Ireland as a land of
contented and compliant peasants under the beneficent sway of the church and an ancient mythos. Among these was Éamon de Valera, the
dominant political player for most of the twentieth century. The Long Fella served three terms
totaling sixteen years as Prime Minister or Taoiseach and fourteen more as
President. He was without doubt a
patriot but he was also an austere, morally rigid and politically devious
autocrat whose fantasies stood squarely between Ireland and the modern world. He was also frightened by the
power—spiritual as well as temporal—of the hierarchy and the clergy and was
rarely able to resist either their threats or their blandishments.
Some
of the clergy were kindly, no doubt, but the Irish hierarchy was a hotbed of
careerism and treason, committed only to the interests of distant Rome. They will point to their holy martyrs
whose blood was shed for the faith by the English. But even these were used as pawns by the Vatican. Archbishop Oliver Plunkett was probably
the most important of them. He was
executed by the English in 1681 and proposed for canonization the following
year. The Vatican refused to
consider him because his cause, like that of Joan of Arc for an even longer
time, was thought to be politically inopportune. The problem was the conflict Pope Innocent XI was having
with the French King Louis XIV in which Innocent hoped to have the support of
France’s traditional enemy, England.
Needing English help, the Vatican simply put Irish interests on the back
burner for 300 years. With one
distraction or another, they finally got around to Ollie in 1975. So much for martyrdom.
To
the Vatican, the Irish have always been a congregation of convenience, a race
of dull louts to be manipulated in whichever way suited their power-driven
strategy of the moment. Religion
was merely the instrument of that manipulation. God was merely the alleged source of that power. Similar villainy pervaded Vatican
policy throughout Europe with the difference that at many points other nations
had the wherewithal to push back. Thus,
for long periods of time, the Vatican was engaged in warfare against the Holy
Roman Emperors, the Kings of France and England and the various states that now
comprise Italy. Papal armies
fought as savagely as any across the length and breadth of Europe, slaughtering
women and children, raping and looting in God’s name. In the early 1980’s, as the popularity of Umberto Eco’s
novel The Name of the Rose spread,
even scholars were surprised to learn that the Inquisition was rooted as much
in politics as in religious doctrine.
The church brutally persecuted one group after another—the Arnoldists,
Beghards, Cathars, Joachimites, Umiliati, Waldensians and others—as heretical. There were always political as well as
religious motives for the autos da fe. Some of the new ideas were indeed
heretical in terms of orthodox doctrine.
But the one thing all these groups shared was their threat to the
secular power of the Pope. The
same persecution, lacking only the burnings, was enforced against every single
Irish organization that dared agitate even peacefully for land reform. In 1832, for example, Pope Gregory XVI
in his encyclical Mirari Vos
anathematized all organizations opposed to complete submission to princes,
suggesting that such opposition was treason to God.
Beginning
at the Synod of Whitby in 664, the Roman Catholic church made every effort to
stamp out both Irish culture and the Irish version of Christianity. The Norman invasion in 1171 marked a
change in strategy in favor of military force and terrorism. To a large degree, it worked but there
always remained a remnant of Pelagian enlightenment or, in the Vatican’s view,
heresy. The Synod of Thurles in
1850 was meant to complete the process of Romanization and, in the aftermath of
the Great Hunger, it very nearly succeeded. The Irish church became more puritanical, more militant,
more pious, more rigorous and more demanding than it had ever been elsewhere. It campaigned vigorously against
women’s suffrage. It opposed
allowing women to serve on juries and, with traditional exceptions, to work
outside the home. It successfully
urged the government to outlaw “revealing” fashions, to prevent the mingling of
the sexes on beaches, to close the dance halls and to enforce strict censorship
of books and movies. Only in the
1990’s, after the revelations of
the horrendous sexual abuses of the clergy did it begin to lose its grip on
Irish life.
Would
history have been different if the Irish had embraced the Protestant
Reformation? As an exercise in alternative history, perhaps. At a minimum, a Protestant Ireland
would have been free of at least one source of its subjugation. Its Christianity might have been
grounded in the theology of Pelagius.
Its politics, at least in theory, would have been less adversarial vis a vis England. To those raised on the idea of
Protestantism as the enemy, as the perpetrator of injustice in the North, it is
well to remember that many of Ireland’s most effective advocates of freedom
were Protestants. Among them were
Parnell, Wolfe Tone, Robert Emmett and Roger Casement (Sir Roger converted to
Catholicism just before his execution).
Others who “kicked with their left feet” include Dean Swift, Oscar
Wilde, William B. Yeats, George
Bernard Shaw, the first Duke of Wellington, Bernard Law Montgomery and even
that quintessential Irishman Benjamin Guinness. Certainly, a Protestant Ireland could not have written as
tragic a history as that which actually unfolded.
Afterword
My maternal grandmother would have hated
this essay. She grew up in County
Mayo and loved the Sisters of Charity who rescued the local economy by creating
the Foxford Woolen Mills in 1892, the year she left for America. If I could, I’d tell her that I hate it
too. Like her, I have known
remarkable nuns and priests whose skill, patience and, yes, love shaped me and
my environment. Certainly there
were none who ever harmed me or anyone I knew. Even as children, we knew some were gay before we were sure
what that meant. Some were harsh,
some gentle. Several were
brilliant, others not terribly bright.
Of course, they preached nonsense poorly and, even as a 10-year old
choir boy, I knew it. But they
were decent people doing their best
In 2019, Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio of Brooklyn released a list of 108 priests who had been credibly accused of sexual abuse of children. It contained only one name I recognized. Shortly thereafter, Bishop DiMarzio was himself accused although the accusation does not seem very convincing.
Finally, in 2018, Ireland passed laws repealing the anti-abortion laws and allowing abortions during the first twelve weeks of pregnancy. The new provisions took effect on January 1,2019.
In 2019, Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio of Brooklyn released a list of 108 priests who had been credibly accused of sexual abuse of children. It contained only one name I recognized. Shortly thereafter, Bishop DiMarzio was himself accused although the accusation does not seem very convincing.
Finally, in 2018, Ireland passed laws repealing the anti-abortion laws and allowing abortions during the first twelve weeks of pregnancy. The new provisions took effect on January 1,2019.
Andrew
Greeley, surely one of the great contemporary priests, often said that if Jesus
had expected the church to be perfect, he should have entrusted it to the
Seraphs. It is true that
every human institution falls far short of its goals. But that is not the issue. The church says (and probably thinks) it is perfect in
all important respects and if you don’t accept what it is pleased to call its
“magisterium,” it will separate you from God’s love and condemn you to an
eternity in hell. Such ignorance
and arrogance cannot be sustained in the modern world.
