Home Truths: Irish Neoliberalism’s Eclipse of Irish Catholicism

Abstract

At one stage in Derek Scally’s brilliant journalistic account of the collapse of the influence of the Irish Catholic Church, he compares the institution to the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Thinking about the Irish Catholic Church as a ‘leaning tower of piety’ is an interesting image, because it is widely understood today that the famous white marble bell tower does not simply have a precipitous tilt because of faulty foundations. That was the initial problem, identified about five years after construction. Soon after that, Genoa and Pisa went to war, and it was the better part of a century before building resumed. Modifications were made that did not sufficiently address the fundamental problem. Even though the edifice was completed in 1370, it was already sliding back off its axis. One of the strengths of Scally’s book is how it introduces the figure of Cardinal Paul Cullen to his readers. While many in Ireland have an understanding of Irish history stalked by a caricature called John Charles McQuaid, Cullen was a much earlier and perhaps more significant ecclesial revolutionary leader. Scally resists the temptation to cast him as a villain and instead locates him in context as a skilled organiser, formed in Rome, who perceived how to advance the institutional reform of the Catholic Church in the aftermath of the Famine and Catholic Emancipation. Scally is clear that this reform was not purely ultramontane, meaning aligned and subservient to the interests of Rome, but also a hybrid with Victorian social mores. At the heart of this project was a devotional revolution that brought about the ‘Irish Catholicism’ that sometimes seems somewhat more ‘Irish’ than ‘Catholic’. It expressed itself in the development of schools, hospitals, parish buildings, and growing seminaries. It also aimed at the social advancement of Catholics in Irish society. Desmond Bowen reports that less than ten years after his appointment, Cullen’s office could boast that ‘everywhere now Catholics were advancing socially, on the bench, in commerce, in railways, even among the landed gentry and nobility’. Kevin Hargaden