Finola Kennedy's new biography of Frank Duff has made some waves.
Judging by her joint essay with Diarmaid Ferriter on Duff in the
Dictionary of Irish Biography, Kennedy sees Duff as a man of
contemporary resonance.
There is even an attempt to burnish Duff's
credentials as a social radical, given the kindliness he showed to
unmarried mothers and many other careworn hearts.
Ferriter and
Kennedy make the standard correlation between Catholicism and social
justice.
They mention Duff's personal devotion to John Henry Newman, but
there is a far more subtle connection that looms large in Frank M
Turner's engrossing intellectual profile of Newman from 2002.
Turner
was a Yale historian and was not inclined to take any nonsense from the
so-called "Newmaniac" wing of the Anglican and Roman Catholic Churches
in Britain, whom he dismissed as mere fawning partisans.
Instead,
Turner emphasised Newman's religious pathologies and he argued that his
religious agonies might best be seen as products of a childhood that
taught him to link evangelical Protestantism with bankruptcy and
fanaticism.
And without descending into the lurid Freudian depths,
Turner asked hard questions about the link between the very violence of
Newman's rhetoric and his complex, sublimated sexual identity.
Turner's
suggestion in passing that John Henry Newman may well have been a
repressed homosexual provoked a very nasty storm of protest from the
more credulous wing of British Catholicism and High Church Anglicanism.
It
seems a fairly obvious question today, though, especially considering
Newman's eating disorders, his misogyny, his romantic belief in the
spiritual benefits of celibate male companionship, as well as his
wounded response to the marriage of certain old friends.
Turner's
sense that sexual disappointments can feed the religious mind never
seems to have been properly applied to a personality like Frank Duff's,
even though he grew up in an enfeebled quasi-Victorian world.
Though
the feel-good rhetoric about his unconventional social views often
conceals this point, it is important to recognise the full extremity of
Duff's religious views.
The Marian wing of the Catholic Church has
always been associated with a fairly virulent form of religious
hysteria, one that encouraged a deep ambivalence about sexual desire
that was inseparable from personal devotion to that whitest of icons,
the Virgin Mother.
Duff's ugly picketing campaign against
Protestant ministers who gave breakfasts to the poor bears the authentic
Marian stamp of channelled aggression.
The Jesuits, by contrast,
would never have responded to free bacon and eggs by lowering themselves
to the level of temperance-style hecklers.
Duff's legendary busyness also suggests a certain controlled frenzy to the weary modern eye.
He
seems to have written so many letters, clocked up so many bicycle
miles, swam so many laps and ministered to so many lapsed Catholic souls
that somewhere along the way he forgot about his own needs.
If
the combination of celibacy and paranoid intensity that we see in Duff
recalls Turner's Newman, then his work with the painted ladies of Monto
recalls nobody more directly than Gladstone.
Gladstone often
slipped out of Downing Street on sleepless nights and made a lonely trek
up to the Strand clutching a family bible.
He wrote in his diaries about bringing several prostitutes back to Downing Street where he would read Dante or Tennyson to them.
Like
Duff, there is no reason to doubt Gladstone's sincerity here. But
Gladstone possessed a degree of self-awareness that Duff lacked.
And
in his diaries, he tried to interrogate his personal motives, and he
admitted in several cryptic passages that he felt a definite sexual
thrill in ministering to the prostitutes, a thrill that soon turned into
High Anglican shame and which could only be off-set by flagellation.
The attempt to detoxify Irish Catholicism with reference to social doctrine is now a fairly standard move.
The
1937 Constitution is still bizarrely hailed as a triumph of "liberal"
Catholicism, even though it explicitly states that the rights it
protects are gifts of a Trinitarian deity who demands that the State
"shall hold His name in reverence".
And hard-nosed Catholic minds
like Declan Costello are celebrated with hyperbole that would embarrass
genuine liberal humanists like Hubert Butler.
As with Duff, the
celibate scourge of evangelicals, there has been a similar failure in
Declan Costello's case to confront the aggressive moralism that would
seem to have structured his thinking.
The expectation in some
cases seems to be that his modest enthusiasm for State planning and
wealth redistribution will offset his appalling judgment in the X Case,
where he read the Eighth Amendment as mandating a kind of internment for
a child who declined to bear the progeny of her rapist.
In its
attempt to cloak fairly obvious religious dogma in the more serene robes
of human charity, that judgment ranks alongside Brian Walsh's equally
menacing insistence in 1989 that "the qualification of certain
pregnancies as being 'unwanted' is likewise a totally unacceptable
criterion".
Proponents of "liberal Catholicism" do not seem to
have pondered the paradox in William James's beautiful gloss on Tolstoy
in his Varieties of Religious Experience.
Recognising the humane
element in the religious mind as a complex product of joy and mania,
James wrote about the pilgrim who found "a good which broke the
effective edge of his sadness; yet the sadness was preserved as a minor
ingredient in the heart of the faith by which it was overcome."
We might chisel these words on Duff's headstone.