The decline of the power wielded
by the Catholic Church in the late twentieth century is clear.
As Tom
Inglis argued, the Catholic Church’s moral monopoly has been eroding
since the 1960s. The proliferation of new media displaced the centrality
of the Sacred Heart and Our Lady for many.
Later, the revelation of
abuse and sex scandals shook the Church and the subsequent publication
of the Ryan Report in 2009 left a chastened institution.
Despite these crises and the
seeming onward march of secularisation, the Catholic Church remains a
prominent part of Irish public life.
The ability to wield influence over
matters of private conscience appears diminished in the light of last
year’s same-sex marriage referendum – although the current struggle
taking place over calls to repeal the eighth amendment may show that the
residual power of Catholicism may prove substantial.
Bricks and mortar
There is one area in which the
Church retains some aura of the prestige it enjoyed in the past and it
exists in the form of bricks and mortar. The ornate churches which are
threaded through Ireland’s urban and rural landscape are the material
evidence of an institution that still maintains a hold upon things of a
worldly nature.
The cathedrals, churches,
convents, schools and hospitals constructed in the 19th and 20th
centuries serve as discernible reminders that spiritual authority could
be inscribed in buildings and architecture. Far from insignificant,
ownership of property remains an important aspect of the Church’s
institutional power.
I work as a researcher on a
historical project that sets out to establish how the Catholic Church
delivered one of the most impressive institution building projects in
modern Irish history.
Led by Dr Sarah Roddy at the University of
Manchester, Visible Divinity is a project which looks to explore two
historical problems. Firstly, how did the church fund church-building
projects between 1850 and 1921? Who were the people that donated the
money? How much was donated? And how did the role of the Irish diaspora
feed into all this? Secondly, the project explores how money played, and
continues to play, a key role in the way people understand their
religion. People’s faith is often mediated through the handing over of
cash.
The historical issues at stake
are significant. The money raised enabled the Church to acquire one of
the most impressive property portfolios in the country. It also helped
the Church build an iteration of the Irish State which is still present
today.
Since earlier this year I have
been granted privileged access to many religious archives the length and
breadth of Ireland. I have been welcomed by a range of lay archivists,
members of religious orders and communities, and even members of the
church hierarchy keen for researchers to use the vast array of rich
historical material in their possession. That this access has been
unstintingly granted in the majority of cases signals an important
desire for transparency and suggests one way historians might serve a
useful conduit in redrawing Church and state relations in the future.
I have also visited many of the
buildings with which our research has so far been concerned. Marvelling
at the beauty and ostentatiousness of buildings such as St Macartan’s
Cathedral in Monaghan, for example, provides evidence of the rich
architectural heritage that exists in Ireland. Built over a 30- year
period, the erection of Monaghan’s cathedral represented a concerted
effort across generations. Any of the more modest churches located in
rural parishes reminds one of the incredible efforts that must have been
carried out in order to construct these buildings.
Such buildings radiated a kind of
divine beauty for our ancestors. Even the most agnostic of visitors to
these buildings today cannot help but be impressed. Why did people pay
for these structures? Appeals made by the church hierarchy and clergy
certainly played an important part in this work. However, besides the
compelling influence of religious leaders other possible reasons must
also be considered. For those people who donated money repeatedly to
build, renovate and maintain these edifices in the past, an array of
possible intentions lay behind the gift – a contribution towards the
afterlife, a desire to do honour to God, a pride in one’s local parish, a
need to honour the memory of a loved one, even self-aggrandisement.
Each church serves as a valuable archive with a wealth of local
historical detail memorialised in stained-glass windows, holy water
fonts and pews.
I know from recent experience how
the relationship between religious donation and one’s sense of faith
are entwined. Earlier this year I moved to Dublin from Manchester, where
I grew up in an Irish family. The church informed my own sense of
Manchester-Irishness.
Like many, my childhood was landmarked by key
events that included the sacraments of Confirmation and first Holy
Communion.
In common with many of my cohort I
identify as a lapsed Catholic, which itself is an ambiguous position.
“Lapsed” neither admits agnosticism nor completely divorces one from a
latent Catholicism. Indeed, such identification is almost an admission
of somehow falling short of an expected ideal. However, whenever I’ve
visited churches in the course of my studies I felt a need to leave some
small donation as if to acknowledge my trespass.
When my parents visited Ireland
this summer I travelled to meet them in my mother’s home place in south
Sligo and agreed to join them on their annual pilgrimage to Knock. My
parents were never overbearingly religious, and I hope it is no source
of embarrassment to them to suggest they are not the most regular of
Mass attendees. When they asked how the work was going I laid out the
central problem with which I struggled – namely why did Irish people in
the past give so liberally of their financial resources to the Church.
My father thought that it was
indicative of the awesome power the Church held over people in the past.
“It’s hard for you to understand how powerful the Church was back then,
even when I was growing up in Ireland”, he explained. “People were so
afraid of the clergy that they just did what was expected. Things are
different today.”
We then called in at Knock Shrine
where my parents proceeded to one of the kiosks set up to enrol people
in Masses. There was an order and efficiency to the place as pilgrims
from far-flung places queued up. There my parents left behind a small
fortune as they paid for Masses to be said for deceased loved ones,
friends who were ill, and even one Mass for my own intention (“Just in
case,” they explained). With that done they hadn’t time to attend a
service there. When I asked my mother why she found it important to pay
money for all those Mass cards her explanation was, “It’s what I’ve
always done”.
Catholicism occupies a lesser
position in Irish everyday life than it once claimed.
Nevertheless it
still remains. However, in the consideration of the history of the
Catholic Church’s built legacy there are questions of much wider
significance at play.
To travel across Ireland is to
see the prominent claim made by the church upon the landscape as it
sought to institute its own permanency over a century ago. Yet
increasingly, these buildings support Colm Tóibín when he has written of
the Church’s “strange ghostly presence in Irish society”. Today, the
church struggles to populate its pews, the religious workforce is aging
and vocations have declined drastically. What the future holds for all
of these churches, convents, schools and hospitals is a question that
remains unanswered.
One possible solution that has
been suggested relates to the current housing crisis and the use of
religious property to provide the basic right of shelter. We shall see
what might unfold on that question.
However, there still remains a
question around the sustainability of the religious buildings in rural
areas. For example, my mother’s church, St. Attracta’s in Tourlestrane,
Co Sligo, can no longer justify holding services every Sunday – a result
of continued depopulation in the area married to the fact one local
priest needs to administer several parish churches. This is a pattern
replicated in other parishes.
Therefore asking who funded the
building works that gathered pace rapidly after the Famine is a
legitimate one that might help illuminate a debate about how a
custodianship of all this property should be administered.
The place of Catholicism within
Irish society remains a source of contemporary fascination.
Any valuable
debate about the role of religion in delivering state services, finding
solutions to social problems, shaping the character of a country’s
charitable sector, all require at the very least an engagement with the
historical dimensions of these problems.
A wider appreciation about how
and why the Catholic Church acquired such a significant portfolio can
help to illuminate how it finds itself where it is today.