Heralding its motto “Faith and Fatherland”, O’Connell declared that “education to be suited to this country must be Catholic and Irish in its tone”.
An estimated 100,000 people attended this event, which was in effect one of O’Connell’s “monster meetings”.
It was 1828, a year before O’Connell’s milestone achievement of Catholic Emancipation, and 26 years after Edmund Ignatius Rice established his religious community of lay men to cater for the educational needs of deprived boys in Waterford, heralding the genesis of the Christian Brothers.
Historian Dáire Keogh makes the observation that “among the urban poor, the Brothers made a landmark contribution in widening the social base of the institutional church. Through their teaching and catechetical instruction, they introduced the poor to the new forms of devotion which became the hallmark of nineteenth-century Catholicism.
This effort brought a previously marginalised class within the ranks of the institutional church, which in time became the backbone of the emerging Catholic Ireland ... Rice’s Brothers assisted in the moulding of a distinctively Catholic urban working class, by promoting literacy alongside piety and instilling in their pupils the middle-class virtues of personal discipline, hard work and sobriety”.
The cocktail of devotional Catholicism, nationalism and the promise of upward social mobility was mixed with much moralism – for example, that reflected in the pages of the Brothers’ Our Boys magazine, launched in 1914, which declared its aim to “preserve the minds and hearts of the children of holy Ireland pure and clean”.
A century ago, the Brothers made submissions to the Committee on Evil Literature, emphasising the need to ban “objectionable papers and publications” that included “gilded filth ... papers and books ... which urge people to the most monstrous crimes”.
We have learned much in recent times of the monstrous crimes of some of their own members, and the contempt displayed towards the children they were supposed to liberate from poverty and snobbery.
The “middle-class virtues” desired were deemed out of reach for pupils who, one Brother reminded them in Letterfrack Industrial School in the 1920s, “will always be identified by your sheepish look”. This is one of the most devastating lines to appear about institutional abuse.
Apologies from the Brothers about the child abuse revealed were, however, hollowed out by the strategy adopted in relation to legal cases by their victims, as underlined this week by the publication of the names of 341 former Brothers who are being joined as defendants to a case where a man who was sexually abused in one of the Brothers’ primary schools in Kilkenny in the 1970s is suing the congregation.
This is because religious congregations, as unincorporated bodies, cannot be sued collectively, requiring a single member to be nominated in civil cases or, if not, all members need to be individually sued. The Brothers refused to make the single-member nomination.
The men on this week’s list were Christian Brothers between 1974 and 1979; they are not alleged to be connected with the abuse but have been joined to the case because of the cynical legal strategy being adopted by the congregation, meaning the abuse victim has to sue all members of the congregation at the time of the abuse to progress the case.
During the Ryan Commission public hearings in 2005, David Gibson, the current leader of the Christian Brothers, argued that “sexual abuse in a period 60 years ago was seen more as a moral failure than a crime”.
Gibson also revealed that from the 1930s onwards, there was evidence of abuse in institutions run by the Brothers, and that 30 internal formal trials of abusers were kept secret between the 1930s and 1960s, rather than being reported to the authorities.
Gibson also admitted that it was the spiritual as opposed to the emotional welfare of children that was the Brothers’ priority, and he referred to the “burden of care” undertaken in looking after poorer children.
Where lies that burden now? Gibson defended his congregation’s legal strategy this week, insisting its preference is to seek resolution for abuse victims through mediation to avoid “the stress of litigation”, pointing out that the congregation has to date provided more than €40 million, including legal fees, to claimants, as if that is a lot.
In any case, why should the power to control resolution rest with the congregation?
High Court Judge Mary Rose Gearty has acknowledged Gibson has no legal obligation to nominate himself for the litigation but said there was “a moral obligation” to put himself forward.
Assertions of moral purity have always been selective and hypocritical, as underlined by the congregation’s leaders facilitating the callous continuation of abuse by another means.