A review of Oracles of God: the Roman Catholic Church and Irish Politics, by Patrick Murray.
(The Furrow, June 2000, pp.370-380)
A wonderful and a terrible book
Patrick Murray has written a wonderful and a terrible book. It is wonderful in the extent and depth of its research, in the calm of its judgments (the Epilogue is generous to a fault), and in the clarity of its expression. Wonderful, too, that Irish bishops had the courage to open up diocesan archives where many a skeleton was locked and allow the truth to be told. Three cheers for that. Wonderful, too, that Irish historians are breaking the taboo that for so long surrounded the Civil War and bringing it out into the light of understanding.
The book’s sub-title tells the reader what it’s about. The author presupposes a general familiarity with the essentials of the history of the period, but I would have found a chronological table helpful.
Oracles of God is also a terrible book, terrible in the story it tells of mutually supportive arrogance and ignorance on the part of ideologues, both clerical and lay, ecclesiastical and political. It is a chronicle of folly, a farce that turned to grim tragedy trailing bitterness, division and death.
Clerical involvement in politics
In the Introduction, Murray places his topic against the background of clerical involvement in the politics of the late nineteenth century, especially around the issues of land reform and Home Rule. Clergy were openly and widely involved in politics: they were election agents, publicity managers and fund-raisers; they nominated candidates, spoke on platforms and directed campaigns on a constituency basis. In Murray’s view, this was understandable because of the position priests had earned in Irish society through their close association with the people at grass-roots level and because there were not many educated laymen who could fulfil such a role. This involvement was accepted, and indeed practised, by bishops also and regarded by most people as the natural course of affairs. On p.139, for example, Murray gives the political loyalties of some 758 priests, on the basis of public statements or writings of theirs. Irish Catholic clergy were considerably ahead of the popes of their time in their acceptance of the democratic process. (Northern Protestant clergy were similarly involved, with the Church of Ireland archbishop of Armagh calling on the British government in 1920 to prosecute the war in Ireland with ‘the ruthlessness of fate’, to increase the number of troops and to show ‘an excess of firmness rather than weak yielding to disorder.’ p.7)
Clergy, especially bishops, were conservative in their politics and social attitudes in the first decade of the twentieth century. They were not republicans, but home rulers who openly accepted the British monarchy and parliamentary system as being lawful and requiring the obedience of citizens. Some were Castle Catholics who were eager to ingratiate themselves with the powers that be, Cardinal Michael Logue of Armagh, for example, stating that he ‘enjoyed waiting upon royalty, delighted in entertaining British dignitaries with champagne and oysters’. (p.237) Bishop Abraham Brownrigg of Ossory was in a similar mould (p.10) as, in an earlier generation, were Troy of Dublin and ffrench of Elphin. (p.21) Some of these men were the products of a lobby which Britain maintained (and maintains?) at the Vatican to exercise influence on church affairs where those impinge on British interests. (pp.197-8)
The Easter Rising, 1916
When the Easter Rising took place in 1916, the clergy, in common with the very large majority of Irish people, regarded it as an act of criminal folly, an illegitimate revolt against a lawful government engaged in a life-and-death struggle for survival in the Great War. The execution of the leaders of the Rising changed all that. The swing in public mood was nowhere more clearly illustrated than in the sweeping aside of John Redmond’s home rule in favour of Sinn Féin’s republicanism in the general election of 1918.
When the bishops roundly condemned 1916 as a revolt against a lawful government they reflected public opinion. In 1918 they reflected it similarly when they opposed the conscription of Irishmen into the British Army, though their position there rested on shaky ground. Was conscription not the act of a lawful government, recognized as such by themselves, and therefore requiring the obedience of citizens? If the bishops saw in this dilemma a warning signal to proceed with caution, they didn’t heed it.
The War of Independence
In the period 1919-21, when the IRA, in the name of the Republic proclaimed in 1916, and backed by the support of the Irish people, began a military campaign against British rule, the bishops disapproved, on the generally accepted moral grounds that such a campaign was unnecessary, futile, and disproportionate in the relationship of means to ends. None went as far as Bishop Cohalan of Cork who excommunicated IRA members for taking part in attacks on British troops. IRA members were overwhelmingly practising Catholics for whom faith, family, farm and fatherland were intertwined. That did not preventing them from circumventing Bishop Cohalan’s excommunication by taking a train to Mallow or Cóbh where they could receive the sacraments in Cloyne diocese without any problem!
The Treaty
The Treaty which followed the truce was accepted by the Dáil in a vote of 64 to 57. Though giving Ireland Dominion status like Canada, the principal bone of contention in the debate was the oath of allegiance to the British monarch which Irish public representatives and civil servants would be required to take. Republicans felt they could not do so since they had earlier, with some clerical encouragement, sworn an oath of allegiance to the Irish Republic. Furthermore, Republicans saw the Free State as a puppet of Westminster’s, a clever ploy by Britain to get Irishmen to do its work for it and keep Ireland under the crown. Michael Collins recognized that the Treaty did not give the Irish people what they had hoped for – a Republic – but saw it as a stepping-stone which would enable them in time to achieve that goal. (Ironically, it was Éamon de Valera, the outstanding opponent of the Treaty, who was to prove Collins right in the following decade through his successful removal of the oath of allegiance and of the governor-general, the return of the treaty ports, and the inauguration of a republic in the 1937 Constitution.) The election, which, in 1923, followed the acceptance and ratification of the Treaty, showed overwhelming support for pro-Treaty candidates and positions. It was an election marked by bitterness and anger, with accusations of betrayal made by Republicans against Free Staters, and the latter equally vigorous in denouncing Republicans for refusing in a doctrinaire manner to accept the Dáil vote in favour of the Treaty.
In that election campaign large numbers of clergy took an active part: they nominated candidates, raised funds, spoke on election platforms and built up party organizations. All the bishops and a large majority of priests supported the Treaty.
Civil War
When Free State troops attacked the Four Courts in Dublin, which had been occupied by IRA men rejecting the Treaty, the Civil War began, and with it a tidal wave of anger, bitterness and hatred which tore apart the unity so carefully built up over many years. The bishops tried to bring the opposing parties together to find a settlement but their efforts were swept away by the sheer intensity of feeling on both sides. Free Staters, led since the deaths of Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins by William Cosgrave, felt that they were the lawful government of the 26 counties, having been elected to office by the people with a large majority. They felt that those who had lost the election had the obligation to accept the result and limit themselves to constitutional means of changing Ireland’s position. What remained of Sinn Féin following the emergence of Cosgrave’s Cumann na nGaedhael claimed to see his party not as the legitimate government but as merely a party faction which had seized power with the support of the Free State army in a military coup.
The pastoral letter of 11 October 1922
After hostilities between the two sides had continued for several months and their peace-making efforts had failed (see pp.57 and 62), the bishops issued a joint pastoral letter on 11 October 1922. They regarded the Free State government as lawful by reason of the electoral support it had received and they denounced the guerrilla warfare of the “Irregulars” [Republicans] as murder, and excommunicated those involved in it. They stated that their teaching was based on the Divine Law and that they spoke, not as politicians, but as pastors appointed by God to teach authoritatively in his name.
The letter was by no means free from ambiguities and inconsistencies which were soon pointed out to its authors. It contained exaggerations which weakened its case: was it true to say that Irregulars ‘had wrecked Ireland from end to end’? Was it true to say that they had ‘deliberately set out to make our Motherland, as far as they could, a heap of ruins’?
The question was also asked why, if the bishops’ teaching was based, as they claimed, on the Divine Law, they stated that an appeal could be made to the Holy See by those who did not accept it. Could the Holy See dispense from the Divine Law?
There were many who felt that the bishops were cavalier in their dismissal of the problem of conscience caused by the requirement of an oath of allegiance. To most Republicans this was a real problem and they were shocked by the bishops’ seemingly casual waving it away.
‘Unauthorized murders’
The biggest shock in the letter was where the bishops declared their horror at the many ‘unauthorized murders’ recorded in the press. Did that mean that authorized murders were alright? Were the bishops implying that someone, for example the government, could authorize murder?
When these matters were pointed out to them, one of the bishops quite unjustly blamed the press for inaccurate reporting (the press had in fact printed faithfully what the bishops had given them) and, a few weeks later, the bishops issued a series of 43 amendments to their letter, including the removal of the word ‘unauthorized’.
The bully pulpit… and more
What followed the pastoral letter was the unleashing of the bully pulpit, a period of spiritual terrorism in which the sacraments became, in the words of one Republican, ‘a state monopoly’.(p.186) The vocabulary of clerical vituperation was vigorous, sometimes venomous. A missioner at the start of a parish mission called on Republicans to leave the church, saying he would not begin until they did so. They did. (p.171, n.151) In another parish, after Republicans had walked out, the priest commented that they were ‘no great loss’. (p.226) The bishop of Elphin denounced members of Cumann na mBan as ‘half-crazed hysterical women…. who gloried… in the continued crucifixion of the plain people of the country…. With pretended piety and brazen effrontery they kneel in prayer to God, and, heedless of Our Lord’s warning that “His pearls were not for swine,” they assert a right to the Sacraments.’ He went on to complain that they completely ignored charity. [!] (p.89) The cathedral administrator in Cork described Republicans as ‘human vermin to be crushed out of existence.’ (p.71) A parish priest in Roscommon told his congregation at Mass that a vote for Cosgrave’s party was ‘a vote for Almighty God’ and that de Valera was ‘Lucifer head of the Ku Klux Klan and for the destruction of religion’. (p.127) Priests with Republican sympathies were not outdone in the language of abuse: one such priest told Free State soldiers that they were ‘murderers… damned for all eternity.’ (p.144)
It was not only language that was abusive; so were the practices which followed. A family in Kerry known to have Republican opinions was refused Communion at the altar rails, despite having stood apart from violent action, and it was said that such incidents were widespread. (pp. 78-9) Some priests went beyond what was laid down in the letter and refused the sacrament of matrimony to Republicans (pp.79-80). Bishop Cohalan refused Christian burial to their dead. (p.80) A canon in Mayo withheld payment of salaries from teachers who were Republicans saying that ‘these fellows will not be in a hurry to challenge our authority in the future.’ (p.120) Cardinal Logue declared excommunicate those who had looted oil from a boat belonging to a harbour commission. (pp.77-8) An archdeacon declared that the sin of those who had destroyed railway carriages ‘cried to Heaven for vengeance’…’because religious institutions had their money invested in railway shares’. A bishop pronounced excommunication on those who had commandeered a priest’s car if they had taken it despite knowing that it was the chief means of enabling the priest to discharge his spiritual duties. (p.78) A Kerry parish priest obliged the Free State army by allowing the tower of his church to be used as a machine-gun post. (p.71) A priest in Kinsale armed himself with a gun and held up and searched passers-by and broke into homes terrorizing women and children. (p.71 and n.168.)
The church a control system
The church had allowed itself to become a political control system, with fear as the agent of control. Underlying this was an attitude of contempt for people, for their intelligence no less than their good will. It was the contempt of the bully for the victim who does not fight back. In adopting such a partisan attitude the clergy had ignored the appeals made to them by Pope Pius XI in August 1922 (p.185, n.205) to be agents of reconciliation. The effective Church-State alliance from October 1922 had made the church, in the eyes of Republicans, virtually a department of state. Christ and Caesar indeed were hand and glove. It was a system of mutual exploitation between church and state, each using the other for its own ends. There was a strange reversal of roles in which speeches by politicians sounded like sermons, while sermons sounded like political speeches. William Cosgrave could ask for, and get, a joint pastoral letter which followed closely, even in its wording, the suggestions he made for it (pp.319-323), while, at a later date, de Valera, when in office, could produce a policy document which earned the name of ‘Dev’s Lenten pastoral’.
The bishops had the most sweeping views of their authority, not hesitating to say that the only limits to their jurisdiction were those which they set. ‘Bishops are the authentic teachers of faith and morals in their own diocese and their authority includes the right to determine the boundaries of their jurisdiction’, declared an archbishop in 1951, summarizing attitudes held for a long time previously. (p.14) The bishop of Killaloe switched political allegiance four times in two decades and seemed to think that each change represented the authentic voice of the Holy Spirit for the people of his diocese.
Murray puts his finger on the spot when he says that the attitude of the church to political issues and movements from Catholic Emancipation to the end of the 1930s was one of vigorous opposition to ideas and organisations which it could not control. (p.10)
Infallibility all round
But if bishops considered themselves virtually infallible, so did doctrinaire Republicans. Éamon de Valera told a Labour Party delegation trying to prevent civil war that ‘The majority had no right to do wrong’ (p.55) – by which he meant they had no right to disagree with him. And he is famously quoted as saying, at a later date, that if he wanted to know what the Irish people wished, he had only to look into his heart. There was an overlap between political ideology and religious devotion, especially among Republicans, which led them to identify their ideology with the concept of a Catholic Ireland.
Credibility the casualty
The clergy did immense damage to their credibility by their statements and actions during the twenties and thirties. They made sweeping claims to authority even when those claims were shown to rest on insecure foundations. If they appealed to the authority of the pope in support of their position, it could be pointed out to them that they had ignored the decision of the then pope, Leo XIII, on the immorality of the Land League’s Plan of Campaign in 1888 and had paid scant attention to the appeal of Pius XI in 1922 for them to bring people together in unity. If they appealed to the doctrine of the lawful authority of an elected government, it could be pointed out that they had rejected that in the anti-conscription campaign. Their attitude to the sacredness of an oath was shown to be ambiguous at best in their insistence in the pastoral letter of October 1922 that those who had sworn an oath of allegiance to the Republic were not bound by it. The episcopal condemnation of Sinn Féin for not accepting the election result in 1922 rang hollow when the bishops, in 1936, supported the military revolt of Franco against the elected Spanish government. Above all, their use of excommunication was shown to rest on shaky foundations. The Republican-minded rector of the Irish College in Rome, Msgr. John Hagan, wrote to the bishop of Galway that, ‘I cannot but question the wisdom of making absolution depend on one’s ability to see in the body that calls itself the Irish Government the one and only lawful government of the country’. (p.204) The openly partisan statements and actions of so many clergy were a deeply alienating force for many Republicans.
But perhaps most damaging of all was the ‘unauthorized murders’ phrase in the pastoral letter. (pp.418-9) When the Free State government executed four Republican prisoners without trial in what was clearly a reprisal for the assassination of a pro-Treaty TD, the government justified its action by reference to the pastoral letter (p.87), and Republicans clearly understood the letter as sanctioning a policy of government reprisal. (p.83)
There were people who challenged the bishops in their attitude. One such person, Conn Murphy, challenged the bishop of Galway, ‘Your public espousal of the Free State cause has enabled its government to illegally and unjustly seize and imprison tens of thousands of Irish Catholic boys and men and hundreds of Irish Catholic women; to torture habitually defenceless prisoners… to murder them… You are very directly and specifically responsible for these injustices [through] your failure to utter a single word of protest or disapproval of murders, tortures, raids.’ (pp.84, 234) Such protests, however, had little impact against leaders who had a cast-iron assurance that they were right and that what they said was God’s will. The second commandment, ‘You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain’ seems to have been forgotten.
Opportunism?
If someone wished to accuse the clergy of opportunism in their political attitudes they would not be short of material. The evidence strongly suggests that the clergy ignored Pope Leo’s condemnation of the Land League’s Plan of Campaign in 1888 because they feared losing the people if they did otherwise, and that a similar concern motivated them in regard to the anti-conscription campaign in 1918. It was a case of going with the flow or being left behind. And the clergy who sustained the Cosgrave government throughout the twenties supported de Valera and Fianna Fáil in the thirties. And the award of the Supreme Order of Jesus Christ (the church’s highest award to a layman), made to William Cosgrave and Éamon de Valera towards the end of their lives carries with it a heavy smell of opportunism.
Politicians likewise changed from side to side as public opinion demanded. There was probably no major issue in this period on which Éamon de Valera did not switch sides, whether it was majority rule, the oath of allegiance, participation in the Free State government, or the legitimacy of the IRA and its activities. Infallibility was reversible.
A new target in the sights
When the passions of the Civil War began to diminish in the thirties a new and fervent passion developed for the denunciation of socialism. Bishop Michael Fogarty told children at confirmation in 1935 that ‘there was a communist agent in every parish in Ireland with a box of matches in his pocket to burn your church’ (p.335, n.119.); he also warned against the ‘black devil of socialism, hoof and horns.’ (p.328) It was said that he had inserted into the catechism in use in his diocese the question: ‘Is it a sin not to pay land annuities?’ to which the child was required to reply, ‘It is a sin not to pay land annuities’. (p.312) There was a long-standing aloofness, even antipathy, between some of the bishops, mostly born and reared in rural areas, and the urban working-class. (pp.326-7) Bishop Brownrigg of Ossory had earlier condemned Parnell’s followers as ‘the lowest dregs of the people… the working-classes’ (p.10) and Archbishop Croke spoke of ‘the lower stratum of society… cornerboys, blackguards of every hue, discontented labourers, lazy and drunken artisans… all irreligious and anti-clerical scoundrels’. (p.10) The bishops seemed to identify the Gospel with the values of middle-class respectability in which they had their social origins. Did the bishops really believe what they were saying about socialism, or were simply creating bogeymen in order to rally the faithful flock into the pen? Whatever it may have been, it was difficult for anyone to be a socialist or even social democrat in Ireland for several decades after 1922.
Learning from mistakes… or not?
It has to be said that the clergy were slow to recognize that they had made mistakes and to learn from them. It would have taken great courage in those days for any priest to have publicly challenged the political statements of his bishop. To do so would have been branded as insubordination and disloyalty, though it might have helped to heal relationships between the bishops on the one hand and Republicans and socialists on the other. As a side effect, it would also have helped to undermine the Ulster unionist cry that ‘Home Rule was Rome rule’. That was not true, but Home Rule could indeed have been seen as bishops’ rule. (The first papal nuncio to Ireland, Paschal Robinson, is quoted as saying that Ireland did not have 28 bishops, but 28 popes.) The lack of an effective public opinion in the church meant that mistakes were repeated again and again, so that, by 1951 and the Mother-and-Child scheme, the bishops, while less given to fulminations (to borrow a favourite word of Cardinal Logue’s) were no less insistent that, when they spoke, what they said was God’s will for government and citizen alike.
It would be a mistake to think that the bully pulpit has come to an end. In the sixties a bishop could publicly insult a minister of education at the personal level for his alleged inadequacies. In the early seventies, the then Senator Mary Robinson was denounced from the altar in a Mayo parish, with her parents in the congregation, for trying to change the law on the availability of contraceptives. And only recently, a woman, long in her loyalty to the church, told me she had walked out of a church because she could no longer tolerate the arrogance and ignorance of a young priest dogmatically laying down the law about Humanae Vitae and berating people for their non-acceptance of it. [This paragraph was omitted by the editor of The Furrow without consultation.]
Having said that, it also needs to be said that the bishops, in their response to events in Northern Ireland between 1969 and 1998 have been more intelligent, astute – and Christian – than their predecessors. Cardinal Cahal Daly in particular earned the respect of people on both sides of the divide and is listened to as someone who has something to say that matters.
Enormous damage was done to the position of the church in Irish life by the power-crazy antics (what else can they be called?) of the bishops during the early decades after independence. The wonder is that they did not lose entirely the loyalty of the Irish people. That this did not happen may be due to the ability of people and many clergy to take much of what they said with a grain of salt and quietly make up their own minds about matters. If that is the case, it is a good development and a growing maturity which is to be welcomed.
The bishops, for their part, seem to have learned something from the experience. In recent years, they have produced positive, constructive documents on social and economic affairs, such as The Work of Justice (1977), Work is the Key (1992) and Prosperity with a Purpose (1999). Sadly, hardly anyone reads them, even priests. They are good material largely wasted, and that is probably – in part at least – a reaction against the crozier-swinging of earlier years. In contrast, an organization like the Conference of Religious in Ireland (CORI) which has no power other than that of persuasion and professionally-done homework has a significant input and is respected even by those who do not like what it says. CORI is making enemies in the right places, and that is no bad thing.
What can the church learn from this sad experience, this catalogue of folly? One, I believe, is to trust people, their intelligence no less than their good-will. It is very much to be welcomed that the church-as-control-system is coming to an end; this provides the opportunity of building a church which instead interprets reality, finds meaning, motivates people, and educates consciences. A church which focusses on relationships with God, with others, with self and with nature, one which enables people to use their freedom to develop their humanity to the full, will be a church that people can respect. May it come! It is more likely to come now that Patrick Murray has done it the service of documenting so thoroughly the folly of former practices.
We may be moving in the right direction. As I was writing this review the bishops placed before the Minister for Justice some proposals for the treatment of refugees. He rejected them. The next day, two leading national dailies had headlines, ‘Minister rebuffs bishops’ and ‘Minister rejects bishops’ proposals’ or words to that effect. I suspect that editors would like to have hyped it as “Church-State clash” and to have evoked memories of clouts with the crozier and clerical interference in politics, but the ammunition wasn’t there. Perhaps there is a growing maturity in that bishops and a minister can simply disagree on an issue without descending into exaggerations, generalizations and personal abuse. It was good also that the bishops put their proposals publicly, a step forward from the days when the archbishop of Dublin could have a large, but secret, input into the writing of the country’s Constitution. Maybe we’re getting there.
An apology?
Would it not be a good step along the way for the bishops to imitate the example of the pope and apologize for their predecessors’ many abuses of authority (only a few of which are dealt with in Murray’s book), and which were integral to the power-system that they created? I believe that the Irish people would welcome such a move and that it would make a worthwhile contribution towards healing wounded relationships.
The truth shall make you free
Congratulations to Patrick Murray for a wonderful book which offers a service to the church: an opportunity of purifying its memory by an honest confession of wrong-doing and the chance of acknowledging the mistakes of the past and learning from them. Idols have fallen, and thank God for that; we’re better off without them. More importantly, he has done the truth a service, and ‘the truth shall make you free.’ (John 8.32)
Patrick Murray, Oracles of God: the Roman Catholic Church and Irish Politics, 1922-37, University College Dublin Press, Dublin, 2000. Pp. x and 493. ISBN 1 900621 28 2. Paperback edition IR£19.95, hardback IR£42.95.