Home Truths: Irish Neoliberalism’s Eclipse of Irish Catholicism

Abstract

Home Truths: Irish Neoliberalism’s Eclipse of Irish Catholicism Kevin Hargaden (bio) 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’. [End Page 225] If the foundations for Cullen’s Church reform went awry, it may well be here: in its pursuit of social and political influence through economic attainment. Unlike the tower in Pisa, Catholicism has collapsed, and in its wreckage thousands of lives have been ruined. If economic attainment and societal legitimation were part of the shifting sand that set the institution to fall, then excavating those foundations is a central part of understanding how the collapse happened and how ‘they are still palpable now’. Scally’s account is more comprehensive than any 300-page first-person investigation has any right to be, but a notable absence from his analysis is how the Irish economic ‘miracle’ took off in parallel with the decline in the Irish Catholic Church’s fortunes. In this essay, I will put Scally’s book into dialogue with Melinda Cooper’s Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism with a view to understanding how the economic factors that can be identified in malignant Irish Catholicism have not been exorcised but intensified in the new era’s moral imagination. Tracing the family tree: the story Scally tells The Best Catholics in the World is an attempt to provoke an engagement in Irish society with a version of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (the process of coming to terms with the past, modelled particularly on German efforts to remember rightly the Nazi regime, war, and holocaust). It is a story told in three parts. First, he seeks to unearth why it is that Irish people came to believe themselves to be so very Roman Catholic. These chapters are full of useful demythologisation. He tries to draw a line under the bogus self-flattery that often gets hidden behind discussion of ‘Celtic Christianity’. Whatever else it was, it was neither imposed on the Celts through force nor wildly divergent from what prevailed elsewhere. He very neatly explains how the Penal Laws – which in some cases were statutes passed in parliament without much real-world impact – were retroactively woven into the nationalistic narrative that emerged in the nineteenth century...