Say Nope to the Pope: performance and resistance in the creative interventions during the 2018 papal visit to Ireland

Abstract

ABSTRACT In September 1979, the newly elected head of the Catholic Church, Pope John Paul II, made a historic pastoral visit to Ireland where he celebrated an open-air mass in Dublin’s Phoenix Park to an estimated 1,250,000 people, a third of the country’s population. In August 2018, Pope Francis returned to Ireland, though the second papal visit was met with a series of protests and a lower-than-expected turn-out at the public mass in Phoenix Park. In the intervening years Ireland underwent broad social changes and the credibility of the Catholic Church, once the bedrock of morality in Ireland, was eroded by scandals revealing the depths of clerical sex abuse and abuse in Catholic-run institutions. This article considers the creative protests and interventionist actions that marked the 2018 Papal visit, using Judith Butler’s Notes Toward A Performative Theory of Assembly (2015) to think through these public actions. Focusing specifically on Say Nope to the Pope and the associated events of Stand 4 Truth, it explores these public performances of protest grounded in solidarity and resistance.