‘The people – the real governors of today’ the Irish Catholic Church and Democracy, c. 1825–1923

Abstract

‘The people – the real governors of today’: the Irish Catholic Church and Democracy, c. 1825–19231 Oliver P Rafferty SJ The title of this paper in part comes from a letter written by Fr Robert Whitty SJ, theological adviser to David Moriarty, the bishop of Kerry, at the First Vatican Council. Writing to Moriarty in the months before the council met in Rome in December 1869, Whitty remarked that, in the past, councils of the church, such as Trent, faced difficulties from kings and governors. Now ‘the obstacles might easily come from the people, the real governors of today’. He was also concerned to stress that the effect of the French Revolution had been to bring about immense change in peoples’ thinking and in society in general.2 The problem was, as Whitty identified, that Catholicism had not as yet processed those changes. In fact, in some ways it had tried to nullify them. Even before the restoration of the Papal States by the Congress of Vienna, the Pope, Pius VII, had restored the Jesuit order in 1814, which, despite its reputation for liberalism, now became one of the most reactionary forces within Catholicism. This transformation came about, in part, because of the order’s eighteenthcentury experience. Under pressure from European elites, the Jesuits had been suppressed by Pope Clement XIV in 1773. The newly restored society became firmly attached to the papacy as an institution in its political and religious dimensions. By 1819, when Joseph de Maistre had penned his twovolume work Du Pape, which laid the foundation for neo-ultramontanism, the Jesuits were unquestionably ‘pope’s men’. In Ireland, before the arrival of Paul Cullen in the country as papal legate and archbishop, we can say that in general the mores of Irish Catholicism were imbued with a mild Gallicanism.3 What Cullen facilitated from 1850 on, precisely because he was a product of the high papalist school, and therefore implicitly trusted by Rome, was the emergence of an ultramontanism married to liberalism and hence, in principle, to the forces of democracy. Oliver P Rafferty SJ Studies • volume 107 • number 427 346 Those forces had been at work in Ireland for a generation before 1850 and it is to the activity of Daniel O’Connell that we must attribute the birth of Irish democracy. A democratic process emerged that would in time be influenced to some extent by Fenianism, by the Home Rule Movement and then by the Land League, the latter described by Donal McCartney as one of the most powerful democratic movements in Irish history. 4 At the centenary celebrations in Australia of O’Connell’s birth in 1875, Bishop James Quinn of Brisbane could remark that no part of O’Connell’s hard task was more delicate or required more judgement, integrity and power than to conciliate and gain the approval and confidence of the bishops.5 This was, indeed, no easy task. In the early decades of the nineteenth century many of the Irish clergy had had to be trained in France, under the conditions of the ancien regime. Their instincts were of deference to the social authorities in the shape of the landlords. Now O’Connell wanted to utilise the clergy, and the church generally, to resist landlord influence. He presented churchmen with an alternative model of their role in society. Using the Catholic clergy, he fashioned the first mass democratic movement in Europe. In doing this, he thrust the church to the forefront of the popular movement and gained for Irish Catholic priests a reputation for being the most politically liberal in Europe. In that process he created what one might term Catholic democracy. It is however important to stress that it was O’Connell’s political activity, more than any other factor, which forced the Irish hierarchy into secular politics, and it was he who largely determined the role they were to play.6 The idea of Catholic democracy in its Irish form was to have enormous influence on Catholicism in both Europe and the United States. O’Connell was well aware that his successful mobilisation of hitherto unrepresented Irish citizens and peasants, with the church at their head, was studied...