John Newsinger

Revolution and Catholicism in Ireland, 1848-1923

’Please give to the Holy Father my dutiful homage. Though nominally cut away from the body of Holy Church we are still spiritually and mystically of it, and we refuse to regard ourselves except as his children’.’ Thus wrote Eamon de Valera, President of the shadow Irish Republic on 30 April 1923 to Monsignor Salvatore Luzio, the Papal Envoy in Ireland. This was during the closing

stages of the civil

war

between the Free State and the Irish

Republic. Earlier, in October 1922, the Irish hierarchy had decisively declared for the Free State and ordered the general excommunication of, and deprival of the Holy Sacrament to, those members of the irregular Irish Republican Army who continued the struggle. This condemnation in no way weakened the faith of devout Catholics like de Valera or undermined their political resolve. Hundreds of republicans remained in arms until the ceasefire order of 24 May 1923, and in the general election in August republican candidates polled nearly 300,000 first-preference votes or 27 per cent of the total poll. A Catholic people once again showed their disregard for the political dictates of their Church. This illustrates a central paradox in modern Irish history whereby a country, which has seen continual revolutionary activity since 1848 down to the present day, where at various times revolutionary movements committed to the use of physical force to achieve their ends have dominated the political arena, is at the same time the most profoundly Catholic country in Europe and has never experienced an anti-clerical movement worthy of the name. It is the intention of this study to unravel this paradox and as a corollary to demonstrate the full extent to which the revolutionary movement in Ireland has been infused with Catholic sentiment and 457European Studies Review (SAGE, London and Beverly Hills), Vol. 9 (1979), 457-480

458 can

meaningfully

be characterized

as a

’Catholic’

revolutionary

movement.

While the rebellion of the United Irishmen in 1798 was to be assimilated into the mythology of the modern revolutionary movement and to be identified as its point of origin, in concrete historical terms there was no connection. The main organized strength of the United Irishmen was in the north and the leadership of the organization was dominated by Protestant Dissenters. Their revolutionary nationalism was part and parcel of what has been called ’the Atlantic Democratic Revolution’.2 They were secularists and rationalists who looked for inspiration to the American War of Independence, Tom Paine and the French Revolution. Theobold Wolfe Tone, their most notable propagandist, was strongly anticlerical and welcomed the dethronement of Pope Pius VI by French troops in the most fulsome terms as an event of equal moment as the French Revolution itself and as an historic blow in the liberation of mankind from the yoke of superstition and priestcraft. Revolution in Ireland, he believed, would free the Irish Catholics from the sway of the priests as it had freed the French.3 Ironically, it was Tone who was to be expropriated by the modern revolutionary movement and proclaimed as the father of Irish republicanism and separatism. In June 1913 Padraic Pearse told the crowds assembled at Tone’s graveside in Bodenstown churchyard that ’We have come to the holiest place in Ireland; holier to us even than the place where Patrick sleeps in Down’, and he sanctified his memory: ’this man died for us’. For Pearse, a devout Catholic, that ’God spoke through Tone and through those who after Tone have taken up his testimony ... is a thing upon which I stake my mortal and all my immortal hopes’.4The metamorphosis was

complete.

The 1798 rebellion itself took a completely different form from that envisaged by the leaders of the United Irishmen. The Protestant north had been disarmed and pacified the previous year and remained comparatively quiescent. The rebellion was largely confined to Catholic Wexford where it was provoked by the excesses of the government troops. Here it took the form of a peasant jacquerie against the landlords, of a Catholic crusade led by the priests against the Protestant Ascendancy. There were wholesale forcible conversions of Protestants as the price of life; a far cry from the

459

ideals of the United Irishmen. The ideology of the rebellion was more Jacobite than Jacobin. When French troops eventually landed at Killala in County Mayo, they were astonished at their reception by the peasants. Lecky described how these soldiers of the Revolution, whom the panic-stricken priests in other lands had as the most ferocious and most terrible of the agents of antiChrist, now found themselves, to their own astonishment and amusement, suddenly transfigured into Crusaders; surrounded by eager peasants, who declared ’that they were come to take arms for France and the Blessed Virgin’. ’God help these simpletons’, said one of the French officers to Bishop Stock; ’if they knew how little we care about the Pope or his religion, they would not be so hot m expecting help from us;’ and old soldiers of the Italian army exclaimed with no small disgust, that, having just driven the Pope out of Italy, they had never expected to meet him again in Ireland’.5

long regarded

The secularism and rationalism of the United Irishmen were simply swept away by the violent sectarian passions let loose by the rebellion. From this time on, except as individuals, the Irish Protestants were to exist in Irish history as the determined opponents of Irish nationalism. The modern revolutionary movement in Ireland derives not from the United Irishmen and the rebellion of 1798, but from the abortive insurrections of 1848 and 1849. It was in these futile attempts to raise the standard of revolt that the founders of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the most influential and longest lasting Irish revolutionary organization, were initiated into revolutionary politics. However much they might appeal to the memory of Tone, their political activity took place in a different era of Irish political history. The context was altogether changed: the Protestant north had become an unassailable stronghold of Unionism and Orangeism, and in the south Daniel O’Connell, the Liberator, had mobilized the Catholic masses for a successful constitutional assault on the outworks of the Protestant Ascendancy. From now on revolutionary activity was to be effectively confined to the Catholic population, and would have to compete with a parallel constitutional movement for their allegiance. Inevitably the revolutionary organizations were to take on the colouring of their rank and file’s strongly held religious beliefs.

The identification between Catholicism and Irish nationalism that

460 course of the nineteenth century is testified to by many contemporary accounts, although it has still not been accorded adequate recognition in current scholarship.6 The injunction of the Reverend Aug. J. Thebaud is worthy of notice in this regard:

developed in the

Truly those men are very ignorant of the Irish character who would abstract the religious feature from it, and paint the nation as they would any other European people... it would be equally foolish to depict the Irish of today as the worldlings and godless of France, Italy or Spain. The Irish patriot could not be like them without deserting his standard and the colours for which his race has fought. The nation to which he has the honour of belonging is still Christian to the core In his influential Lectures on Faith and Fatherland, another priest, Father Thomas Burke, put forward as the reason why Ireland had ’never consented to merge its name, its history, its national individuality into that of a neighbouring and powerful state’, that ’the supernatural life became so much the absorbing life of the Irish people that it acted upon their natural life and preserved the principle of their nationality’. ’There are two ideas in the mind of every true Irishman’, he argued, ’and these two ideas England never was able to root out of the land ... And these two ideas are: IRELAND IS A NATION. That is number one. IRELAND IS A CATHOLIC NATION: and so she will remain’ .8 This theological account describes a very real phenomenon. From the time of the Elizabethan conquest to the rebellion of 1798, ’the living coherence of Ireland’, to use Patrick O’Farrell’s phrase, rested not on Irish nationalism, but on Catholicism.9 It was from this background that Irish nationalism derived its confessional character as a ’Catholic’ nationalism. The manifestation of British rule in Ireland as a Protestant Ascendancy was the root cause of the identification between Catholicism and Irish nationalism. The Irish peasant was exploited by a Protestant landlord, compelled to pay tithes to a Protestant clergyman, policed by a Protestant-controlled state apparatus, and his religion was persecuted by an array of Protestant-made penal laws. The Catholic Church was not a landowner of any consequence and in this way it differed from the continental norm. It fully shared in the oppression of the peasantry, and religion, as was most likely in a peasant society, became the ideological form in which resistance was expressed. Jeremiah O’Donovon Rossa, a leading Fenian of the 1860s and a bitter opponent of ’the priest in

461

politics’ described how ’Catholic Irishmen came to feel that in fighting against Protestantism, they were fighting against England, and, in fighting for Catholicity, they were fighting for Ireland’. This was the tradition of his boyhood, he recalled, when the parish priest was looked up to as ’the embodiment of hostility to England’. 10 He considered that the close relationship between priest and people was breaking down, but while it certainly underwent a strain in the 1860s, it by no means broke down. While France, Italy and Spain were all to experience violent anti-clerical movements in the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, anticlerical movements that were not limited to opposing the intervention of priests in politics, but which challenged the Church in every area of social life, especially the field of education, and contested its influence over men and women from the cradle through to the grave, Ireland remained unsullied. On the continent the clergy were widely viewed as part of a reactionary establishment, rather than as part of the people, as their counsellors and advisers who would listen to their problems and hold them in confidence. The critical juncture was the sacrament of

confession. If this link between priest and people remained undeveloped or was broken because of lack of trust or identification, then an essential element in the functioning of the Catholic Church was lost.&dquo;A gap appeared between priest and people which might well be filled by anti-clericalism. This occurred where the rising middle and lower middle classes had to struggle for political power against feudal-royalist-plutocratic establishments that were allied with the Church. In Ireland, however, the constitutional nationalists were able, over a period, although not without difficulty, to reach an accommodation with the Church against the Protestant Ascendancy and British rule. Consequently instead of having to fight Catholicism and to mobilize the people against the Church, the nationalists were able to maintain Catholicism as the core of their ideology and the Church as one of the bulwarks of the various constitutional nationalist movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The identification between Catholicism and Irish nationalism was so great that even when the Church condemned the more extreme physical methods of the revolutionary separatists and republicans, they still maintained their faith regardless. Catholicism was so central to their conception of the Irish nation that no rupture ever took place. Instead it was argued that the hierarchy was misinformed, that the bishops were anti-

462

national, and dissident republican priests were produced to give these opinions clerical sanction. There were instances, particularly in the 1860s, when the denial of the sacraments to the Fenians was to undermine this identification, but only for individuals. For the overwhelming majority of the Fenians it remained intact. Indeed so overpowering was it that Protestant nationalists such as Joseph Biggar, Maud Gonne, and Sir Roger Casement often fell victim to what has been decribed as ’the inevitability of Catholicism’ and converted to the faith as a vindication of their political convictions: Biggar converted, on his own admission, after hearing Father Thomas Burke preach that ’the Catholic religion was the national

religion’.’2 The creation of the alliance between the constitutional nationalists and the Church was largely the work of Daniel O’Connell. In 1808 he led Catholic opposition to British efforts to maintain a veto over episcopal appointments that the hierarchy had conceded in 1799, but which only became public knowledge that year. The issue in dispute was of crucial importance: the British state was trying to establish its influence within the Irish Church in order to secure its loyalty. The attempt was repulsed, but only after O’Connell had orchestrated a campaign of Catholic lay opposition that had intimidated some bishops, strengthened the resolve of others, and established lay influence within the Church as a force to be reckoned with.13 The basis of this lay influence was the ’democratic’ nature of the Church. The lines of interdependence between the Church and society were drawn vertically with the people rather than horizontally with the Protestant Ascendancy. The Church was financially dependent upon the contributions of the people. This made it difficult for the clergy to oppose the political sentiments of their parishioners. Contrary to the conventional Unionist notion of the clergy usurping political leadership, it was more often the case that they were forced into it to maintain their

influence. O’Connell’s great achievement was to harness the Church to his campaigns for Catholic Emancipation in the 1820s and for the Repeal of the Union in the 1840s. This was necessary given the weakness of the Catholic urban middle class that provided the leadership in his campaigns. They were only able to mobilize the people through the agency of the clergy. Only the Church possessed a national organization that extended into every part of the country and could act as a means of transmission between the urban middle

463

class and the large tenant farmers who were the rural backbone of O’Connell’s campaigns. In particular the priests played a vital and well-documented role at elections where clerical intimidation successfully beat down and overpowered landlord intimidation. 14 It is one of the ironies of Irish history that clerical intimidation should, at this time, be a progressive modernizing force. 1848, the year of revolution throughout Europe, saw Ireland play the part of a shabby sideshow. The ’revolt in a widow’s cabbage patch’ will never occupy an elevated position in the history of revolution, but in the development of the revolutionary tradition in Ireland, it has an important place. The party of revolt, the Irish Confederation, was a product of disagreements within O’Connell’ss Repeal Association. It had originally formed as the’Young Ireland’ group around The Nation newspaper edited by Thomas Davis, a Protestant, and worked within the Association as a culturalnationalist ginger group loyal to O’Connell. One of the most

significant disagreements that emerged between Davis and O’Connell was over Sir Robert Peel’s Colleges Bill of 1845. This provided for the establishment of non-denominational colleges on the principle of mixed education. O’Connell, with the support of the hierarchy, condemned these ’godless colleges’. Davis considered this attitude to be a threat to any prospect of winning over the Ulster Protestants to the national cause. The dispute, in which Davis came off decidedly the worse, highlights an important feature of Irish nationalism : while Protestants were welcome to adhere to the cause, and in the celebrated instances of Smith O’Brien, Isaac Butt and Parnell to lead it, it nevertheless remained a Catholic cause. Even when led by Protestants, Irish nationalism retained its confessional character, and those Protestants such as Davis who challenged this quickly became isolated and lost influence. The dispute was cut short by Davis’s premature death on 16 September 1845, but only a short while before, his private correspondence had been filled with doubts and fears as to the dangers of a Catholic ascendancy in

Ireland. 1S After the death of Davis, publication of The Nation was continued by the efforts of Charles Gavan Duffy, John Mitchel and a number of other talented individuals. Davis’s concern with the religious question was forgotten as other areas of disagreement with O’Connell came to the fore. The immediate cause of the break with the Repeal Association was O’Connell’s unconditional rejection of the use of violence to achieve his political ends in July 1846.

464 The supporters of The Nation seceded from the Association and eventually formed a rival organization, the Irish Confederation. This is not to say that the leaders of the Confederation were themselves advocating insurrection. They were only too well aware of their isolation from the people and of the hostility of the clergy, but they refused to rule out the use of force altogether. Their caution was soon to come under attack as the horrors of the Great Famine convinced some of the need for resistance. The first attacks came from the pen of James Fintan Lalor, the son of a leader in the tithe wars of the 1830s, who advocated the unleashing of a social revolution against the Ascendancy landlords. Lalor described the Irish peasant as a ’wolf-dog’ but argued that ’For Repeal, indeed, he will never bite, but only bay.’ 16 Only for the land would the peasantry take up arms. This refrain was soon taken up by John Mitchel. Early in 1848 he resigned from the Confederation and established his own newspaper, The United Irishman, to advocate a more advanced policy. For the first time in over forty years revolutionary separatism was openly proclaimed in Ireland. The more moderate leaders of the Confederation, all men of property, recoiled from such adventures. Charles Gavan Duffy wrote to William Smith O’Brien describing a vision of how ’you and I will meet on a Jacobin scaffold, ordered for execution as enemies of some new Marat or Robespierre, Mr James Lalor or Mr Somebody else’ .&dquo; Only the arrival in Ireland of news of the bloodless February revolution in Paris was to overcome their caution. Lamartine described the revolt in Paris as ’an outpouring of Christianity’. 18 It was a revolution in which the priests had played a prominent part, leading street demonstrations and blessing the ’trees of liberty’ that were planted in many communes. Similarly in Italy the early stages of the national upsurge saw the clergy well to the fore. As Duffy was later to recall, ’at this time Pius IX still seemed the appointed leader of the nations striving for freedom’.19 This was very important to the leaders of the Confederation. They ’had no sympathy with the cry of &dquo;no priests in politics&dquo; which is sometimes raised by men who claimed to be patriots of a very advanced type ... but rightly regarding the assistance of their sacred order as invaluable in the struggle for Irish rights, they wisely sought to retain it for the country.120 All Davis’s fears of sectarianism and of conflict between Protestant and Catholic were forgotten. In March O’Brien, together with Thomas Francis Meagher, visited Paris. They were immensely encouraged by the

465

enthusiastic reception they received from sympathetic theology students at the Irish College and were heartened by the goodwill and moderation that appeared to prevail throughout the city. They returned to Ireland resolved to fight if their demands were not met. Even Duffy had by now come to regard a revolutionary outbreak as inevitable and urged that they should place themselves at its head or else be swept aside. The support and active participation of the priests was regarded as absolutely essential in the event of a rising. No advance was possible without the priests, a belief that these would-be revolutionaries fully shared with the constitutional nationalists. Duffy subsequently recalled that it was as plain then ’as it is now that the peasantry would not fight in opposition to their local clergy unless other priests were seen in the ranks of the insurgents. Priests might make effective soldiers; they had done so in 1643 and in 1798. They had done so in Spain, New Spain and in Belgium. ’21 The leadership of the Confederation actually envisaged the clergy leading their flocks into battle as in 1798. And indeed such clerical support did, for some time, appear to be forthcoming, particularly from the younger priests who were enthused by events in France and Italy. While awaiting trial in Newgate Gaol early in July, Duffy was visited by two young priests who volunteered to assume the editorship of the various national journals in the event of further arrests. One of these young priests was the future Archbishop Croke of Cashel, and the other, Dr Barry, was to become the head of St Patrick’s College in Melbourne, Australia. He also received word from Bishop Maginn of Derry that if they waited till after the harvest was gathered before raising the standard of revolt, he would himself join them ’with twenty officers in black uniforms’.22 At the beginning of 1848 Confederate strength was largely confined to the towns, in particular to Dublin, and was virtually nonexistent in the countryside. Inevitably reliance had to be placed on the priests to rally the peasantry. John O’Mahony, the future leader of the Fenian Brotherhood in the USA, described the extent of this reliance in his Personal Narrative of My Connection with the Attempted Rising of 1848. He wrote that: in South

Tipperary, at least, the originators of the movement were priests. They publicly told the people to form clubs, to make pikes and many a one proclaimed from the altar that he would be with the people and lead them on the day of action... The older priests opposed the movement a little at first, but such was the

466

impetus given to the revolutionary organizations by Mitchel’s deportation that their opposition was soon silenced. Silent they remained for a few weeks, and their younger and more sanguine brethren had a clear field... Had not the Young Ireland leaders calculated upon the cordial and active support and cooperation of these clerical revolutionists, they never should have attempted to raise the people after the fashion they did. As it was they were the main hinge, upon which the whole movement turned.23 the formative experience in O’Mahony’s long career as a revolutionary. The conclusion he drew on the role of the priests was that it would have been better if ’they had never come into it’.24 Once again events in France had a decisive impact in Ireland: in the June insurrection in Paris Archbishop Affre was shot while attempting to mediate at the barricades. At the same time there were serious disturbances in Rome that were to lead to the Pope’s flight to Gaeta. These events began a revulsion against revolution throughout the Catholic Church. In Ireland this was to compromise fatally prospects for a rising. When O’Brien raised the standard of revolt at the end of July the priests stayed away. The most damaging blow was the defection of Father Kenyon, President of the Templederry Club, reputedly the largest and best organized in the country. He was the best known and most popular of the Confederation’s clerical supporters and his presence in the field would have reassured the younger priests that the revolt had no anti-religious tendency. Kenyon submitted to his bishop, refused to support the rising, and would not even allow the ringing of the chapel bell to assemble the people as was done in other places. O’Brien and his friends were only able to rally a handful of poorly armed insurgents. The rebellion dissipated itself in a skirmish with a police patrol barricaded in the widow MacCormack’s farmhouse in Ballingarry. The leaders of the rising were loud in their recriminations against the priests. O’Brien, when preparing his notes for his trial, wrote

This

was

that it is my sincere belief that it was through the instrumentality of the superior order of the Catholic Clergy that the insurrection was suppressed. For my own part I feel convinced that we were defeated, not by the military preparations of Lord Harding or of General MacDonald, not by the system of espionage organised by Lord Clarendon, but by the influences brought into action by the Catholic Clergy. Whatever merit therefore is connected with the repression of our effort is due chiefly if not solely to the Catholic Hierarchy. 25

467 And this sentiment was endorsed by Duffy with the important qualification that while it was ’certain had they helped it cordially, it would have been widespread and protracted’, it was still ’doubtful whether it would have been successful’.26 When Michael Doheny arrived in exile in the USA the following year he found Irish Americans bitterly divided with one party asserting that ’the entire failure was attributable to the Catholic priests’. 21 Mitchel in his account of these events wrote bitterly of how at the time of his own arrest and deportation at the end of May ’many of the Catholic clergy had come over to the &dquo;Young Ireland&dquo; party’, but that when ’the final scene opened... and the whole might of the empire was gathering itself to crush us the clergy as a body were found on the side of the enemy’. This betrayal he ascribed to their belief that they had more to hope for ’in a union with monarchical aristocratic England than in an Ireland revolutionized and republican’.28 At any rate the lesson was not lost on James Stephens, John O’Mahony, Charles Kickham or any of the other young men who had participated in the rising and were determined never again to rely on the priests. A realistic assessment of the revolt, while not denying the part played by the priests, cannot ignore other factors of equal importance. The Confederate organization was weak and virtually without arms. Many of those who flocked to join the clubs and swelled the numbers at demonstrations and meetings must have had serious doubts as to the practicality of an armed insurrection without any arms. Moreover, there can seldom have been a man less fitted to lead a revolt than William Smith O’Brien. He refused to violate the rights of property by commandeering food for his starving followers, insisted that they observe the laws of trespass on manoeuvres and forbade the cutting down of trees for barricades without the permission of the landowners. This ’tragi-comedy of errors’ was not the work of serious revolutionaries. That the peasantry, particularly in ’disturbed Tipperary’ were prepared to fight, without benefit of clergy if necessary, was shown by the crime figures that indicate a high level of agrarian resistance throughout the years of the famine.29 They were not prepared to engage in open rebellion under incompetent leadership in the face of certain defeat. The following year saw another fruitless attempt at revolt. A secret society under the leadership of Lalor and involving a number of young men who were to become leaders of the Fenian move-

468 ment : John O’Leary, Philip Grey and Thomas Clarke Luby, attempted to rally the remnants of the Confederation. The result was

another fiasco in September 1849 with its dreary quota of arrests and exiles. Lalor died soon afterwards and his society died with him. From these two disasters emerged the men who were to build the Fenian movement in the 1860s. The rebellions of 1848 and 1849 were an important phase in the development of the Irish revolutionary tradition. The Confederation’s backward-looking reliance on the priests expired in the mud of the widow MacCormack’s cabbage patch, while Lalor’s secret society presaged the methods of the future. Equally significant, despite the fact that a number of the leaders were Protestants, was the complete lack of support for the rebel cause among the Ulster Protestants.

’We meant to kill clerical dictation, and we did kill it’, was the claim made by John O’Leary when he came to write his Recollections of Fenians and Fenianism.3° And this claim has been generally accepted at face value and even enlarged upon. In his massive work, Ireland since the Famine, F. S. L. Lyons goes so far as to pronounce the Fenians of the 1860s responsible for the words ’Catholic’ and ’Irish’ no longer being interchangeable and describes their call for the separation of Church and State as ’a contribution of incalculable value to the development of Irish nationalism’.31 This judgment is fundamentally untenable. It derives from a confusion between clericalism, which the Fenians rejected, and the confessional nature of Irish nationalism, which remained untouched by their diatribes against the priest-in-politics. Moreover in the 1860s the cutting edge of a demand for the separation of Church and State primarily affected the Church of Ireland, not the Catholic Church. From the inception in 1858 of the Fenian organization in Ireland, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the leadership was determined to organize independently of the clergy. The methods of the agrarian secret societies, of the Ribbonmen, leavened by the experience of continental secret societies, were adopted. Throughout Ireland Fenian circles were established that were closed to the parish priest. A clash was inevitable between such an organization and the Catholic Church whose condemnation of secret societies was of long standing. The first conflicts were localized affairs, the most notable involving Jeremiah O’Donovon Rossa in Skibbereen,

469 but as the organization grew and its extent became known, so the conflict came to involve the hierarchy as a whole. From the viewpoint of the Church the Brotherhood smacked of Garibaldi. To the majority of the bishops it was a close relative to the revolutionary secret societies of France and Italy that were the sworn enemies of the Church and they reacted against it as such. There was something in this. While the main axis of the Fenian movement lay between the Irish Republican Brotherhood in Ireland and the Fenian Brotherhood in the USA, there were also continental influences at work. After the 1848 fiasco, James Stephens, the Chief Organizer of the IRB from its foundation until his deposition in 1866, and John O’Mahony, the future Head Centre of the Fenian Brotherhood, both fled to France. Here they underwent an apprenticeship in the methods and techniques of secret revolutionary organization. On his own testimony Stephens closely studied the activities of the Italian secret societies, ’for Italians have in a certain way perfected conspiracy, and I thought that with certain reservations they were the best models to follow’ .32 During his exile he adopted socialist ideas that he was to retain throughout his life. Inevitably Stephens was to attempt to bring about an alliance between the Fenians and continental revolutionaries, and with more success than is commonly attributed to him. At no time, however, did he attempt to proselytize for his beliefs within the IRB. Fenianism retained its remarkable character as a revolutionary movement which was conservative on social questions and united only on the need for armed insurrection to drive out the British. According to O’Leary, the leadership of the IRB saw from the first that ’ecclesiastical authority in temporal affairs should be shivered to atoms before we could advance a single step towards the liberation of our struggling country’.33 This did not amount to a full-blooded anti-clerical assault on the Church but was restricted to the subject of the priest-in-politics. How far was this a matter of principle? How far of expediency? How far was it a response to clerical attacks? The crucial event in establishing the IRB as a national force in Ireland and in mobilizing the hierarchy against it was the funeral of the ’48 veteran Terence Bellew McManus in November 1861. This affair throws considerable light on the development of the Fenians’ ’anti-clericalism’. McManus died in exile in America. The Fenian Brotherhood took the decision to carry his body back to Ireland for burial. For a time it was intended to use the funeral as the occasion to stage a ris-

470

ing, but Stephens effectively squashed this idea. Instead the funeral would become a political demonstration of support for separatism and revolution. The body was carried across America and arrived in New York on Friday 13 September. A committee led by Thomas Francis Meagher, a recent recruit to the ranks of the Fenian Brotherhood, waited on Archbishop Hughes to request a Solemn High Requiem Mass on the Monday. Hughes agreed and expressed the sentiment that nothing ’would give him more gratification than to identify himself with the honors to be paid to our deceased countryman’.34 On the Monday in his address to the congregation, Hughes proclaimed that ’there are cases in which it is lawful to resist and overthrow a tyrannical government’ .35 This was music to Fenian ears and was widely publicized as a clerical endorsement of their activities. Certainly at this time O’Mahony was concerned to such endorsement and to disarm clerical censure. To this end the Fenian Brotherhood had been instituted in America as an open political organization rather than as a secret society.36 John Rutherford in his hotly disputed The Secret History of the Fenian Conspiracy goes considerably further than this and asserts that O’Mahony, ’a devout Catholic, was more than inclined to place his organization under clerical sway’.31 This seems most unlikely in view of O’Mahony’s experience in 1848. While he welcomed clerical support and had a healthy fear of clerical censure, he was still committed to organizing independently of the clergy. The body arrived in Ireland on 30 October. In stark contrast with the stand taken by Archbishop Hughes, the overwhelming majority of the Irish hierarchy refused to countenance the funeral. In Cork on Sunday 3 November, Bishop Delaney refused to allow the body to lie in any of the city’s churches. Despite this an impressive funeral procession followed the coffin through the city. In Dublin Archbishop Cullen also refused to allow the body to lie in any of the city’s churches and no Dublin priest dared officiate at the funeral. The procession through Dublin on 10 November numbered over 50,000 people and stretched seven miles. The impact upon the fortunes of the Brotherhood of this triumphant progression of the dead McManus through Ireland, in the teeth of clerical opposition, was tremendous. More members were recruited into the organization in the three weeks of McManus’s funeral obsequies than in the previous two years.38 The ranks of the Church were not altogether united in opposition to the funeral. Bishop Keane of Cloyne allowed the body to lie in a secure

471

church in Cobh and was well known for his sympathy with the Fenians. In Maynooth College students held a Requiem Office for McManus as a gesture of solidarity. A number of priests including the veteran Father Kenyon of Templederry and Father Lavelle of Partry were even prepared to defy Archbishop Cullen’s wrath and attend the funeral. Father Lavelle delivered a provocative oration over the grave and warned that the day ’for which our fathers yearned, struggled, fought and suffered cannot now be far off.’39 Nevertheless these were very much the exceptions. The Church as a whole set its face determinedly against the McManus funeral and those young priests who may have sympathized were successfully curbed by Cullen. Thereafter the conflict between the Fenians and Church became increasingly fierce. It was in this context that the Fenian newspaper, The Irish People, which was to spearhead the attack on the priest-in-politics, was established in November 1863. The McManus funeral, however, must be seen as an attempt to secure from the Irish Church the apparent endorsement that had been forthcoming in America. The organizers of the funeral requested Cullen to allow the remains to lie in state in the Cathedral and to perform a grand religious ceremonial over them. This would clearly have identified the Church with the separatist cause and Cullen refused The intention was clear. Within the Catholic revolutionary tradition, funerals played the role of restoring the sacramental link between the Church and the revolutionaries that had been otherwise frayed by clerical censure of revolutionary activity. The contrast with the lay funerals that became fashionable in French republican circles in the 1880s could not be greater. In this instance, however, Cullen took an uncompromising stand against the revolutionary movement. It was this that drove the Fenians into their campaign against the priest-in-politics. They were already firmly committed to organizing independently of the clergy but the campaign against the priest-in-politics in no way derived from this position, rather it was a response to the vigour with which the Church opposed their activities. The Irish People was edited by John O’Leary, a nominal Catholic who had long since ceased to practise his faith; its principal full-time contributors were Thomas Clarke Luby, a Protestant, and Charles Kickham, a devout Catholic. From the very beginning, the paper mounted a sustained attack on clerical dictation in politics. Unsparing attacks on priests for opposing the movement filled its pages, but there were strict limits to this anti-

472 clericalism. Quite deliberately the devout Kickham was left to lead the attack in the quite vain hope of avoiding denunciation as irreligious or anti-Catholic. And as Kickham himself explained: ’We never uttered a word against the priests as ministers of religion. But we challenged and do challenge their right to dictate to the people in politics.’4’ Another frequent scourge of the clergy in the columns of The Irish People was James F. X. O’Brien, described by O’Leary as ’nothing if not Catholic’, who wrote under the pseudonym of De 1’Abbaye. Two of his sons were to become priests.42 This was hardly the stuff of a full-blooded anticlericalism. It had, as John McManners has observed of eighteenth century French anti-clericalism, ’that intimate bitterness peculiar to a family quarrel’.43 The priests were attacked for their politics without this in any way calling into question their domination over other areas of Catholic social life and without undermining the religious convictions of the Fenians themselves. The political stand adopted by the Church was seen as a result of the dominance of pro-British bishops and of British intrigue at the Vatican, rather than as inherent in Catholic doctrine, and this was made all the more credible by the well-publicized sympathy of individual priests and bishops with the movement. The most significant feature of the clash between the Fenians and the Church is the small number of those who actually broke with the Church. Individuals such as John O’Leary, O’Donovon Rossa and Frank Roney were very much the exception. More typical was ’the sterling piety’ of the Fenians who assembled for the assault on Chester Castle in February 1867 and ’who thronged the confessionals on that Saturday night and Sunday morning to make their peace with God, satisfied, if need be, to give their lives for the holy cause of Irish Freedom’.44 More typical was the Fenian conspirator with his copy of Bodkin’s Fenian Catechism enumerating ’the wrongs that God has ordained the Brotherhood to redress’ hidden among his possessions.45 The devotion of the Fenians to the Catholic faith was such that it drew reluctant recognition even from their most hostile opponents: Manning wrote to Archbishop Cullen on 6 February 1866 that ’Your Grace will be happy to know that the Fenian prisoners in Pentonville have asked for Mass, and the Government has granted it. This is a strange victory, on which I make no comment except &dquo;Thank God&dquo;.’ Elsewhere he wrote of these men that ’My heart bleeds ... They believe themselves to be serving in a sacred and holy war for their country and religion.’46

473 In view of such religious beliefs how did the Fenians reconcile their revolutionary politics with the censures of the Church? Kickham himself was refused access to the sacraments for many years by the parish priest at Mullinahone after his association with The Irish People. Only the personal intervention of Archbishop Croke of Cashel secured his re-admission long after the dust of the 1867 rising had settled.47 John Devoy, in his thoughtful Recollections of an Irish Rebel describes clerical censure as the ’hardest test the Fenians had to face’. 48 A devout Catholic himself, Devoy believed that they were able to confront this challenge and yet remain within the fold of the Church because it was not united in its response to Fenianism. While the overwhelming majority of the bishops opposed Fenianism, Archbishop McHale of Tuam and Bishop Keane of Cloyne both declined to instruct their priests to refuse absolution to Fenians. When the Papal Rescript explicitly condemning Fenianism was eventually issued in January 1870 neither promulgated it in his diocese. McHale’s partiality towards Fenianism was legendary. He protected Father Lavelle, the Fenian priest, from Cullen’s wrath. In April 1864 he sent three autographed portraits of himself to be sold at a Fenian Fair in Chicago. Undoubtedly many young priests also sympathized but remained silent for fear of their bishop. John Mitchel, who had no illusions about the prospect of a Fenian victory, was nevertheless greatly heartened by the evidence he found of rebel sentiment among the younger clergy. Soon after he gave up the post of Fenian agent in Paris in June 1866, he visited the Irish College together with his old friend Father Kenyon, and was mobbed by the cheering students. He wrote an account of the visit: The scene was, under all the circumstances, a strange and touching one. Most of these fine young fellows had been yet unborn when I left my country in 1848; they could have known me only by the tradition of their various counties, and by such publications of mine as they might meet with. It strikes me that if they cheer me so warmly, they cannot be very earnestly loyal to the British Empire; and next year, or the year after, most of these will be curates in towns and country parishes all over Ireland. It is the young blood that flows each year through the veins of the Church, and the blood thereof is the life thereof. What is his Eminence Cardinal Cullen going to do about it? How will he ever make the young priests, educated in this Irish College, good faithful West Britons? And Maynooth, I hear, is no better, that is, no worse! Will he excommunicate them and damn all their souls... Cardinal Cullen will have a tough job in carrying out his contract with the enemy of his country.49

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widespread such sentiments were among the younger clergy is impossible to gauge. But this testimony is all the more credible for coming from Mitchel who was otherwise sceptical of the strength of separatist sympathies in Ireland. Cullen’s position then was not as strong as at first appears. Even in Dublin, he was defied: the Jesuits did not refuse the sacraments to Fenians so that men denied them in their own parish could receive them at Gardiner Street Church. It was this, that in Devoy’ss words ’largely counteracted the effect of the Cardinal’s hostility’.So Clearly Fenian ’anti-clericalism’ was of an altogether different How

order from that which flourished on the continent. It derived from the clergy’s opposition to the revolutionary methods advocated by the IRB and was limited to contesting their political influence. While, after the events of 1848, it was unlikely that Irish revolutionaries would ever again have fully trusted or allowed themselves to be dependent upon the priests, there is no doubt that they would have welcomed their support. When they encountered only opposition, they responded blow for blow. In every other respect, however, the clergy were treated with all due reverence. This was a milk-and-water affair when compared with the virulent anticlericalism of continental revolutionaries. The contrast is nowhere more clearly highlighted than by the Irish response to the Italian Risorgimento. In 1859-60 the Irish Church mounted a campaign of support for the papal states against the encroachments of Piedmont. This campaign assumed massive proportions and took on the character of a crusade. Some 1000 Irish Volunteers were despatched to fight with the papal army and included among them were a number of Fenians. Such behaviour would have been altogether incomprehensible to Italian revolutionaries. It is only comprehensible once the limitations of Fenian anti-clericalism are recognized and the extent to which they drew inspiration from Irish Catholicism is

appreciated. Throughout 1865 and 1866 Stephens prepared for an armed insurrection, but shortage of arms prevented him from naming the

day. The assistance from America on which he had relied was not forthcoming. As part of his preparations he actively sought the aid of continental revolutionaries and of the republicans in Britain. He despatched Frank Roney to England to establish contact with Charles Bradlaugh, the republican and secularist, and had received a promise of assistance. 51 In 1866 he joined the International in New York and secured the assistance of its agent Cesare Orsini.

475

important was his offer of command of the Fenian forces to the French revolutionary soldier-of-fortune Gustave Cluseret. Cluseret’s chequered career had seen him in action against the workers’ barricades in Paris in June 1848, in Algeria, in the Crimea, in Sicily with Garibaldi in 1860, and as a Brigadier General in the Union Army in the American Civil War. After the Fenian rising, his career was to culminate with the command of the armed forces of the Paris Commune in 1871. A successful rising and protracted guerrilla war would undoubtedly have seen this radical influence upon Fenianism becoming stronger. Disappointment with the cancellation of plans for a rising precipitated Stephens’s removal as Chief Organizer of the IRB in December 1866. He was replaced by a revolutionary council dominated by Irish-Americans of whom the leading figure was Colonel Thomas J. Kelly. The headquarters of the council was established in England. When the rising was imminent, Cluseret, together with Kelly, visited Bradlaugh to obtain his opinion of their draft proclamation announcing the formation of the Irish Republic. On Bradlaugh’s own account, he removed from the proclamation an appeal to the Catholic feelings of the Irish peoples. 12 That night, Kelly, a skilled compositor, set and printed the proclamation. Confronted at first hand with the state of the Fenian organization, Cluseret advised against a rising. He was ignored. In February and March 1867 the attempt was made. In appalling weather some thousands of Fenians assembled in Cork and Dublin. They were without arms, their leaders were already under arrest or in hiding, and they were dispersed by the police. Isolated clashes occurred elsewhere. The rising was an unqualified disaster. The man most responsible for the determined stand taken by the Church against Fenianism was Paul Cullen. A former Rector of the Irish College in Rome, Cullen had been consecrated Archbishop of Armagh in 1850, translated to Dublin in 1852 and eventually received his cardinal’s hat in June 1866. As Apostolic Delegate, he was the effective ruler of the Church in Ireland for nearly thirty years, and exercised a degree of control that no one man was ever to possess again. He did this through the unqualified support of Rome and it is essential to place his policies within the context of developments throughout the Church in Europe. The history of the Church in this period is characterized by a tendency towards centralization, the imposition of rigid discipline, and an absence of More

476

theological controversy.53 Cullen embodied these trends in Ireland. The Fenians labelled him a Castle-bishop. On the contrary he had a deep antipathy towards British rule and was described by Lord Clarendon as ’the bitter and uncompromising enemy of the British Government in Ireland’ .54 His attitude towards the Fenians formed by his personal experience of the revolution of 1848 when he was in Rome. This had given him a deep fear and hatred of revolution. Thereafter it was axiomatic with Cullen that wherever secret societies and revolutionary organizations prevailed, religion was destroyed. For this reason he welcomed the suppression of The Irish People by the authorities and was undoubtedly relieved at the collapse of the 1867 rising.55 Only after the collapse of the 1867 rising did the first indications of widespread clerical sympathy for the Fenians begin to appear. Undoubtedly many of the younger priests had been deterred from supporting the movement earlier by fear of their bishops, but now that it had been crushed it was possible to express sympathy openly for the Fenian prisoners. The event that really brought clerical feelings out into the open was the execution on 23 November 1867 of William Allen, Michael Larkin and William O’Brien, the Manchester Martyrs. These executions horrified and outraged Catholic Ireland. Prayers were said for the dead men in every church in the country. Cullen instructed his priests to pray privately but elsewhere the services became political demonstrations. In Rome itself Irishmen serving in the papal army tried to arrange a Requiem at the Sant’Andrea della Fratte. In December Archbishop McHale took the initiative to set up a fund for the dependents of the three men and although he refused to act as treasurer, he opened the donations with £5. The fervour displayed over the Manchester Martyrs was carried into the campaign for the release of the Fenian prisoners that was conducted by the Amnesty Association. The extent of clerical support for this cause was shown when towards the end of 1868 Dean O’Brien of Limerick circularized the clergy for signatures to a document petitioning for the release of the prisoners. Early in 1870 he announced that nearly 1400 priests had signed, that is almost half the Irish clergy. Cullen’s sway was shown by the fact that only seven priests in the diocese of Dublin had was

signed.56 The Fenian episode for all its sound and fury left unchanged the identification between Catholicism and Irish nationalism. The relationship between Church and people was too strong to be broken,

477 too

deeply embedded in the fabric of Irish social life. John Devoy,

however, considered that had the conflict ’continued there can hardly be any doubt that it would have resulted eventually in an anti-clerical movement’.5’ This seems a sound judgment; if the Church had opposed the struggle for the land, a struggle that was of crucial interest to the Catholic tenant farmers, the backbone of the Church’s congregation, as it had opposed Fenianism, then it is likely that genuine anti-clericalism would have appeared in Ireland. This never happened. The land war of 1879-82 was to effect a decisive reintegration of national politics and the Church, restoring the alliance of the O’Connell era and overthrowing the policies of the late Cardinal Cullen. After much hesitation the Church took its stand alongside the embattled tenant farmers and the identification of Catholicism with Irish nationalism emerged all the stronger.58 The veteran nationalist, Archbishop Croke of Cashel, played a vital part in this development and in many ways embodied this identification. Not even the struggle that accompanied the overthrow of Parnell could shake it. Indeed it was precisely the nationalist credentials of the bishops that enabled them to play the decisive part in the defeat of Parne11.59 Significantly, the IRB was to rally to Parnell in his last fight and provided many of his most prominent supporters The confrontation between the Fenians and the Church in the 1860s established limits to such conflicts beyond which Irish revolutionaries have never ventured. During the War of Independence essentially the same themes repeated themselves, although in what were for the revolutionaries, more favourable circumstances. Clearly, recognition of the confessional nature of Irish nationalism is central to the understanding of the revolutionary tradition in Ireland. For the overwhelming majority of the Fenians, the identification between Catholicism and Irish nationalism was absolute. They were fighting for both Faith and Fatherland. Their ability to withstand clerical censure of their activities without any weakening of their religious beliefs is striking testimony to the strength of this

identification.

478 Notes

1. 220. 2. 3. 290. 4.

Lord Longford and Thomas P. O’Neill, Eamon de Valera (London 1970), See R. R. Palmer, The Age of Democratic Revolution (Princeton 1959). R. Barry O’Brien, The Autobiography of Wolfe Tone (Dublin 1910), 288, Padraic Pearse, Collected Works: Political Writings and

Speeches (Dublin

1922), 293. 5. W. E. H. Lecky, A History 46-7. 6. Notable exceptions to this

of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century:

5

(London

1913),

are the works of: Patrick O’Farrell, Ireland’s English Question (London 1971); Emmet Larkin, ’Church and State in Ireland in the Nineteenth Century’, Church History XXXI (September 1962), ’The Devotional Revolution in Ireland 1850-1875’, American Historical Review 77, 3 (June 1972), ’Church State and Nation in Modern Ireland’, American Historical Review 80, 5 (December 1975); David W. Miller, Church State and Nation in Ireland 1898-1921 (Dublin 1973); E. R. Norman, The Catholic Church and Ireland in the Age of Rebellion 1859-1873 (London 1965). 7. Aug. J. Thebaud, Ireland Past and Present (New York 1899), 526-7. 8. Thomas N. Burke, Lectures on Faith and Fatherland (Glasgow 1877), 116-17,

270. 9. O’Farrell, op. cit., 31. 10. Jeremiah O’Donovon Rossa, My Years in English Jails (Tralee 1967), 18-19. 11. I am indebted for this discussion to Ivan Vallier, Catholicism Social Control and Modernization in Latin America (New Jersey 1970). 12. T. M. Healy, Letters and Leaders of My Day, I (London 1924), 41; Maud Gonne McBride, A Servant of the Queen (London 1974), 267; Brian Inglis, Roger Casement (London 1974), 383-4. 13. Oliver MacDonagh, ’The Politicization of the Irish Bishops’, The Historical Journal 18, I (March 1975), 38-41. 14. See J. H. Whyte, ’The Influence of the Clergy on Elections in Nineteenth Century Ireland’, English Historical Review LXXV (April 1960). 15. See Denis Gwynn, O’Connell, Davis and the Colleges Bill (Cork 1948); Charles Gavan Duffy, Young Ireland (London 1880). 16. Charles Gavan Duffy, Four Years of Irish History (London 1883), 469. 17. Denis Gwynn, Young Ireland and 1848 (Cork 1949), 159. 18. H. Daniel-Rops, The Church in an Age of Revolution 1789-1870 (London

1965), 244. 19. Duffy, Four Years, op. cit., 540. 20. T. D. Sullivan, Troubled Times in Irish Politics (Dublin 1905), 32. 21. Duffy, Four Years, op. cit., 638. 22. Ibid., 630. 23. Michael Cavanagh, Memoirs of General Thomas Francis Meagher (Worcester, Mass., 1892), 266. 24. Ibid., 267. 25. Gwynn, Young Ireland, op. cit., 234.

479 Duffy, Four Years, op. cit., 692. Michael Doheny, The Felon’s Track (Glasgow 1875), VII. John Mitchel, The Last Conquest of Ireland (Glasgow nd), 197-8. James W. Hurst, ’Disturbed Tipperary, 1831-1860’, Eire-Ireland (Autumn 1974), 47-8. 30. John O’Leary, Recollections of Fenians and Fenianism, II (London 1896), 53. 31. F. S. L. Lyons, Ireland Since the Famine (London 1973), 133. 32. Desmond Ryan, The Fenian Chief (Dublin 1967), 51. 33. O’Leary, op. cit., II, 33. 34. Cavanagh, op. cit., 418. 35. Ibid., 419. 36. See letter from O’Mahony to Charles Kickham (19 October 1863), in Seamus Pender, ’Fenian Papers in the Catholic University of America’, Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaelogical Society Vol. LXXI, Nos. 233-4 (January-December 1976), 128-9. 37. John Rutherford, The Secret History of the Fenian Conspiracy, I (London 1877), 192. 38. A. M. Sullivan, New Ireland (Glasgow 1882), 246. 39. E. R. Norman, A History of Modern Ireland (London 1973), 159. 40. T. D. Sullivan, A. M. Sullivan: A Memoir (Dublin 1885), 52. 41. P. S. O’Hegarty, A History of Ireland under the Union 1801-1922 (London 26. 27. 28. 29.

1952), 441. 42. O’Leary,

op. cit., II, 64. See also Peter Nolan’s interesting James Francis Xavier O’Brien 1828-1905 (MA Thesis, University College Cork 1971). 43. John McManners, The French Revolution and the Church (London 1969), 13. 44. John Denvir, The Irish in Britain (London 1892), 221. 45. D. G. Bodkin, The Fenian Catechism (New York 1867), VII. 46. Shane Leslie, Henry Edward Manning (London 1921), 194, 196. 47. James Maher, A Valley Near Slievenamon (Mullinahone 1942), 33, 51. 48. John Devoy, Recollections of an Irish Rebel (New York 1929), 118. 49. William Dillon, Life of John Mitchel II (London 1888), 247. 50. Devoy, op. cit., 119. 51. Frank Roney, ed. Ira B. Cross, Frank Roney: Irish Rebel and California Labor Leader (Berkeley 1931), 119. 52. Adolphe S. Headingley, The Biography of Charles Bradlaugh (London 1880), 209-10. 53. A. C. Jemolo, Church and State in Italy (Oxford 1960), I. 54. Leon O’Broin, Fenian Fever (London 1971), 136. See also Noel Blakiston, The Roman Question (London 1962), 358. 55. P. F. Moran, ed., The Pastoral Letters and Other Writings of Cardinal Cullen II (Dublin 1882), 391. In a letter to the clergy of Dublin on 10 October 1865 Cullen remarked that ’it must be admitted, that for suppressing that paper, the public authorities deserve the thanks and gratitude of all those who love Ireland, its peace and its religion’. 56. Thomas O’Fiaich, ’The Clergy and Fenianism 1860-1870’, Irish Ecclesiastical Record 109, 2 (February 1968), 94-5. 57. Devoy, op. cit., 120.

480 58. See in particular: Emmet Larkin, The Roman Catholic Church and the Creation of the Modern Irish State (Dublin 1975), and C. J. Woods, The Catholic Church and Irish Politics (PhD Thesis, Nottingham University 1968). 59. William O’Brien, Recollections (London 1905), 282. 60. Leon O’Broin, Revolutionary Underground (Dublin 1976), 44.

John Newsinger teaches at the Wreake Valley College in Leicestershire. He has published articles and reviews in a number of journals and is at present working on studies of Irish Republicanism and Sean O’Casey.