Read: Historic Destinies

From: Church & State: Editorials

Date: October, 2013

By: Brendan Clifford

Historic Destinies

Some Fine Gael TDs who voted for abortion complain that they are being denied Communion in the Catholic Church, and their complaints are treated by the Sunday Independent as having legitimate grounds. But it is well-known that the Catholic Church regards abortion as a form of murder. So we cannot see what their legitimate ground for complaint is.
When this journal was launched almost forty years ago, its first difficulty was in establishing public awareness of the distinctive spheres of Church an State in order to establish some actual space between them.

The distinction between Church and State is very much a Roman Catholic distinction. It did not exist in many of the major cultures and religions of the world. It was a Christian innovation. And, if a distinction is to be made between Christianity and Roman Catholicism—and it is made very sharply in the British part of Ireland—then it was a Roman Catholic innovation. When England broke with Rome and became Protestant—that being the order in which it happened—it abolished the distinction between Church and State. The Church was a Department of State under Henry 8 and Elizabeth. When James 2 tried to restore the distinction he was driven out of the kingdom.
The unity of Church and State was central to British development after the Glorious Revolution of 1688. That Revolution was Glorious because it restored the totalitarian unity of Church and State, with the State in command and capable of generating and manipulating religious fanaticism. The Penal Law system of British rule in Ireland was a consistent manifestation of the Protestant unity of Church and State.
The outcome of the Reformation in the one country where it became a World Power was an absolutist nationalism that became an absolutist Imperialism.

For one generation in the middle of the 17th century the Protestant religion had a go at running the state. The result was the Cromwell fiasco. Thereafter the State ran the religion. The clergy of the Church of England were not allowed to meet in Assembly for many generations, lest they should endanger the moral totalitarianism of the State. The Church was run by its Bishops, who were members of the governing system, appointed to their Sees by the Prime Minister acting in the name of the Crown.
The religious system of the State was gradually loosened up. Enthusiastic Protestants who had doctrinal disagreements with the Established Church and refused to toe the line were allowed an outlet for their energy in the expansion of the Empire—which in the first instance consisted largely of the slavery business, which was thrown open to Free Trade by the Glorious Revolution. Then, as they became a more important element in the economy, they were allowed to hold minor offices in public administration by making a token gesture towards the Established Church once a year.
But these were developments within the consolidated nationalist-Imperialism of the Protestant State.

In Catholic Europe relations between Church and State were regulated by Treaties (Concordats) between national Governments and a religious authority lying outside the State. Under this arrangement the Catholic Church within a particular state was neither free to do as it pleased, nor subject to the direction of the State, nor at the mercy of the Pope. Rome acknowledged that the local State had a legitimate interest in the affairs of the Church within its borders, and the State acknowledged that Rome likewise had a legitimate interest. And Rome was willing to make similar arrangements with States that were not Catholic.

The possibility of making such an arrangement arose within the UK after the 1800 Act of Union removed the controlling apparatus of the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland and the national development of the native population began. The natives asserted themselves as Catholics because it was as Catholics that they had been disfranchised, plundered, and generally put upon.
Henry Grattan, who had tried and failed to persuade the Protestant Ascendancy Parliament to admit Catholics to the Constitution, proposed an Emancipation Bill in the Westminster Parliament in 1808. It included the condition that the Government should have a say in the appointment of Catholic Bishops in Ireland. A list of possible appointments would be given to the Government, and it might strike out any it considered politically subversive.
There was nothing at variance with Roman practice in this condition. Grattan had cleared it with the Irish Bishops. They had all been educated on the Continent because of the Penal Laws and took it for granted that some such condition should be imposed.
There was a rebellion by the Dublin Catholic middle class against this condition, sparked off by Walter Cox in his Irish Magazine. But this was national dissent against the Act of Union, rather than an expression of absolutist Catholicism.
The dispute on this issue ran on for 20 years, until Daniel O'Connell intimidated the Government by a credible threat of mass rebellion into conceding unconditional Emancipation, which put Rome in the anomalous position of being freely in control of its Church in Ireland.

At various points in this Veto Controversy the possibility of a Concordat between Whitehall and Rome was considered. It was not liked by Irish national sentiment. But the basic reason it was not attempted was that English ruling circles recoiled from the prospect, 300 years after Henry 8 made himself Pope, of once again establishing a formal agreement with Rome about the conduct of their internal affairs. They remained in the grip of the nationalistic totalitarianism of the Reformation event in which their Empire had its origin.
Their refusal to feel out the possibilities of a Concordat was neither rational nor pragmatic. It was a moral/emotional reflex, to which they sacrificed the possibility of curbing nationalist development in Ireland with authoritative assistance from Rome.

Rome had not actually had free control of the Irish Church until around this time. Until the late 18th century the Stuart Monarchy, though overthrown and in exile, had been the intermediary between Rome and Ireland. It was the British Government of the 19th century that placed Rome in unmediated authority over the Irish Church.
And then British Governments, having refused a Concordatist relationship, still attempted to curb Irish nationalist development by use of Rome. It simultaneously assisted and complained about the increase of the influence of the church in secular affairs.
The final act of British statesmanship in Ireland was to split Sinn Fein in 1922 by negotiating a deal with the Collins/Griffith group and establishing them in power on the condition that they make war on those who refused the deal, and the threat that it would itself make war on the whole lot if this was not done. The Catholic Bishops facilitated Britain by excommunicating those who actively opposed this 'Treaty', thus driving out of public life at a critical moment the element which had shown itself least susceptible to Episcopal authority.
That is how we got the 'Free Church in a Free State'.

Democratic states are governed by public opinion. But how is public opinion formed? It does not arise directly from the public. The 'public' in the mass does not give rise to opinion capable of directing states. Public opinion is opinion formed through the operation of organised bodies which divide the public and make it capable of political action.
In England democracy was established by the gradual phasing in of increasingly wider circles of the general populace into political structures of party politics formed within a very small ruling class which had governed for a century and a half before the first franchise reform in 1832. The populace, as they were admitted to these structures, became the political public and formed opinions about the conduct of the state under their influence. In British history there is no Year Zero in which an unstructured populace is confronted with the task of conducting government.

In Ireland the bulk of the population was excluded from public affairs during that century and a half, under the Penal Laws, and the small class which constituted the public of the state in Ireland was not an elite of the general population, but was an alien stratum whose relation with the general population was merely exploitative.
When that long exclusion of the Irish populace from British public life ended under O'Connell's leadership, they turned, under his influence, against British government of Ireland rather than to participation in it.
The sheer military power of Britain, and its willingness to use it brutally, made Irish independence a hopeless cause. Therefore the organised demand came to be for a measure of Irish devolved government subordinate to Britain. A disciplined Home Rule Party monopolised Irish political representation outside of eastern Ulster for a generation, from the 1880s to 1914. That Party won all its elections but its electoral victories were entirely disconnected from government.
Democracy is the election of a Government by the populace. Voting in elections which do not have the function of establishing a Government is something else. And it gave rise to a blind party loyalty by the mass, instead of compelling them to form contentious practical opinions about policies to be implemented in government if the election was won.
The cultivation of blind loyalty in the mass of the people to a process of voting disconnected from government led to their going blindly into the British Army for war in 1914, led along by the vacuous Utopian slogans specially devised for them.

In 1918 the newly-reconstructed Sinn Fein Party contested the Election with the object of forming a Government. That was the founding act, in Ireland, of democracy properly so called.
Sinn Fein won he election, formed a Government according to its mandate, and defended its Government against British efforts to wreck it. I know of no grounds to suppose that the 1919 Government would not have taken root as an orderly system of state if Britain had not been determined to wreck it at any cost.
The wrecking attempt became effective in December-January 1921-2. A section of Sinn Fein was induced by a carrot and a cudgel to allow itself to be installed in a new Government on British authority, armed and financed by Britain, and, under the stimulus of the same cudgel, to make war on its colleagues of 1919-21 who disagreed.

It is tempting, under the influence of British patronage, to assume a priori, that the Treaty War of 1922-3 must have been the expression of differences within the Government of 1919-21 which had been papered over and had come to the fore under pressure. But I could find no evidence of such differences.
If the Treatyites had been fighting for the Crown on principle, and had gained a resounding electoral majority for that principle in the 1922 Election, the outcome of the War would not have been as it was. The Treaty War would have been an authentic civil war and the victors would have dominated the post-War situation ideologically and culturally, as well as militarily.
But it was not an authentic Civil War fought over some great principle which the victors put into effect. The victors, impelled into war by an outside force, cut themselves off from their roots by fighting the war. They were no longer Sinn Fein at the end of it. They had to find a new ideal and a new source of popular sentiment. And they were given it by the Catholic Hierarchy.

The Hierarchy had never recognised the binding democratic force of the 1918 Election or the legitimacy of the Government based on it, and in some areas Decrees of Excommunication were issued against the Volunteers who defended the Republic against the British terrorism. And then the Church Hierarchy gave general support to the Treaty against the Republic and excommunications were freely issued.
Professor Tom Garvin (UCD) takes no account of this when expounding his theory that excessive religious influence on the State and society kept Ireland poor when it might have been rich (in Preventing The Future, 2004).
Growing up in rural Ireland, into my twenties, I was entirely unaware that I lived in a poor, isolated, introverted, backward country that was all of these things because it was Catholic. I was hypersensitive to religion. From the age of thirteen, when I first had reason to think or act on it—when, in a sense, I first became aware of it—I couldn't stand it. I was in the midst of it. It was going on all around me. But there was an awful lot more than religion going on. And rural religion was relaxed and non-intrusive. But then a great missionary effort was launched from the cities to bring the peasants to proper order. I observed this for about eight years in the 1950s, as an insider who was detached from the general flow of things only on the single point of religion. So I know how much else there was besides religion in rural Ireland—which was then the major part of Ireland.

When I first saw Dublin, in the mid-1960s, I could hardly believe what I was seeing. The city seemed to be a Church and its precincts.
After I strayed into left-wing politics I came across the notion that Garvin has made a literary career out of. It was a notion that resentful dissidents griped about in pubs, but gave no public expression to.
A group of us, urged by Pat Murphy who knew Dublin from the inside and had contempt for its Public House anti-clericalism, decided to express public dissent. We published a magazine called The Irish Communist, as a red rag to a bull. I was arrested selling at the GPO and taken to Store St. Having arrested me, the Guards did not know what to do with me. It was obvious that there must be something wrong about publicly selling a magazine called The Irish Communist but they couldn't figure out what it was so they just let me go.
Then Dennis Dennehy got himself imprisoned for homelessness and went on a hunger strike carefully timed to be at a critical point when the 50th anniversary of the First Dail was being commemorated in the Mansion House. He did so explicitly as a Communist, and made a point of directing his action against the bourgeoisie of the Georgian Society. He emerged from Mountjoy as the Communist folk-hero of the soulless Dublin housing estates.
Then Pat Maloney brought a legal action against a Cork hospital over the proposal to site a religious statue in the grounds of a public hospital.
It was by actions such as these that secular space was established and a public awareness was created that the Free Church in a Free State, deriving from the Treaty War, could not last.

M.J.F. McCarthy of Midleton is now being discovered by some belatedly daring academics. We published selections from his assault on the Church in the 1970s. But there was one point on which we had to disagree strongly with him—that the Catholic Church, and the resources 'wasted' on Church building, was the reason why Irish society was not obsessively capitalist. It seemed to us that it was the cultural inheritance from Gaelic society that was inimical to an English-style preoccupation with the capitalist market, and that it was as a modernising, i.e. pro-capitalist, influence that the Church had gained influence in the mid-19th century.
It is interesting to recall that the one institution of the Church which McCarthy admired was the Christian Brothers.

I wrote a book about the great dispute between Catholics and the appointment of Bishops, The Veto Controversy that raged from 1809 to the late 1820s. The publishers tried to get it reviewed but no bourgeois publication would deal with it.
A Belfast bookshop, Mullan's, stocked it. The initial stock sold out very quickly. The management refused to re-stock it. (Mullan's no longer exists. Like the Belfast Department Stores of those times, it has made way for the international chain stores.)
In the early 1970s I wrote a series of articles for this magazine under the title, The Rise Of Papal Power In Ireland. It showed that the Free Church In The Free State had not existed from time immemorial but was a construct of the mid-19th century—made possible by the victory of the Anti-Vetoists in the Veto Controversy. These articles were issued as a pamphlet in 1979 on the occasion of the Pope's visit. It got one review, in Books Ireland, by a priest. All he said, as far as I recall, is that it was not helpful.

Professor Garvin has published an essay entitled entitled Turmoil In The Sea Of Faith: the secularisation of Irish social culture, 1960-2007. (It will be found in Turning Points In 20th Century Irish History, edited by T.E. Hachey, published two years ago.)
Garvin's account of a "secularisation" process that has been going on since 1960 makes no mention of the public defiance signified by the publication and sale of The Irish Communist in 1966, the mass breakthrough in public opinion in Dublin achieved by Dennis Dennehy in 1969, or to the launching of this journal in 1973, or Pat Maloney's unprecedented legal action.
And what else was there? We did what we did because no one else was doing it.
The shock effect of The Irish Communist was not felt in the capitalist economic system but by the Catholic religious order of things. If there had been a secularising bourgeois intelligentsia active in public life, it is unlikely that we would have done many of the things we did. And it would have made no sense at all for us to use our very limited resources in the production of this journal.
But Garvin says that secularisation had been in process since 1960! How did we miss it, and waste our resources in duplicating it?
And how did Garvin miss it? His title implies that it was there, but it isn't to be found in his article.
I suppose this is modern scholarship, in which the title is really what counts.

Garvin quotes a 1962 survey of opinion in Dublin which showed 90% thinking the Church was a force for good and over two-thirds thinking that, if they followed the advice of the priests, they could hardly go wrong. Few people were educated beyond the age of 13, and their education was controlled by the clergy. This brought it about that: "The Irish democratic process was heavily tinged with theocracy, for the overwhelming reason that the majority wished it to be that way" (p156).
The Christian Brothers were especially effective in generating the theocratic mentality, with—

"a potent mixture of authoritaran Christianity, a sometimes rabid patriotism, and a rigid puritan lifestyle. An instantly recognisable political style combining a bullying for of argument with holier-than-thou postures, characterised some of the products of their schools" (p158).

Clerical control was supplemented by the activity of lay organisations, such as the Knights of Columbanus, which "controlled official and unofficial systems and acted as what might be best termed para-clerics" (p158). Secret unbelievers "kept their opinions strictly to themselves and even joined the Knights or similar organisations for safety's sake".

I know nothing about the Brothers from direct experience. We didn't have them in Slieve Luacra, where all education way lay, and where the small, local secondary schools I knew of were businesses conducted by local private enterprise.
Histories published within the last 20 years assert that the Brothers were responsible for the mentality that gave rise to the Easter Rising. I went into the matter and found that the Brothers were enthusiastic Redmondites in outlook from 1914 to 1916. But, being broader-based in the world than Redmond's Party, and having an interest in the world that was not locked into the British war effort, they applied the central reason given as making the War necessary—the sanctity of declarations of Neutrality—as a general principle not limited by British Imperial interest, and therefore they observed that Britain did to Greece what Germany did to Belgium.
I was so impressed by what showed up under my investigation of the Brothers that I collected their War commentary and published it.

The only sense I could find in the assertion that they produced the 1916 generation is that they gave a good education to the lower strata of society, which otherwise would not have had it, and made them capable of availing of opportunities opened up by the Rebellion. They certainly did not incite rebellion.
I then made a point of asking people of a later generation if they had been educated by the Brothers and how they regarded it. Invariably they said they had been given a good education which they could not have got otherwise—an education which made them effective in the society in which they lived. So I understood why McCarthy admired them. After all, disbelief is not the only virtue.
I don't know what went wrong after that—supposing it did go wrong. I suppose it was the subversive effect of the rather vacuous ideology of Vatican 2 on the system of Pius IX and Vatican 1.

Garvin does not say if he was educated by the Brothers, and, if not, where his information about them comes from. His mindset strikes me as being like that of a disillusioned believer.
He appears to see the theocratic democracy as being based on education that ended at the age of 13. That is contrary to my experience. I worked with people whose education, like mine, ended at 13 or earlier, and there was nothing I couldn't talk about with them. People who went off to be educated in city Colleges became certain about things that most people who were not educated took with a pinch of salt. And those who went on to University became omniscient in these matters.
And the policing of these things was not done by the Parish Priest—who never bothered me—but by the educated laity, urged on by missionary activity from the cities.
When I decided to leave Slieve Luacra, it was the pious pressures from the cities forcing their way into the country that I was leaving. Therefore the last place I would have thought of going to was Dublin. I did not go to see Dublin until almost ten years after I had left Ireland. It was as I expected, only more so.

But if secret unbelievers kept their opinions to themselves and joined the Knights for cover, how could there be a secularisation process? The answer is that there wasn't.
And I wonder how Garvin knows that secret unbelievers joined the Knights?
Gene Kerrigan, the Leftist journalist who made a career in Establishment journalism, explained about 25 years ago that there was n need for anybody to disadvantage himself career-wise by taking issue with the Church from a secularising standpoint because the position of the Church would be undermined by external forces, chiefly by globalist capitalism. Something like that has happened. This meant that there was none of the development than an internal secularising movement would have caused. The middle class did not do what, according to the classical liberal conception of things, it was their historic destiny to do. Insofar as that was done, it was BICO that did it. Then, when the Church was down, the bourgeois liberals kicked it.

Back in the mid-seventies there was an influential bourgeois-academic variant of Marxism called Althusserianism. One of its central precepts was that there was a "radical absence of memory" between successive modes of production. Since human existence depends very much on memory, this implied that there was no continuous human existence in history—and therefore, in a sense, there was no history, only the illusion of it.
In Ireland in recent times, insofar as bourgeois liberal academia influenced things, there has been a radical absence of memory, not between successive modes of production—because it was capitalism then and it is capitalism now—but between successive phases of fashion.
The Minister for Education—one of the BICO campaigns was for an Education Act but we do not recall getting any support from Ruairi Quinn—wants to abolish history from the schools. And in the light of the vastly expanded role which schools have come to play in life during the past forty years, that is tantamount to trying to abolish history. No doubt he was a secret unbeliever. His time has come and he sees that history is just packed full of the wrong stuff.
But Professor Garvin is a historian, and historians can hardly be against History. Carroll Professor Roy Foster was. He praised Edna Longley's plea for amnesia. But that was only a feint. He wanted to displace Irish history with English history of Ireland.

Professor Garvin seems to be attempting something different. He is aware of what is supposed to be the historic mission of the middle class intellectual and he is trying to create a false memory of there having been at least a pathetic attempt to accomplish that historic destiny, if only by means of mental reservation.

The Veto Controversy by Brendan Clifford. An account of the fierce dispute among Irish Catholics, between 1808 and 1829, as to whether the appointment of Irish Bishops by the Pope should be subject to a degree of Government influence, as was generally the case elsewhere. Includes Thomas Moore’s Letter To The Roman Catholics Of Dublin (1810) and extracts from polemical writers on either side: J.B. Clinch, Dr. Dromgoole, Bp. Milner, Denys Scully, Rev. Charles O’Conor etc. 203pp. 1985. €18, £15
The Origin Of Irish Catholic-Nationalism, Selections From Walter Cox’s Irish Magazine: 1807-1815. Introduced and Edited by Brendan Clifford. 136pp. 1992. €14, £11.50
The Christian Brothers' History Of The Great War, first published in monthly instalments in 1914-18, edited by Brendan Clifford. 52pp (A4). 2007. €10, £8

CONTENTS
Historic Destinies. Brendan Clifford
The War On Islam. Conor Lynch
Eoghan Ruadh Ó Súilleabháin. Two Songs
The Blacksmith and the Mason, Life & Work Of Eoghan Ruadh, Part 10. Séamas Ó Domhnaill
Padraic Fiacc: Tribute to a Poet. Wilson John Haire
Frost Over Beowulf. Walter Cobb. Poem: Upon the Deaths of David Frost and Seamus Heaney
Sighing For Duelling Pistols. Donal Kennedy
Vox Pa by Pat Maloneyt: Churchill's Poisonous Legacy; Cosgrave; An Irish Miracle; Carmona; Funerals; Archbishop Eamon Martin; Abortions; Peter Sutherland; Church Gate Collections; Congress Costs; Catholic Press?; Fr. Flannery; Bishop John Dignan; Heaney
Bartolomé de Las Casas. John Minahane Part 2 of The Spanish Polemic on Colonisation
The Real History of Europe. Desmond Fennell
The Jazzman Cometh. Stephen Richards
The Guardian Encounters Mugabe's Real Reputation. Seán McGouran on Zimbabwe

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