CATHOLIC NATIONALISM IN THE IRISH REVIVAL

CATHOLIC NATIONALISM IN THE IRISH REVIVAL

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Catholic Nationalism in the Irish Revival A Study of Canon Sheehan, 1852-1913 Ruth Fleischmann Lecturer in the English Department University of Bielefeld Germany

First published in Great Britain 1997 by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-349-40114-7 DOI 10.1057/9780230374423 ISBN 978-0-230-37442-3 (ebook) First published in the United States of America 1997 by ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC., Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN 978-0-312-17366-1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fleischmann, Ruth, 1942- Catholic nationalism in the Irish revival : a study of Canon Sheehan, 1852-1913 I Ruth Fleischmann. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-312-17366-1 (cloth) 1. Sheehan, Patrick Augustine, 1852-1913-Political and social views. 2. Politics and literature-ireland-history-19th century. 3. Politics and literature-ireland-history-20th century. 4. Christian fiction, English-History and criticism. 5. Political fiction, English-History and criticism. 6. Catholic Church -Ireland-History-19th century. 7. Catholic Church-In literature. 8. Nationalism in literature. 9. Catholics in literature. 10. Ireland-In literature. I. Title. PR5377.SSZ66 1997 823'.8-dc21 96-52823 Ruth Fleischmann 1997 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1997 978-0-333-68943-1 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. 90 Tottenham Court Road, London WI P 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. 10987654321 06 OS 04 03 02 01 00 99 98 97 CIP

In Memory of My Parents Anne and Aloys Fleischmann of Cork

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Contents Foreword: The Relevance of Canon Sheehan ix 1 Introduction 1 The Two Nations in Irish Literature 1 The Irish Catholic Church Moving to Ascendancy 10 The Life of a Country Parish Priest 20 2 Canon Sheehan's Campaign for a Catholic Culture 31 The Crisis in Catholic Education Ignored 31 Secondary Education 31 The University Question 34 Clerical Education 38 A Catholic Literature for Catholic Self-Respect 41 The 'Sugaring of the Pill' 41 Sermons in Disguise 42 3 The Religious Life in Rural Ireland 49 My New Curate: Wise Leadership 49 Plot 49 Viewpoint 59 Narrative Technique 82 Luke Delmege: The Bitterness of Failure 92 The Blindness of Dr. Gray: Unwise Leadership 103 4 The Land, Labour and Social Unrest 112 The Queen's Fillet: Fatal Injustice in France 112 Lisheen: Injustice Overcome in Rural Ireland 115 Miriam Lucas: No Socialism in Irish Cities 122 5 The National Question 130 The Irish Nation in the Past 130 Glenanaar: Who Belongs to the Nation? 134 The Graves at Kilmorna: Ireland - A Lost Cause 140 VII

viii Contents 6 Canon Sheehan in Perspective Notes Canon Sheehan within the Nationalist Movement Brinsley McNamara: A Blind Critic Joyce's Study of the Submissive Religious Mind Bibliography Index 151 151 161 163 170 179 185

Foreword THE RELEVANCE OF CANON SHEEHAN Canon Sheehan, parish priest of Doneraile, a small town near Mallow in County Cork, was born in 1852 and began writing novels in 1895 for political reasons. He was a writer of the Irish literary revival, but he wrote to combat the ideas of those who have made the movement world famous, to counteract the influence of Ireland's Anglo-Irish, Protestant writers. His works quickly became popular; they were translated into eight languages; before his death in 1913 over 100 000 copies had been sold. 1 They were read in farmhouses, in middle class urban homes, in convents and seminaries, in schools until the 1960s, and by Irish emigrants in England, the United States and Australia. He was the only Catholic clergyman of the time to venture into the literary battlefield using fiction as a propagandistic weapon for the church. The period 1895-1914 was a decisive one for the history of the country and one during which the Catholic church was laying the foundations of its future position in the Irish Free State and Republic. In Canon Sheehan we have an astute observer of Irish life and a protagonist of one of the most influential institutions of the nation. Furthermore, as Catholicism was one of the sources feeding Irish nationalism, his thinking had much in common with that of middle class nationalists. He belonged to the Irish-Ireland faction of the cultural movement. He was one of those who believed that if Ireland was to recover from the colonial period, it needed seclusion from England - not only economic protection from the powerful neighbour, not only the insulating barrier of the Irish language, but cultural seclusion in general as a bulwark against the swamping influence of the dominant culture after centuries of enforced openness towards England. Canon Sheehan embarked on his literary campaign because he feared that the Catholic church might not achieve sufficient influence in the New Ireland which was appearing on the horizon. He believed his church should predominate in its cultural life, but he was afraid it might not be allowed to do so, were the new state to be a secular one. He desired a reversion, with roles exchanged, to the position of the Church of Ireland ascendancy during the colonial era. ix

X Foreword Had Ireland not been partitioned seven years after Canon Sheehan's death, legal provision would have had to be made to accommodate the two religions and cultural traditions of the country, which would have prevented one dominating the other. But partition made coexistence unnecessary. As soon as the two traditions came into possession of states of their own, they determined that the orange and green would go their separate ways without the white flag of truce and peace between them. And so Canon Sheehan would have found, greatly to his surprise, that what he had preached had become reality, the law and the ideology of one of the new states. Yet the victor would probably have regarded himself as a loser, since the price was to be paid by the large and vulnerable minority in the other state, a price so heavy that it was to perpetuate the conflict between the two traditions for the rest of the century. That is why a study of some of the most influential, now forgotten writings of Catholic nationalism is of historic interest, and the issues involved are still of sad relevance in modern Ireland. Canon Sheehan's works belong to the 'submerged underworld of Anglo-Irish literature', as Daniel Corkery describes the late nineteenth century works written by native Irish as against Anglo-Irish authors: literature which was often mediocre in quality, always highly imitative in its form, at best 'only good in parts, and not great anywhere', but works in which 'under-educated Ireland discovered its own image'. 2 A study of their strengths and weaknesses brings much insight into the great difficulties involved in post-colonial reconstruction of identity. Nationality, land and religion - these were the main issues of the time. Corkery identified them as the moving forces of Irish history, and therefore as the central themes of Irish literature. To Joyce their dominance constituted a threat. In that famous passage of the Portrait he described them as nets flung out to prevent the soul from taking flight - the city man and master craftsman of the word substituting 'language' for 'the land'. Nationality, land and religion are also the themes of Canon Sheehan's works. He campaigns in his novels for a Catholic and conservative nation; he does so systematically but with circumspection, never mentioning his adversaries and giving no publicity to their cause. Having failed to make impact by direct pleading, he chose fiction as a vehicle for his campaign. It was an acute sense of threat caused by the radical climate of opinion furthered especially by the Anglo-Irish writers of the new cultural movement which impelled him to turn novelist. He believed that the position of the Catholic church in Ireland was being

Foreword xi slowly undermined since the Land League and Parnell's alliance with the British Liberals. He was disturbed by the far-reaching changes taking place in rural Ireland and by the prospect that better education and a higher standard of living could weaken the traditional authority of the priest as leader of the community. He was alarmed at the rise of the socialist labour movement under Connolly and Larkin with its radical methods and aims and its outspoken criticism of the social and political policies of the church - a criticism seconded courteously but firmly by influential Anglo-Irish reformers such as Horace Plunkett, and more bluntly by men of letters such as George Moore. Canon Sheehan does not in his novels argue the cause of Home Rule: that it was needed and justified is taken completely for granted. His view of the Irish past derives partly from Thomas Moore and Davis; his image of the ancient secular Gaelic world is courtly and chivalrous, as was theirs. But his nationalism was essentially denominational. He regarded the colonization of Ireland by Britain as an attack on the Catholic church, and the subsequent history of the country as a process of martyrdom for the faith. Yet, while his main concern was to have the church restored to its former dominant position in Irish society, he was in favour of a policy of conciliation with Irish unionists and against all reforms likely to antagonize them - and also to radicalize the people. In an early novel he denounced the Fenians and Irish Republican Brotherhood as godless trouble-makers, but when the Irish Parliamentary Party together with the Liberals became increasingly distasteful to him, the Fenians with their hopeless rising and their courage facing death and long imprisonment began to stand out in sharp contrast to the place-seekers of contemporary politics. In his last novel Canon Sheehan presents as heroic the Fenians' willingness to give their lives for their cause, believing that they had died in vain, and that such radical nobility was a thing of the past. He set his novels in the old days of landlords and tenants, but it was the post-landlord world which perturbed him, which drove him to write, and which is the real subject of his works. Sir Horace Plunkett founded the first cooperative bank in Doneraile the year Canon Sheehan became parish priest there; the issue of economic development is one of the leitmotifs of the novels, and the message throughout is: 'no social experiments'. No case is made for land reform or for rural industrialization, but rather for more kindness and charity on the part of the wealthy. He represents the tenant farmers as being poor, far from perfect, most lovable; they are contented, since their religion and priests

XII Foreword give them all the solace, entertainment and direction they require; and their utter indifference to material advancement brings to nought the devoted efforts of the younger clergy to better their lot. This lesson is essentially conservative: the Canon is appealing for deference to the clergy, for acceptance of one's station in life. He is dissuading from political involvement, reform, modernization. Canon Sheehan affords material to the modern reader concerning the stultifying attitudes and conditions which drove Joyce out of the country and which, in their urban form, are the theme of Joyce's early work. The most important aspect of Canon Sheehan's writing, however, is the access he gives to the situation and thinking of the rural clergy at a decisive period in the history of the modern Irish Catholic church. The anxiety about the future of religion in Ireland, which led him to preach deference, resignation and acceptance of poverty to the laity, also brought him to a critical estimation of the clergy, which, he considered, was neither aware of the threat to its position nor intellectually equipped to withstand the challenge. The criticism was not radical compared to that of the Maynooth professor, Walter McDonald, or of the ex-priest Gerald O'Donovan, but nonetheless it sufficed to earn him clerical enmity. In fulfilling the delicate task of admonishing and exhorting his colleagues, the preacher shows his mettle as a novelist. He avoids the manipulative methods so often employed for the persuasion of the laity, and refrains from presenting ecclesiastical policies as religious truths. Instead he demonstrates with subtlety, wit and humility the kind of clerical failing which is damaging, and the type of wise and flexible leadership which is required if the old authoritative position of the priests is to be maintained. The interest and the value of Canon Sheehan's work lies not in the complacent tableaux of the soggarth aroon, the beloved priest amidst an adoring populace, but in the many portraits of priests who have, or who think they have failed to live up to the exigencies of their calling. For didactic reasons he obliterates the tensions from his representation of the life of the people. The didactic aims he pursued with regard to his colleagues, however, did not allow of such idealization - the clergy were, after all, being urged to abandon their complacent passivity and to respond with sagacity to the threat posed by the modern world. In describing the difficulties of priests in coming to terms with the demands made on them, struggling with scruples and doubts in the loneliness of country presbyteries, Canon Sheehan reveals himself as a novelist whose ability was both stimulated and curbed by the cause he set out to serve.

Foreword xiii Although he took up novel-writing in order to counteract the influence of the Anglo-Irish intellectuals of the Irish Revival, his own work is very much part of the movement itself. Charles Kickham was his Irish literary model, and like him he wrote of rural life for the ordinary people of Ireland - evidence of the growing political consciousness of the time. His particular concern lay in overcoming the social stigma so long attached to Catholicism, as well as to the Irish language, and in inculcating in his readers a sense of pride in their religious heritage, which to his mind constituted the essence of their national identity. He was in favour of the Anglo-Irish Protestant minority being allowed cultural autonomy in a self-governing Irish state, but he did not regard their heritage as an integral part of the national culture to which all should be given access, and envisaged their eventual assimilation by the majority. His position, and that of the other Irish Irelanders, bears a close resemblance to that of the early eighteenth century Anglo Irish formulators of Irish nationalism in that they both assume that the right of their 'nation' to cultural supremacy is self-evident. The circle has thus been completed. This book deals with a little-known author, but it has been written for readers with a general interest in Irish culture, and not merely for the specialist. The literary and historical context of Canon Sheehan's time is sketched to bring the issues to mind which his works deal with, and a short account is given of his life. His writings have been examined under Daniel Corkery's three headings: religion, the land and social justice, the national question. Considerably more space has been given to the chapter dealing with the religious life than to the others, and to one of the three novels analysed within that section. As Canon Sheehan's main purpose in writing was to produce for the first time a popular literature which would reflect the people's Catholicism and allow them to take pride in it, this theme is at the centre of his work and provides the basis for his views on both the social and the national issues: it is therefore of unique interest. His novel My New Curate has been examined in depth because it is his best, because it is of value not only as a document of the period, but as a work of literature. It is the literary quality of the book which not only brings the rural world to life for us, but which gives an image of the life of the priests in that world, who belong and yet stand apart, with all the tensions such a position entails. These are insights afforded by no other Irish writer.

xiv Foreword NOTES 1. M.P. Linnehan, Canon Sheehan of Doneraile, pp. 52-3. Catherine Candy gives figures of subsequent sales in her meticulously researched chapter on the reception of Canon Sheehan's works in: Priestly Fictions. 2. Daniel Corkery, Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature, pp. 19-22 and 201.