
The findings of a recent survey commissioned by Ireland’s Iona Institute for Religion and Society have shed new light on attitudes there toward religion and the Catholic Church. The results are revealing. Sixty-one percent of respondents describe themselves as “religious and/or spiritual,” but only 16 percent are regular Mass-goers. (A higher number, 18 percent, have a positive view of astrology.) Half of adults pray, while three in ten meditate. But one finding stands out for its admirably brutal clarity. Participants in the survey were asked whether they agree or disagree with the statement: “I would be happy if the Catholic Church disappeared from Ireland completely.” Twenty-five percent answered “agree.”
In other words, one in four of the Irish (about 1.3 million people), many of them descendants of the generations who held fast to the faith through persecution, who were consoled and sustained by it, and who allowed it to form the national character, walk around wishing to see the Catholic Church not simply further weakened or diminished, but wiped out.
A desire like this does not, of course, simply sit passively in human hearts awaiting the day of its fulfillment. It will seek laws and regulations to hasten the time of the Church’s final disappearance. Its blast will be felt in exhortations to withdraw all support for the outdated institution. And, it seems, the desire to see the Church vanish can also be pursued by seizing control of history and making it vanish; by persistently scrubbing out all traces of the Church as a positive force in the growth, development, and achievements of Irish culture.
I have written previously about a disingenuous 2024 BBC interview given by Neil Jordan, Ireland’s most celebrated director and screenwriter, in which he pretended (for a middle-class English radio audience) that there was no filmmaking in backward 1950s and ’60s Catholic Ireland. “I think the Ireland I grew up in was still not entirely civilized,” he said. “I mean it was this kind of blasted, Catholic Church kind of universe, you know, wedded to a whole bed of superstition.” More recently, an arts official, when discussing Daniel O’Connell, the leader of the movement for Catholic emancipation, seemed to risk brain injury in avoiding any reference to the emancipation of Catholics.
Two exhibitions in Dublin this summer offer more evidence of this phenomenon. The National Gallery is celebrating the work of the artists Evie Hone and Mainie Jellett. The two were friends and came from affluent, Church of Ireland backgrounds, the daughters of a Bank of Ireland director and a member of Parliament respectively. Hone, however, converted to Catholicism in 1937 while in her early forties.
Here was an upper-class, Protestant, woman artist, a pioneering modernist, who became a Catholic in the same year the Irish people adopted (in the name of “the Most Holy Trinity, from Whom is all authority”) their new Constitution, drawn up by Éamon de Valera. Hone, moreover, was received into the Church by Archbishop John Charles McQuaid. These two men, de Valera and McQuaid, hold equal title as the greatest pariahs of the liberal Irish mind. When Evie Hone died in 1955, she was on her way to Mass, having continued to work as an artist right to the end.
It sounds like a story of irresistible interest. Yet a History Ireland article about the new exhibition contains not a whisper of Evie Hone’s conversion. The biographical note accompanying a work by Hone contained within the Trinity College art collection alludes to time she spent testing a vocation among Anglican nuns and to her “deeply spiritual nature”; but of her adoption of the Catholic faith there is no word (an omission made even more egregious considering the ostentatiously Catholic subject matter of the work in question, St. Veronica Wipes the Face of Christ). Similarly, the biography of Evie Hone on the website of the eminent Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, keeper of several of the artist’s post-conversion, religiously themed works, tells us she was a “very spiritual person” who was “interested in revitalising Irish religious art.” Nothing about her Catholic conversion.
Meanwhile, the Museum of Literature Ireland is commemorating Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis, the posthumously published letter written in jail to Wilde’s lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. As anyone who has read it will remember, De Profundis contains page after page of meditations on the person of Christ by a man who in 1900, three years after its composition, was received on his deathbed into the Catholic Church: “And everybody is predestined to his presence,” wrote Wilde. “Once at least in his life each man walks with Christ to Emmaus.” No hint of any of these ideas reaches us through the exhibition’s promotional video. Twelve extracts from De Profundis are read, but none is drawn from its outpourings about Christ and the Church. The website summaries of the book and the artist’s life are similarly silent on Wilde’s religious struggle and eventual homecoming.
Embarrassed by the ubiquity of the Church in Irish cultural history (at least when this extends beyond areas that invite easy pillory, such as book censoring), progressive Ireland must find the opportunities presented by the drafting of museum catalogues, or exhibition press notices, or retrospective appreciations, to make Catholicism disappear, to fulfill the dreams uncovered by the Iona survey, too good to pass up. But it’s a strange business indeed when a country cannot talk honestly and accurately about itself and its past.
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