In the nineteenth century, many previously devout Catholic regions in Europe saw the rapid growth of anticlerical radicalism. They set about reshaping Irish civil society - and its social values - in their own image. As historian Emmet Larkin argues, the Church brought into the clergy the sons of larger tenant farmers and urban middle-class Catholics - groups that were largely unconcerned with the social problems facing Ireland’s urban working class. The expanding Church found an ally in the British state, which trusted the Catholic Church as a bulwark against radical movements like the Irish Republican Brotherhood. After the 1845–1852 Great Famine (during which approximately one million people starved or succumbed to disease, and a million more emigrated), church attendance, the number of clergy and churches, and the Church’s role in health and education provision grew. The Catholic Church’s position of influence can be traced to the mid-nineteenth century.
Today, the same Church has seen its power greatly reduced - presenting, it seems, new opportunities for the long-beleaguered Irish left. It called for the expulsion of radicals organized surveillance of communists and in response to growth of radicalism internationally, supported repressive Catholic regimes like Franco’s Spain. Viewing socialism and communism as moral evils, Catholic clergy assailed radical ideas and snuffed out social progress, throwing their considerable weight behind policies and campaigns designed to marginalize leftists on the island. For more than a century - from the mid 1800s until the years after World War II - the Catholic Church was the island’s most consistently reactionary force. Socialist organizers weren’t usually so lucky. “In dealing with Ireland,” James Connolly wrote in 1910, “no one can afford to ignore the question of the attitude to the clergy.”Ĭonnolly’s subject of discussion was a 1830s Owenite cooperative that enjoyed brief success, in large part because nearby clergymen didn’t oppose it.
Ireland’s foremost socialist knew that the British Empire and Irish capitalists weren’t the only challenge he and his comrades faced.
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