James joyce, p.28
James Joyce, page 28
Ireland prides itself on being in body and soul as faithful to her national traditions as to the Holy See. The majority of Irishmen consider loyalty to these two traditions as their cardinal article of faith. But the fact is that the English came to Ireland following the repeated requests of a native king, without, it seems, much wanting to and without the sanction of their monarch, but provided with a papal bull from Adrian IV and a papal letter from Alexander. They disembarked on the southern coast, numbering 700 men, a gang of adventurers against a people. They were met by certain native tribes and, less than a year later, the English King Henry II noisily celebrated Christmas in the city of Dublin. Moreover, the parliamentary union of the two countries was not passed in Westminster, but in Dublin, by a parliament elected by the people of Ireland—a corrupted parliament goaded by the huge sums from the English Prime Minister’s agent—but an Irish parliament none the less. In my opinion, these two facts must be perfectly explained before the country in which they took place has even the most elementary right to expect one of its sons to change his position from that of detached observer to convinced nationalist.44
The argument regarding the implication of the papacy, through the bull Laudabiliter of Pope Adrian IV, affirmed by Alexander III, in the English conquest of Ireland was widely rehearsed in the Split. Joyce was not too concerned with historical accuracy before his Triestine audience. There is a characteristically Joycean swerve away from the Parnellite argument in the Split to blame the Act of Union on the Irish people. It was not correct to say that a parliament of the Irish people had carried the Act of Union, as the Irish Parliament was notoriously a body exclusively representative of the Protestant ascendancy.45 Joyce certainly knew this but elected not to lose the polemical thrust of his argument before his Triestine audience. If he was far from exculpating the Church, he did not wish to acquit the Irish people of primary responsibility for the fallen condition of nationalism. He was importing into his account of the historical role of the Church his bitterly implacable assessment of the Split.
As earlier discussed, the patriotic record of the Irish Catholic Church features also in the Christmas dinner scene in A Portrait. When Dante Riordan proclaims that the priests were always the true friends of Ireland, Mr Casey retorts, ‘Didn’t the bishops of Ireland betray us in the time of the union when Bishop Lanigan presented an address of loyalty to the Marquess Cornwallis? Didn’t the bishops and priests sell the aspirations of their country in 1829 in return for catholic emancipation? Didn’t they denounce the fenian movement from the pulpit and in the confession box? And didn’t they dishonour the ashes of Terence Bellew MacManus?’46
Stephen is powerfully affected. Casey’s ‘face was glowing with anger and Stephen felt the glow rise to his own cheek as the spoken words thrilled him.’47 The last two sentences uttered by Mr Casey invoke the memory above all of Paul Cullen, Archbishop of Dublin from 1852 to 1878, and identify why Cullen was a hated figure to Fenians: his determination to crush the Fenians, of whom he procured a papal condemnation in 1870, and his refusal to allow the coffin of Terence Bellew McManus to rest in the Pro-Cathedral before his massively attended, Fenian-organised funeral in 1861.48 This is the cue for Mr Dedalus, ‘who uttered a guffaw of coarse scorn’ and concluded, ‘O God he cried, I forgot little old Paul Cullen! Another apple of God’s eye!’49 This is the final escalatory movement of the Christmas dinner scene.
At the National League in late February 1891, John Redmond enunciated the Parnellite response to the bishops and priests:
I am entitled, when the bishops, in a political question, advocate a course which my intelligence and my conscience tell me is a wrong one, to perfect freedom to dissent from them, and to recall how, time and time again in the history of our country, the prelates took action which has since been proved to be shortsighted and unpatriotic (applause).… But it is said that in supporting Mr. Parnell those of us who are Catholics are condoning sin (no, no). I deny it. I repudiate this as an insult to the intelligence and the virtue of the millions of our race, who detesting as heartily as it is possible for men and women to do the charge which is laid at Mr. Parnell’s door, yet declare they will not consent to drive him from public life to satisfy the demands of an English statesman or party (applause).50
Redmond’s extremely careful negotiation of the issue of Parnell’s affair with Katharine O’Shea is a reminder of the fact that Parnellite spokesmen did not generally seek to defend or justify Parnell’s affair with a married woman, of which most Parnellites personally disapproved. There was a degree of palliation on the grounds that Parnell was a Protestant, even if it was the case that such acceptance of divorce as there was in contemporary Anglican doctrine was highly qualified.51
Redmond went on to make an argument which came to feature more prominently in Parnellite rhetoric: that the perception engendered by the Split that Irish nationalism was in thrall to the Catholic Church had a potentially catastrophic impact on the prospects for Home Rule: ‘The question of Mr. Parnell’s leadership was a purely political question (applause), and for my part I don’t hesitate to say that if in this purely political question the bishops and priests of Ireland are able to make their power paramount and to overbear the will of the country, they will thereby have created the most formidable obstacle to the granting of Home Rule by the English people that the wit of man could devise (applause).’52
Anti-Parnellite apologists scoffed at this argument as self-serving and smacking of desperation. In late April Parnell at Irishtown, speaking ‘in these days, fellow-countrymen, when you are told that Ireland is to be a nation of one religion only, when sectarian considerations are sought to be imported into the national movement’, re-asserted to cheers the principle that ‘the Irish nation is to be a nation of the whole of our people’. The National Press retorted that ‘Mr. Parnell posed as the persecuted Protestant’.53
Andrew Kettle advanced a subtle variation of this aspect of the Parnellite case. Seeking to turn around the anti-Parnellite argument that the division in the nationalist vote in Ireland was detrimental to Home Rule, he asserted that ‘the alliance between the Catholic hierarchy and Mr. Parnell was the great stumbling block’ to Irish Protestant adherence to the cause of Home Rule, and had now been removed. He cogently added, ‘No two men in the world know better than Dr. Croke and Mr. [Michael] Davitt that in the coming electoral struggle with Mr. Parnell they could very easily succeed far enough to defeat themselves. A big Catholic clerical party will never get Home Rule from Protestant England.’54
Some but not all Parnellites followed their leader’s cue in his laconic assertions that as clerical influence had been brought into play, the issue that it raised would have to be fought out to the end. If this certainly commended itself to Fenians for their own reasons, it was not pressed by Parnell’s mainstream adherents. A notable expression was the mild-mannered but clear-sighted politician and writer Edmund Leamy, who, like most of the Parnellite parliamentarians, would go down to defeat at the 1892 general election. He declared at the National League in March 1891,
I believe in my heart and soul that it is the best thing for Ireland, and for the future of Ireland, and for the relations between the priests and the people of Ireland, that this struggle which they have forced upon us should come before Home Rule (hear, hear). I say that we are going to fight the battle like men. I say that we are going to take care that every man in this country shall understand that the Home Rule we are seeking for is not the Home Rule of a class, of a section of the nation, however great that section may be; that we are not going to forget that the Protestant Grattan declared that he would never accept a Parliament which would exclude the Catholic nation; we will never accept a Parliament which will exclude our Protestant fellow-countrymen (applause) and I say I believe in my heart and soul that the result of this struggle which the priests have forced upon us will be to develop all that is best in our country, and, while we will respect our Church and our priests, we shall teach them that they shall not be our masters (applause).55
Few Parnellites were so forthright. They were in an impossible situation which Healy and his confederates exploited to the hilt. When Parnellite spokesmen responded to ecclesiastical condemnations and disputed the authority of the Church in political matters, they were denounced as anticlericals or worse. The Parnellite position was far removed from that of the proponents of laïcité in France, with which it was frequently compared in anti-Parnellite and clerical invective. Redmond put it thus in his National League speech of late February 1891:
Recent public utterances show more and more clearly every day that this is rapidly developing itself into a fight in which most of the Irish bishops, and many, thank God not all, of the Irish priests (hear, hear), will be arrayed against us. Now, I speak as a Catholic, and as a Catholic, say, for the sake alike of my country and my creed, I deeply deplore this. God forbid I should deny to the prelates of my Church the most plenary powers in matters of faith and morals. In such matters they shall command my obedience and my devotion. God forbid also that I should echo the false and hollow cry of no priests in politics. Priests and bishops cannot by reason of their sacred office lose their civil rights or evade their duties as patriotic Irishmen, but for my part I say the two things must be kept apart (applause).56
The Parnellites were contending, not altogether realistically, that the bishops and clergy should observe a self-denying ordinance and not throw their very considerable socio-political influence massively and quasi-corporately on the side of the anti-Parnellites.
The Effects of Ecclesiastical Intervention in the Split
After Parnell’s death, the Parnellites were routed in the general election of July 1892, which returned nine Parnellites against seventy-two anti-Parnellites. Commenting on the success of the Parnellite electoral petition in South Meath, soon to be followed by that in North Meath, John Redmond asserted that it ‘shows conclusively that, but for the undue influence of the clergy, the Parnellite party in Ireland, at the last General Election, would have won a clear majority of the representation of the country’.57 The electoral impact of ecclesiastical intervention in the three by-elections of the Split in Parnell’s lifetime, in the bitterly contested Cork by-election on Parnell’s death (Redmond won the Waterford city by-election of 23 December 1891), and at the general election, if palpable, remains hard to quantify.58
Analytically, the abstraction of ‘clerical influence’ in the Split is problematic. Redmond’s argument was premised on the clergy refraining from ‘undue influence’, a narrow legal concept which captured only that part of the immense socio-political influence of the Catholic clergy in late nineteenth-century Ireland which found overt expression in an actual election.
The effect of clerical influence is not easily isolated. The opposition to Parnell in the Split was composite, woven seamlessly into anti-Parnellite rhetoric, and its elements are hard to disaggregate. The operative mechanism of the Split was that the anti-Parnellite press, the majority of the Irish Party, and the priests and bishops strove to impress on Irish voters that Parnell’s affair with Katharine O’Shea was immoral and had jeopardised the Home Rule alliance. The clergy were the conduit of anti-Parnellite propaganda as well as of moral instruction.
One has also to allow for the unquantifiable impact of the nationalist desire for unity, which introduced a ‘winner takes all’ element that favoured the anti-Parnellites. It is true that the electorate, habituated to the achievements of a united Irish Party in Westminster, tended to rally to the majority in a crisis, and this was particularly marked among Catholic nationalists in Ulster. However, there remains abundant evidence of the effectiveness of clerical intervention. In the by-elections of the Split, where individual clerics actively supported Parnell, the local pattern of support moved discernibly in his favour. Correspondents for English Liberal papers found themselves awkwardly saluting the wondrous vigour of Parnell’s clerical adversaries. In the counter-positivistic realm of what Joyce called ‘ousted possibilities’,59 any judgement is speculative and approximate. In the politically unrealistic scenario that the Catholic Church in Ireland had held back from concerted intervention, it is eminently possible that Parnell would have prevailed in the contest in Ireland and thrown the course of the Split into reverse. On the most conservative assessment of possibilities, the effect of clerical intervention was a matter of degree that significantly amplified the aggregate scale of the Parnellite defeat. Even that was of great moment. Had Parnell carried even one of the three by-elections fought between December 1890 and July 1891, the course of the Split would have shifted incalculably. Had he won North Kilkenny (something of a long shot, as the potent influence of Davitt was added to that of the Church, and the anti-Parnellite majority was two to one), it would have changed utterly. On a cautious and necessarily crude measure, the concerted opposition of the bishops and clergy at the very least stripped Parnell’s support to its core and brought his campaign by the time of his death disquietingly close to, though not below, the level of support at which it would have ceased to be viable. From the time of the 1892 election, the issue of clerical influence presented the Parnellites with an intensifying dilemma. If emphasising the role of the priests and bishops was a means of accounting for the fact of Parnellite defeat, or its scale, it also threatened to entrench their minority status in locking them into fighting what appeared to be a lost cause.
United Ireland responded to the overwhelming Parnellite defeat at the 1892 general election, which left ‘the Independent Party in a very small minority of the Irish representation’, with a trenchant critique of the effects of clerical influence: ‘The people have been badgered, bounced, intimidated, drugged. They have been threatened with the gravest penalties of the Church’. The paper’s condemnation of clerical interference was plain spoken:
We have said over and over again in these columns that there is no chance in the world of making an Irish Parliament a success unless under conditions by which the civil rights of every Irishman can be exercised unfettered by any influence, high or low. We say so again. Whatever Mr. Healy and his colleagues are working for, we are working for an independent Irish Parliament, independent not alone of English interference, but of any interference. We want a Parliament whose members will be representative of the people, not of the priests. We use the words deliberately—of the people, not of the priests.60
John Dillon might have believed that it would be possible for the majority, once it had secured its position, to suppress clerical influence, ‘but we can tell him that these influences are sinking down day by day on the Irish mind and leaving a deep and ugly scar on the Irish character’. The paper professed itself concerned less with the effect that the political role of the Catholic clergy in Ireland would have on English opinion than with ‘the demoralization which it is spreading among the peasant population of Ireland’. The action of the clergy had been ‘inspired by a deliberate intention on the part of the Bishops to stamp out Parnellism, because Parnellism refused to recognise their right to be the political arbiters of the Irish nation.’61
Parnellites were averse to being aligned either with the far more radical exponents of continental anticlericalism or with Unionist critics of nationalism. Thus, when the Unionist publicist Philip H. Bagenal published his anti–Home Rule The Priest in Politics in 1893, United Ireland recoiled: ‘This matter of the priest in politics, if we say it without disrespect to the author of this book, and all others who approach it from his standpoint, is one to be dealt with by Catholics and by Catholics alone. No good is gained by Protestants meddling in it.’62
Across the decade, Parnellite attacks on clerical influence for the most part abated in frequency, prominence, and ferocity. From 1900 the Parnellites were subsumed into the reunited Irish Party, and attacks on clerical influence by nationalist parliamentarians ceased entirely. For Joyce this represented a seemingly inexorable drift backwards that sealed the defeat of Parnell. Politically unrealistic this may have been, but it was far from an irrational obsession. It was left to Joyce, and to W. B. Yeats, to keep to the fore the issue of the influence of the Church in the Split, from which Irish politicians shied away. It was forty-five years after Parnell’s death that Yeats wrote the famous lines, ‘The Bishop and the Party / That tragic story made’.63
The Irish Catholic
Anti-Parnellism comprised a diversity of strands. Healy defined the rhetoric of the anti-Parnellite case in a brilliantly demotic ad hominem rhetoric, denouncing Parnell as a monster of egotistical ambition and self-gratification, attacking him as member of the landlord class rather than explicitly as a Protestant, but in a language shot through with avowedly Catholic nationalist values. Healy’s kinsmen the Sullivans; their paper, the historic but imperilled Nation; and their confederate William Martin Murphy denounced Parnell in a more traditionally moralistic vein—‘Affected Mob Follows in Religious Sullivence’,64 as Joyce would write with superbly tart contempt four decades after the Split in Finnegans Wake. At the most right-wing clericalist end of this semi-dynastic continuum was the Irish Catholic, edited by W. F. Dennehy.
Close to the Sullivans, as he would later be to Healy and to William Martin Murphy, W. F. Dennehy (1853–1918) was the eldest of the seven children of Alderman Cornelius Dennehy. The family originated in Castleisland, County Kerry. The older Dennehy, a supporter of Daniel O’Connell, was a Dublin merchant who through the Encumbered Estates Court acquired extensive lands in Longford. His son wrote articles on Catholic and historical subjects for the Catholic magazines. He became the editor of the Irish Catholic almost immediately on its establishment in May 1888 and remained its editor for the remainder of his life. The paper of which he was part proprietor and later sole owner emerged from the Sullivan stable in succession to the Weekly News as ‘a new journal more exclusively dedicated to the religious interests of the Irish people’.65
