Joyce was certainly capable of savaging Irish Catholic
priests for taking craven political positions, but he does not
allow the Protestant Mr. Deasy to do so without committing
still another distortion of the historical record. Deasy
charges that "the prelates of your communion denounced" Daniel O'Connell "as a
demagogue." Catholic bishops and archbishops strongly
supported O'Connell's efforts to win voting rights for
Catholics, though they were spooked by his subsequent efforts
to repeal the Act of Union.
They never "denounced" him.
The Irish church, once Romanized, had produced a long line of
"castle-bishops": leaders finely tuned to the concerns of the
Castle in Dublin and the Parliament in Westminster. But
despite this acquiescence
to empire among the princes of the church, many Irish
priests, and even some bishops, sympathized with nationalist
aspirations in the 19th century and lent them verbal
encouragement. The line between tolerable and anathematizable
nationalism was drawn through the terrain of illegal protest
and violent revolution. The Church had learned from the French
revolutionaries and from their Italian imitators (the
Carbonari, Mazzini, Garibaldi) to dread armed uprisings, and
in the late 1850s and early 60s it saw them threatening to
appear in Ireland, in the Fenian
movement.
Priests denounced the Fenians and the Irish Republican
Brotherhood from the pulpit, and sometimes refused to grant
absolution after confession to people who admitted membership
in one or the other organization. They took their direction
from the top, in the person of Archbishop Paul Cullen, who in
1867 became the first Irish cardinal in history. In 1861
Cullen refused to allow the body of Terence MacManus to lie in
state in the Pro-Cathedral of Dublin, and forbade priests to
participate in the funeral. MacManus was a supporter of
O'Connell who had become a fenian, was arrested and sentenced
to transportation to Australia, escaped, and died in the US,
from whence his body was returned to Ireland. One priest
defied the archbishop's ban, and the funeral drew an immense
crowd—to the satisfaction of the fenians and the discomfiture
of the church.
Joyce was aware of this episode, and of many other ways in
which the Irish Catholic church had lent tepid support to
nationalist efforts throughout the preceding century. In the
Christmas dinner scene in A Portrait of the Artist,
Simon Dedalus' revolutionary friend Mr. Casey sums up the whole history, in terms
no less critical than Deasy's: "—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
confessionbox? And didn't they dishonour the ashes of Terence
Bellew MacManus?" Simon chimes in, with "a guffaw of coarse
scorn": "—O, by God, he cried, I forgot little old Paul
Cullen! Another apple of God's eye!" Simon contemns not only
Cullen but also William Walsh (seen in the top picture), a
strong nationalist who became more conservative after the
Parnell scandal broke: "Respect! he said. Is it for Billy with
the lip or for the tub of guts up in Armagh? Respect! —Princes
of the church, said Mr. Casey with slow scorn."
