The Shadow of Ireland over the American Catholic Church Cuid a hAon

The Shadow of Ireland over the American Catholic Church, Part I

I’ve read a lot on Irish history, and one can indeed look at it as James Joyce did, as a “nightmare from which I’m trying to awake.” But then I'm also an Irish speaker, unlike that lout, so I'm always quick to point out one could say the opposite, and argue that a small country next to a massively bigger one, and that was repeated invaded, smashed, raped, used as a “cash cow” and cheap food source for 800 years or so, yet was able to come back and get freedom from most of its territory – that seeing Irish history that way is to understand that it was not a nightmare, but a miracle.

Ireland beat the odds – up to a point. Scotland didn’t. It’s still attached, and Wales never got free. Yet Wales has the largest Celtic language-speaking population of all the ‘Celtic” countries, and Scotland, well, I’ve been there often but mostly to the West. Sad thing about Scotland was it could have been Europe’s Singapore. Instead it is a “Socialist Satrapy”. Ireland, too, could have been Europe’s Singapore, but after 800 years of fighting for their freedom, they turned around and surrendered entirely – but not to “Mother England” but rather to “Europe”, an amorphous something or other that seems to loathe itself and wants to transform itself in “Eurostan”.

Yet for their small size, Ireland and Scotland actually have had relatively influential historical effects on a wide range of things. Descendants of both countries make up significant elements of the populations of the U.S., Canada, and Australia and New Zealand. Adam Smith, the moral philosopher remembered for his Capitalism teachings, and that complete idiot “La Bon David” Hume who denied causation and devastated modern philosophy (good or bad or merely whimsical, that’s quite an achievement).

Ireland produced Edmund Burke, who greatly affected what is called “conservative” in the American and English political world. It was Edmund who gave compassion and sanity to the ideas of that old devil John Locke, the founder of what in America is called Libertarian political philosophy. (Tom Jefferson, the "Deist" or "Atheist Waiting for Darwin" was Locks' most famous pupil – and that's fitting because Johnny wanted to get rich via the slave trade and Tom actually owned slaves, so, "soul brothers", as it were.)

“Conservatives" since Burke, I think, are pulled between the Libertarian extremes of Locke and the calm sanity of Burke. It’s been said that Locke was an amazing philosopher, for despite being completely wrong in his theory of knowledge and most everything else, his teachings have had the greatest effect on modern life of any one (more or less) "modern" philosopher. To the extent that is true, Burke was right in his ideas and his effects are more subtle, but one hopes more long lasting.

In any event, modern Ireland, had it managed to return to its native language, Irish, would have stood along side of Poland and Hungary (and others such as the Baltic countries, Finland included, and some of the Balkan ones) as a significant contributor to national identity. Instead, most of what the Free State (from 1922 to De Valera in the ‘30s, and then the “Republic” – always just called “the State” – from post-World War II to Ireland’s submission to the EU) did for the language was to try to kill it. It’s a long, utterly miserable and wretched story that I’ll bypass for now.

Yet one profoundly important “cultural” effect the Irish had was on Catholicism. And we can definitely trace the shallow, soulless Catholicism of so much of the U.S. Church and the Church in Ireland itself (and in Scotland, where most of the Catholics were of Irish descent) much of England (excepting the “old English” Catholic roots that never quite died out) and of course Australian and NZ.

What was it about Irish Catholicism that was so debilitating for the Faith?

See Part II.

An Préachán