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“Language Which Will Move Their Hearts”: Speaking Power, Performance, and the Lay-Clerical Relationship in Modern Catholic Ireland

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2014

Cara Delay
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Abstract

This article explores the lay-clerical relationship in Catholic Ireland from 1850 to the 1930s through an analysis of oratory, rhetoric, and storytelling. It examines how words, speech, and storytelling constructed and complicated the lay-clerical relationship. The Catholic priest's spoken word was a valuable tool in his parish mission; by preaching and making announcements from the pulpit, he transmitted the ideas of Ireland's postfamine Catholic revival, known as the “devotional revolution,” to the laity. Yet as the Catholic Church came to dominate much of cultural life and the position of the parish priest expanded, he sometimes found his authority undermined by parishioners who challenged his clerical performances and who employed their own forceful words and long-standing oral traditions, including legends and storytelling, to qualify clerical power. As a result, the local existence of the Irish Catholic priest was complicated and contested, and the Catholic laity successfully tempered and moderated clerical power.

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Articles
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Journal of British Studies , Volume 53 , Issue 2 , April 2014 , pp. 426 - 452
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Copyright © The North American Conference on British Studies 2014 

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121 Delay, “Confidantes or Competitors?” 120.

122 William Watson, Kingstown (now Dun Laoghaire), to Archbishop McCabe, 11 April 1878, McCabe Papers, 337/3/II/35, Dublin Diocesan Archive, Dumcondra. All misspellings in original.

123 Ibid.

124 Here, Adam Fox's arguments on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England are useful. Fox maintains that early modern England “was a society in which the three media of speech, script, and print infused and interacted with each other in a myriad of ways.” The religious changes of Reformation-era England also have parallels with the reforming agenda of the nineteenth-century Irish devotional revolution. The intersections of orality and literacy proved locally vital during both times of upheaval. Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 5. Although it is more difficult to record the ways in which nonliterate or semiliterate Catholics interacted with the literacy of the devotional revolution, Gearóid Ó Crualaoich has argued that the lines between orality and literacy were quite blurred, and that even those rural Irish folk who were most wedded to orality also were savvy enough to understand literacy and its uses: “Séan Ó Conaill, despite his inability to read or write, despite his never having been at school, participated in a culture that was literate to a degree. He was aware of and recognized that world of literacy. He knew and had dealings with its agencies and its representative agents: the priest, the schoolmaster, the policeman and the folklore collector.” Gearóid Ó Crualaoich, The Book of the Cailleach: Stories of the Wise-Woman Healer (Cork, 2003)Google Scholar, 17. For a comparative perspective, see Goody, Jack, The Interface Between the Written and the Oral (Cambridge, 1987)Google Scholar, and Fielding, Penny, Writing and Orality: Nationality, Culture, and Nineteenth-Century Scottish Fiction (Oxford, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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130 NFC 437, 396.

131 NFC 560, 415.

132 NFC 560, 545.

133 NFC 37, 90.

134 Oral history, Patricia Kelly, Oxmanstown Road, North Circular Road, Dublin, 1920s–30s, cited in No Shoes in Summer, 36–37.

135 Lawrence Taylor, Occasions of Faith, 161, 149. Folklorist Diarmuid Ó Giolláin expresses a similar theory, claiming that “[s]uch accounts show an ambivalence towards the idea of Christianity having an absolute superiority of power.” “The Fairy Belief and Official Religion in Ireland,” in The Good People, 204.

136 Ó Giolláin, Locating Irish Folklore, 159.

137 Ibid., citing Satriani, Luigi M. Lombardi, Antropologia Culturale e Analisi della Cultura Subalterna, 2nd ed. (Milano, 1997)Google Scholar, 91.

138 Ó Giolláin, Locating Irish Folklore, 159–60.

139 Hynes, Knock, 41. In her work on the legend of the dead priest's midnight Mass, Patricia Lysaght argues that Irish people used legendry to comment on priests who failed to uphold their clerical responsibilities. The most popular legend, according to Lysaght, was one in which a priest who failed to say Mass in his lifetime—after accepting payment for that Mass—must return after his death to fulfill his priestly duties. In order to be released from purgatory, the cleric must return and then have a living person serve Mass for him. In this case, the dead priest must rely on the assistance of his former parishioners. This narrative, as Lysaght elucidates, “makes the utter dependence of the dead priest on human goodwill really evident.” Lysaght, Patricia, “‘Is There Anyone Here to Serve My Mass?’: The Legend of ‘The Dead Priest's Midnight Mass’ in Ireland,” Arv, Scandanavian Yearbook of Folklore 47 (1991): 193Google Scholar, 205.

140 NFC 517, 383.

141 NFC 560, 138.

142 For other examples of the ways in which nineteenth- and twentieth-century Irish Catholics contested and negotiated the power of the state, the Catholic Church, and Protestant missionaries, see McLoughlin, Dympna, “Workhouses & Irish Female Paupers, 1840–70,” in Women Surviving: Studies in Irish Women's History in the 19th and 20th Centuries, ed. Luddy, Maria and Murphy, Cliona (Dublin, 1989), 117–47Google Scholar; Earner-Byrne, Lindsey, Mother and Child: Maternity and Child Welfare in Dublin, 1922–60 (Manchester, 2007)Google Scholar, particularly chap. 3, and Moffit, Miriam, The Society for Irish Church Missions to the Roman Catholics, 1849–1950 (Manchester, 2010)Google Scholar.

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