As a little girl born to an Irish mother and English father, language and liturgy were looming mysteries, like living at the foot of an impassable mountain range. The Latin Mass, and the conversations in Irish my mother shared with her Connemara sisters, were enveloping and alien.
Today those mysteries remain deeply alive within me – as inspiring as the words of Eamon de Valera once were for my grandfather, and just as challenging.
It is hard to escape the conclusion that the twin peaks of liturgy and literature change us. Ireland especially has its own legacy of a story that is continually being rewritten, one that is rooted in activism and a literary narrative with the power to deliver revolutionary change. As WB Yeats wrote in the final, devastating lines of his poem, Easter Rising 1916 : Wherever Green is worn/ Are changed, changed utterly:/ A terrible beauty is born.
A significant part of that sense of terrible beauty lies within the legacy of Catholicism. Contemporary literature is bursting with writers who have embraced, rejected or reimagined their relationship with their faith.
Those writers include Colm Tóibín, Martin McDonagh and Hilary Mantel. Growing up Catholic in the north of England, Mantel’s battles with her religion are evident in her fiction and memoir. Speaking from New York, she said: “What I owe to my upbringing as a Catholic is an imagination that moves readily and fluently into the territory beyond the senses. Before I could read, I was assured by the people about me that there was a larger, more complex and more important reality.”
She went on to describe that knowledge as “a very good foundation for a writer”, noting that “the solemn cadences of the catechism” offered valuable exposure to “language fit to deal with important things that went beyond the everyday”.
Contemporary literature demonstrates that the Catholic imagination is rarely safe and remains vibrantly alive, not buried in the work of literary greats from the past. This realisation has inspired a unique two-day festival to be held at the Library of Birmingham in June. The festival – part of a broad programme of events marking the 175th anniversary celebrations in Ireland and the UK of the Catholic journal, The Tablet – brings together writers including the novelists Andrew O’Hagan, David Lodge, Michele Roberts, Alison MacLeod, Maureen Freely and David Almond; the historians Eamon Duffy and Antonia Fraser; and the poets Michael Symonds Roberts and Steve Ely.
They are authors running with a literary baton that has passed from generation to generation. The Tablet, which counts among past contributors Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, was founded in London in May 1840 to record news of interest to the fast-growing Catholic population. Many, like my family, were Irish immigrants and they, along with Catholics born around the globe, have made an indelible contribution to the journal’s history.
Speakers at the festival will explore what the spirit of Catholicism means in their own work, in our time and for the future – in readings, debates and workshops. And they will explore the writing of “a generation who not only became alienated from British rule but the values and ambitions of their parents”, as the historian (and festival speaker) Roy Foster described in Vivid Faces, The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland 1890-1923. His book is a subtle analysis of an historical narrative being continually rewritten – and of the power of the word.
The generational gap he details is vividly apparent in the differing expectations of those who grew up in the mid-20th century and their children and grandchildren today. It’s apparent in what is believed by a new generation of the religiously radicalised – worldly and angry – and in what is expected, or not, of state and religious institutions.
What we read undoubtedly shapes what we expect, and what we become. Words detonate, mysteries endure. The legacy of the Easter Rising and of a century of change for Catholics and those of faith, a changing world for all of us, is reflected in the art and literature which will be discussed in Birmingham. The Tablet’s first literary festival could not have come at a better time.
Cathy Galvin is a poet and journalist. A director of The Tablet, she runs the short story organisation, the Word Factory and is an associate editor of Newsweek. She co-founded the Sunday Times EFG short story award. cathy@thewordfactory.tv
