The Eucharistic Congress in Dublin in 1932 helped to mask the bitterness of post-Civil War Ireland, writes Diarmaid Ferriter
Seán Clancy, the War of Independence veteran who died in September 2006 aged 105, used to vividly recall the 31st Eucharistic Congress, which was held in Dublin 75 years ago this week. As a Free State Army captain, he was a member of the officer guard of honour for the open air Pontifical High Mass in the Phoenix Park during the congress. Like many of his contemporaries, he was greatly moved when Irish tenor John McCormack sang Panis Angelicus at the Mass, attended by an estimated one million people.
But Clancy also remembered the event for another reason. After the ceremonies, the guard of honour attended a dinner with the new Fianna Fáil government. The two groups, who a decade earlier had fought on opposite sides during the Civil War, felt uneasy in each other's company until Éamon de Valera broke the tension by inviting the officer in charge to sit at his side during the meal, a reminder that the congress served a number of different purposes.
Paddy Little, Fianna Fáil's minister for posts and telegraphs, later recalled that the Vatican had been disturbed by the change of government in March 1932 but that the role played by Fianna Fáil during the congress ceremonies lessened those fears.
De Valera, his ministerial colleague Sean T O'Kelly and Cumann na nGaedheal leader William Cosgrave were canopy bearers for Cardinal Lauri, the papal legate, who presided over the congress. The previous week, when he had received Cardinal Lauri, de Valera made pointed reference to "our people ever firm in their allegiance to our ancestral faith", underlining the extent to which the congress provided public opportunities for the new government to repair their damaged relations with the Catholic Church as a result of the Civil War and the excommunication of many republicans. At a time of great political tension and economic stagnation, the emphasis on shared values and faith helped to temporarily mask the bitterness that riddled the Irish body politic.
INTENDED TO DEEPEN spiritual awareness through a greater understanding of the Eucharist, and organised to celebrate the 15th 100-year anniversary of the arrival of St Patrick to Ireland, the congress was an emphatic public assertion of Irish Catholicism, and had a strong international dimension, with visitors from Europe, the United States, Canada, India and Africa.
Regarded as an organisational triumph, the crowds assembled were vaster than any that gathered again in the country until the visit of Pope John Paul II in 1979. The ceremonies in 1932 included a procession from the Phoenix Park to O'Connell Street Bridge for the Solemn Benediction and Papal Blessing by Cardinal Lauri, with all eyes fixed on the moving canopy in which Lauri knelt, holding the monstrance enshrining the Blessed Sacrament. Contemporary radio broadcasts mentioned that the procession included 20,000 priests.
Those alive today who participated as children recall a fiesta-like atmosphere, with ice cream and treats, and competition between villages and streets to see who could construct the most elaborate shrines, and the emphasis on festivities indicated that triumphal pageantry and Catholic devotionalism were also leisure activities. No expense was spared, and it was an extraordinary visual spectacle, with spectacular lighting effects and what was then believed to be the largest public address system in the world. There was an estimated 20km of bunting in Dublin city, and £2,000 was spent to provide a cavalry escort in special dress uniform for the papal legate.
To ensure maximum turnout, 127 trains brought the faithful from other parts of the country to the city, many of them for the first time; 4,000 people were received at a State reception in St Patrick's Hall in Dublin Castle and 20,000 attended a garden party in the grounds of Blackrock College at the invitation of the Irish hierarchy. The Dáil had passed an Act exclusively for the congress, which allowed the sale of alcohol to bona-fide residents of ships moored in Dublin Bay.
Unemployed men cycled to the ships, some to beg, though the congress meant big business for others, including the Jewel and Metal Manufacturing Company of Ireland, owned by the Jewish Segal family, which, ironically, got all the orders for the congress, including souvenir objects. Candle-makers Rathbornes imported the most modern equipment to ensure maximum output, and the Italian ice-cream-maker Attilio Seezio's produce cooled the crowds, while cast-iron urinals were erected along the Liffey quays to facilitate those men caught short during the procession.
IT ALSO PROVIDED an opportunity for the Catholics of Northern Ireland to ensure the celebrations had an all-Ireland dimension. An estimated 100,000 of them travelled south and a special Mass at Corrigan Park in Belfast attracted another 80,000 people. Open-air shrines and arches appeared all over Belfast. Cardinal Lauri later travelled to Newry and drove to the cathedral through the decorated streets as children sang and waved papal flags. The Northern Ireland cabinet recorded that the congress had created "excitement amounting to frenzy along the Border".
Loyalists in Belfast, Ballymena, Lurgan, Larne, Portadown and Lisburn attacked trains and buses travelling to and from the event with pilgrims. The Irish News, the nationalist daily newspaper in Northern Ireland, referred to the congress as demonstrating "the triumph of Catholic Ireland over 750 years of persecution such as even the early Romans or the Jews had not endured". The congress seemed to indicate that Ireland was a Catholic State for a Catholic people, and undoubtedly contributed to a more pronounced sense of exclusion for non-Catholics. Six-year-old Edith Newman Devlin, from an impoverished Protestant family whose father was gate-keeper at the lodge of St Patrick's Hospital in Dublin, remembered that on the day of the procession, her father "forbade us on pain of death to look at it", but she sneaked a glance from the roof of the shed in the backyard and, like most others, was overwhelmed by its scale.
By dramatically linking the great religious spectacle with the august resurrection of a nation, the congress was presented as a triumph of faith over historical persecution. The combined ceremonies epitomised an approach to religion that was based on communal devotion, huge gatherings and a very public piety that was the hallmark of Irish Catholicism for much of the 20th century.
Arguably, this was something that worked to its detriment in the long run, with the church held in awe to an excessive degree, the neglect of the individual, and the discouragement of diversity and questioning in matters of faith.
It may also have stirred the passions of some in ways not to be repeated. When the fledging current affairs magazine Magill conducted a survey of changing Irish sexual habits in 1978, mention was made of a prominent Dublin publican who was asked when he had last had sexual relations with his wife. He paused, and replied: "I think it was the time of the Eucharistic Congress."
• Diarmaid Ferriter lectures in Irish history at St Patrick's College, DCU and is currently an IRCHSS research fellow