In October 1922 Ireland’s Roman Catholic hierarchy issued a document which is surely one of the most significant written during the conflicts a century ago. Their pastoral letter, signed by then Catholic primate Cardinal Michael Logue and the bishops of Ireland, denounced the “anarchy”, “irreligion” and “crime” of anti-Treaty republicans and invoked divine law to deny them Confession and Holy Communion.
The bishops’ letter marked a turning point from the church’s generally less vocal, more radicalised position during the earlier struggle for independence. In its view, republican activists who challenged the “legitimate authority” of the State were “guilty of the gravest sin”.
The pastoral letter was read at all Masses countrywide. But just what was its impact? And how, 100 years on, do views on religious beliefs and church-State relations continue to evolve?
The excommunication of anti-Treaty activists and denial of sacraments (including the last rites and funeral services for hunger strikers and prisoners facing execution) evoked a range of responses among revolutionaries and sometimes led to deep questioning of received religious beliefs
These are just some of the questions that will be addressed at the upcoming, open to all, conference on The Catholic Church & the Irish Civil War, organised by the Catholic Historical Society of Ireland.
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As Ireland becomes increasingly secularised it is easy to underestimate the significance that faith held for many of the revolutionary generation a century ago. Following the devastation of the Spanish Flu (1918–20) and first World War (1914–18), it is perhaps unsurprising that many people relied heavily on spiritual beliefs to help them navigate the unknowns in a world of uncertainty and limited scientific knowledge.
The excommunication of anti-Treaty activists and denial of sacraments (including the last rites and funeral services for hunger strikers and prisoners facing execution) evoked a range of responses among revolutionaries and sometimes led to deep questioning of received religious beliefs.
One response was to simply ignore the pastoral order. Indeed, the fury evident in the bishops’ letter was likely exacerbated by the acknowledged support for the anti-Treaty side among certain priests and nuns. Among them was Fr (later Msgr) Pádraig de Brún, who was interned briefly in 1923 for possession of anti-Treaty documents. His poem In Memoriam, written following the reprisal execution on December 8th, 1922, of the four anti-Treaty IRA leaders, Rory O’Connor, Liam Mellows, Richard Barrett and Joe McKelvey, was circulated widely in Republican pamphlets:
“Their eyes are steady in face of Death, / Star of the morning, Mary, come, / For their minds are rapt by the vision of faith, / Mary Immaculate, guide them home.”
De Brún’s poem was republished in the Capuchin Annual in 1942, suggesting that the conflict between church authorities and the anti-Treaty position was by then resolved. In fact, Pope Pius XI sent a delegate to Ireland in March 1923 to investigate the stance of the Irish bishops, and the appointment of anti-Treaty priest John Dignan as bishop of Clonfert in 1924 seemed to confirm Vatican dissatisfaction with the situation.
When Sheila Hartnett returned to her native Reenagross, Co Kerry, following internment for connections to the Republican cause, she was refused Communion by the parish priest
By 1932 the recently elected Fianna Fáil government — largely comprising excommunicated Republicans — could participate wholly and fully in the 31st International Eucharistic Congress in Dublin.
For others, however, mending relations with the church was more difficult. When Sheila Hartnett returned to her native Reenagross, Co Kerry, following internment for connections to the Republican cause, she was refused Communion by the parish priest: “All this was surely some terrible unbelievable nightmare.”
Sheila’s fellow teenage inmate in Kilmainham, Eily Dolan, also struggled to reconcile herself with the church’s extreme intervention. After her release, she was one of a small cohort of anti-Treaty prisoners, including her future husband Pádraig O’Horan, who joined the Dublin Methodist Mission to seek an alternative source of spiritual support.
By 1927, O’Horan was a Methodist minister stationed in Belfast. Refuting the bishops’ condemnation of anti-Treaty Republicans as degenerate anarchists, he told his congregation: “The people of the North […] might have thought of the men of the IRA as murderers, looters and scoundrels, but Jesus did not believe that. He was behind their barricades, in their blasting buildings, lonely cells and internment camps, and he spoke to their hearts.”
When novelist Elizabeth Connor (whose pen name was Úna Troy) fictionalised [George] Lennon in her 1938 novel Dead Star’s Light, there was a backlash
However, if O’Horan found a welcoming community North of the Border, it was more difficult to question Catholic hegemony within the Free State. George Lennon, who led the anti-Treaty side in Waterford, searched for spiritual comfort as a member of the Society of Friends (Quakers) and later as a founder of the Zen Buddhist Centre in Rochester, New York.
When novelist Elizabeth Connor (whose pen name was Úna Troy) fictionalised Lennon in her 1938 novel Dead Star’s Light, there was a backlash. In the novel, the protagonist’s mother walks out of Mass when the priest denounces her spiritually curious Republican son from the altar. The author later received an excommunication letter from her parish priest in Clonmel, Co Tipperary, because of her novel’s “anti-religious and anti-clerical spirit”.
While one of the most profound legacies of the Civil War was the unification of State and church power, and the shaping of a socially conservative Irish Free State, the religious landscape was less homogeneous than it might seem. In the shadows of the rigid doctrine of the establishment grew alternative personal belief systems within and outside of Catholicism, as the revolutionary generation searched for spiritual means to confront and process the turbulent events of their time.
- Dr Síobhra Aiken is a lecturer in the Department of Irish and Celtic Studies at Queen’s University Belfast. Her recent book Spiritual Wounds: Trauma, Testimony and the Irish Civil War (Irish Academic Press, 2022) was awarded the 2023 Whitfield Prize by the Royal Historical Society. Tickets for The Catholic Church & the Irish Civil War, which will be held on Saturday, September 23rd, in St Patrick’s Campus, DCU are available at eventbrite.ie