The Collapse and virtual extinction of religious communities of Ireland in the past 30 years has surely been one of the great revolutions of Irish history. What was regarded as a normal and highly desirable way of life - admission to which was marked by great competition and departure from which was almost impossible - within a generation came to be seen as bizarre and freakish leave-taking of the senses.
An economic and ethical revolution has transformed popular perceptions of the purpose of our existence on this earth. We do not now think that life ideally is to be lived for someone or something other than oneself.
Frugality and selflessness had to be cultural norms in a stagnant economy; the pursuit of personal contentment would have been a seriously destabilising characteristic if it were widespread. - At the time this State came into existence, seminary lists had to be closed because they were oversubscribed - as Mary Kenny pointed out in her excellent Goodbye to Catholic Ireland (though her publishers did her no favours with the design of the jacket).
Material denial
To the majority of people now alive in Ireland, volunteering for a life of material, social, emotional and sexual denial is an inconceivable and irrational deed. A mere generation away; but we are as far from the mindset of the scores of thousands who chose that way of life as we are from the fakir washing himself in the Ganges, the pilgrim in his throng at Mecca, the bobbing rabbi at the Wailing Wall. The waters have closed over the city, and its civilisation has vanished entirely.
Today, we know about the bad associated with the religious orders. Enough of that. We forget or take for granted the good, and are probably unaware of the loneliness which must have eaten at so many good hearts: how many priests, brothers or nuns dreaded the baleful and endless longueurs of a Saturday, with that vast infinity before nightfall, bed and sleep?
But not, I suspect, Brother William Palladius Allen, who joined the Christian Brothers in 1907, and who over the next 70 years built up one of the most fascinating libraries in Ireland; oh, I would guess that W.P. looked forward to Saturday afternoons, free of boys and largely free of religious worship, so that he could get down his books, his beloved books.
He was a man of his time, and like - I imagine - most Christian Brothers, was an ardent admirer of the 1916 Rising, which more than anything else was a Christian Brother-inspired affair. Eighty-four of the insurgents in Dublin were educated at the other three Christian Brother Schools; but O'Connell Christian Brothers in North Richmond Street educated 125 (and the J's around the corner at Belvedere educated just five: the alumni of that school were, of course, on the Western Front).
W.P. spent the greater part of his working life in O'Connell School, and over the years veterans of the Rising gave their diaries and other documents to the school library and museum. It is deeply educative to browse through these diaries today: the passionate and simple patriotism of that time takes on an extraordinary vitality when you hold the books in your hands and read the writing of men on hunger strike or simply in a prison cell. Far more potently than any historical account, those modest diaries help to explain the flame that burnt in so many hearts when W.P. was a young brother.
W.P. collected anything to do with that time - almost to excess: the library has seven copies of Tom Barry's Guerilla Days in Ireland (none of them, needless to say, telling the truth). But he was a catholic collector, happy to get his hands on any books, from any time, any place, and over the decades he helped to collect some 30,000 volumes which are now one of the primary historical resources in Ireland, and which are being exhaustively catalogued in a computer-assisted FAS scheme.
Some of these volumes make one's teeth ache with felonious envy - the Calendars of the Patent Rolls for Ireland under Henry VIII, Elizabeth, Charles I; enough Leckys to rebuild the Berlin Wall; the History of the Confederate War; Whitelaw's History of Dublin; and thousands and thousands of pamphlets and booklets, many of which might be unique, little scintillae from which great historical edifices might one day be constructed.
It is the nature of things that the commonplace soon ceases to be common. The library has the only complete set of Famine ration cards. And alongside that single example of what was once ubiquitous, there is a hand-painted horarium, an hour-book, from, I think, the 15th century, a masterpiece almost beyond value, and one which a brisk body-search revealed about my person on departure.
Pity.
Spreading learning
The story of formal and organised education of the humbler Catholic classes begins with O'Connell CBS, which opened its doors in 1828, and which for the past few years has had a lay headmaster. It might be thought that the days of the Christian Brothers are done. But whatever their sins, their virtues were many. They spread learning through an unlettered class and cultivated pride in self and nation. They are one of the founding blocks of this land; there is good reason for both pride and gratitude. And in the Allen library, which the FAS scheme is opening for scholars, they have one of the great little centres of civilisation in Dublin. Angels guard thee, W.P.