A visit to a penal Mass rock on the slopes of Keeper Hill the other day set me ruminating about who was the leading Roman Catholic prelate in 19th-century Ireland. Bishop James Doyle of Kildare and Leighlin (JKL); the great Croke of Cashel (and Croke Park); or Cardinal Paul Cullen, who moulded the post-Famine Church? Dr Thomas McGrath's two-volume study of Doyle (published by the Four Courts Press) goes a long way towards answering this question. Dr McGrath, who holds doctorates in history and education, considers the ideas of JKL are still relevant today.
James Doyle, an Augustinian priest and Carlow College professor, became bishop of the diocese of Kildare and Leighlin in 1819 at the age of 33. He emerged quickly as the Hierarchy's spokesman and dominant personality.
Oliver MacDonagh, discussing the Catholic emancipation campaign in his biography of O'Connell, said: "Doyle was critically important as the boldest and most intelligent and radical of the episcopate." Gladstone saw him as "the prelate, who more than any other represented his church and influenced the mind of this country [Britain] in favour of concession". His gallicanism (as opposed to ultramontanism) helped him to make his case before an audience which still saw the pope as a bugbear.
A hunger for justice animated Doyle's prolific writings. His episcopate represents a turning point in the history of modern Irish Catholicism: a transition from the timidity of the penal era to an assertive church. He perceived his role as that of a political mediator between the British state and an oppressed people.
When Doyle became a bishop the government of Ireland was predominantly Orange. He was mistaken in his belief that emancipation would herald a more tolerant age. His own position had already hardened in reaction to the proselytising activities of the so-called New Reformation. He became the main ideologue of the tithe war through his unrelenting attacks on the wealth of the established Church of Ireland.
Famine prediction
JKL predicted in 1825 that if a major famine occurred in Ireland a million people would die. Before committees of both houses of parliament at Westminster, he argued that the poor were entitled, at public expense, to be saved from starvation or extreme hardship. He considered their right to support was indefeasible - an opinion not generally accepted at the time.
Doyle witnessed the sufferings of the Irish poor at first hand. On rising at 5 a.m., he frequently found his house in Carlow surrounded by hordes of hungry people. The bishop had to be restrained from beggaring himself. As chairman of the Carlow Sick Poor Institution in 1826, he observed that the lanedwellers were "dying of a slow but progressive famine".
In evidence before a parliamentary committee in 1830, Doyle held that the primary cause of poverty was massive unemployment due to the recession which followed the Napoleonic wars. Evicted people crowded into towns seeking charity and work. Most of them were reduced to sharing the corner of a room with other families. He cited one lane in Carlow into which 30 families had flocked from the country: "In the course of 12 months there were not 10 families of the 30 surviving, the bulk of them had died."
In 1831 Catholics and Protestants joined together in combating the threat of cholera in Carlow. Doyle reminded his clergy that, while conditions were bad in eastern Ireland, they ought not to close up the bowels of compassion against the West, "exposed not to want, but to all the horrors of famine and disease".
Abominated workhouses
JKL received little support in his quest for a humane poor law. He believed that the conditions endemic in pre-Famine Ireland - comparable to those in today's Third World - required more radical measures than the English Poor Law model. Doyle envisaged a scheme centred on a parish levy organised by community leaders. Although much of the burden would be placed on landlords, often absentees, JKL anticipated a diminution in the wealth of the established church for the benefit of the poor.
How effective his proposals would have been in bridging the poverty chasm is debatable, given the level of insolvency among Irish landlords.
English politicians argued that, besides being a drain on the Exchequer, the system recommended by Doyle would promote Irish indolence. Surprisingly, O'Connell agreed with them on this issue and a sharp public dispute with the bishop ensued.
JKL's bottom line, based on gospel values, was that the state had a duty to prevent starvation. He accused the political economists of having the imputation of murder on their hands because of their attitude to the Irish poor. He "abominated" workhouses, which became emblematic of the poor law regime introduced after his death. He died of tuberculosis in 1834, 11 years before the outbreak of the Great Famine fulfilled his dire prediction.
Ecumenical pioneer
Like Thomas Davis, JKL believed in the power of education, declaring in one of his pamphlets that "an educated people will be free". He wrote to his brother: "Perseverance does a great deal and if I be not destined to witness the liberation of my country from British bondage, I hope to prepare the way for that event."
But Doyle's most enduring legacy is that of an ecumenical pioneer. He told the 1830 parliamentary committee: "I do not know any measure which would prepare the way for a better feeling in Ireland than uniting children at an early age, and bringing them up in the same school, leading them to commune with one another and to form those little intimacies and friendships which often subsist through life. Children thus united know and love each other as children brought up together always will; and to separate them is, I think, to destroy some of the finest feelings in the hearts of men."
Paul Cullen, Doyle's successor as an episcopal heavyweight, if not as a liberal, remarked 22 years later: "Dr Doyle's ideas were outrageous." The poet Patrick Kavanagh asserted that, sometime in the 19th century, "an anti-life heresy entered religion". (The Diary is indebted for this postscript to Sr Una Agnew's book, The Mystical Imagination of Patrick Kavanagh.) Perceiving that Jansenism was sapping the vitality of Irish Catholics, he wrote in the Great Hunger:
The sharp knife of Jansen
Cuts all the green branches . . .