The Catholic Church was not an imposed yet assimilated hierarchy from beyond, as the Manchus were in China or the Moguls in India. It was indigenous; its norms, its disorders, its failings were well and truly authentically Irish. - An Irishman's Diary, The Irish Times, August 13th, 1999.
When Kevin Myers penned those words, he may not have quite realised how important a truth he was stating. Because it is true - the Catholic Church in Ireland has come from the people, her ordained ministers were and always have been Irish, the hierarchy also. The religious congregations that sprang up in the 19th century and which were to have such an influence on Irish life up to recent times could all legitimately claim that their origins came about as a Christian and caring response to the appalling conditions in which the bulk of the Irish people lived.
To try to understand better the nature of the Catholic Church in Ireland in more recent times, it is necessary, I believe, to look back over two hundred years to one of the most intriguing periods in Irish church history at the end of the 18th century.
It is the job of the historian - or perhaps the sociologist - to explain the dramatic increase that occurred in the population of Ireland from the end of the 18th century until the Famine half a century later. It may have had something to do with the easing of the Penal Laws; it was unlikely to have been connected with the onset of the industrial revolution which had, I suspect, little impact on a mainly rural Ireland.
Whatever the reasons, a burgeoning population found themselves living in overcrowded and unhealthy conditions, with many thousands, possibly millions, living in the most abject poverty.
In 1796, it was written of Dublin: "The east part of the capital displays some grandeur in palaces, public buildings and works, which instead of disguising rather make more glaring the huge poverty, the gigantic misery that fills this great city, in every garb, in every shape of human woes and gradation of wretchedness . . . every street and lane, every place of public resort are crowded with squalid victims of oppression while in the silent recesses of bashful woe, famine, nakedness and their concomitant distresses claim their thousands . . ." and of rural Ireland: "Wherever we turn our eyes, we are everywhere stared in the face by the poverty, the nakedness, the miserable filthy sties of a distressed woe-worn peasantry."
The improvement in the political fortune of Catholics in the second half of the 18th century was mirrored by some - but only some - lessening of official opposition to the Catholic Church. Legislative independence came to Ireland in 1782 but the legislators, intent on maintaining their own ascendancy, bitterly resisted the concession of further relief to the huge Catholic majority.
Thanks to pressure from the then prime minister, Wiliam Pitt, who feared having a dangerously discontented Ireland on his flank in the approaching war with the French republic, Catholics in 1793 were given the parliamentary franchise, though not yet allowed to enter Parliament themselves - they were permitted, however, to become magistrates, simple barristers and officers in the army and navy.
As a result of the stimulus given to trade, a significant Catholic merchant class began to emerge in Dublin, Cork, Limerick and Waterford. Maynooth College opened its doors as a seminary in 1795, ensuring from then on a constant stream of priests for every diocese in the country. Daniel O'Connell, living up to his name and reputation as The Liberator, achieved Catholic Emancipation in 1829, thus enabling him to be one of the first Irish Catholics to take a seat in the House of Commons.
O'Connell, born near Cahirciveen in 1775, was one of a remarkable number of Irish people, most of them born in the second half of the 18th century, who, quite independently of one another, were to make a significant impact on Irish life at the end of that century and throughout most of the following.
The earliest of these, Honoria (Nano) Nagle, was born in 1718 near Mallow, the daughter of dispossessed Catholic landowners whose forebears had been staunch Jacobites - and had suffered as a result. Aware from an early age of the oppression, poverty and ignorance in which the majority of the people were living, Nano, herself a small and physically frail woman, set out to do something about it.
While still in her 30s in 1755 she started by teaching young girls in a mud cabin in Cove Lane, Cork City and, within nine months, had over 200 pupils on the rolls. Two years later, she used an inheritance to expand and within a few years had five girls' and two boys' schools operating in Cork. Her aim was to educate the young in the principles of Christian beliefs and to minister to the sick and the aged in homes and hospitals. It was said that she "excluded every exercise of charity which was not in favour of the poor".
In 1775, the first congregation of Presentation Sisters was founded, with Nano Nagle as superior. They were to open their first school in Douglas Street, Cork, that year and were shortly to spread further afield to Kerry and Dublin. Nine years later in 1784 Nano died, aged 66 and, in the two centuries since, congregations of Presentation Sisters, founding and managing schools and hospitals, have been established in England, North America, India, New Zealand, Australia, Africa and the Philippines.
Edmund Ignatius Rice, born near Callan, Co Kilkenny in 1762, had become a successful businessman in Waterford City by the turn of the century, had been married and widowed (his pregnant wife died in a hunting accident, with his one daughter born handicapped as a result). Aware of the grinding poverty and lack of educational facilities for the poor of his city, Rice, with the help of some friends, set up a simple school for the education of the boys running wild through Waterford's streets.
This marked the beginnings of the Presentation Brothers, with a constitution modelled on that of the Presentation Sisters. Some years later, when the constitution was altered to resemble that of the De la Salle order, Edmund Rice and a majority in the congregation changed their name to become the Irish Christian Brothers. This decision was strongly opposed in Cork, however, where the Presentation Brothers continued as before and began to develop as a separate entity.
Edmund Rice is credited as the founder of both congregations and at the time of his death in 1844, groups of Irish Christian Brothers had established 22 schools in every major city and town in Ireland and were attempting to respond to the many requests from Bishops throughout the world who had heard of their work. By 1963, the order had 3,800 teaching brothers in Ireland, Britain, Australia, West Indies, Canada, USA, Africa, India and Gibraltar.
Mary Aikenhead was born into a well-off Protestant medical family in Cork in 1782, but, because of her mother's delicate health, she was sent to a local woman to be wet-nursed and reared. Attracted to the Catholic Church from an early age, she entered the church and soon, having daily encountered the destitute poor in the streets of Cork City, she decided to devote her life to their service, not from behind a convent wall, but in their midst, on the streets and in their homes.
The man who caught her vision and gave her encouragement was the Coadjutor Archbishop of Dublin, Daniel Murray, and thus was born the congregation of the Irish Sisters of Charity. The sisters were soon a familiar sight in the festering slums of Dublin and, later, of Cork. They ministered during the cholera epidemic in 1832, they established free schools, cared for orphans, provided homes for the aged and the blind, visited the sick, the afflicted, the destitute, bearing medicines, food and clothing. Many of the young sisters died young, having contracted the virulent diseases they encountered in their work.
A missionary centre, later to become the Hospice for the Dying, was opened in Harold's Cross; Mother Aikenhead had the courage and the foresight to found, equip and manage St Vincent's Hospital in St Stephen's Green (the first Catholic hospital in Dublin), despite opposition from some titled and influential neighbours. For 27 years, Mary Aikenhead herself was the victim of ill-health and when she died in 1858 her congregation was known throughout Ireland and was soon to spread to Britain, Africa and Australia.
Catherine McAuley, too, was born into a prosperous and distinguished family four years before Mary Aikenhead in 1778. They lived in Dublin, firstly in Stormanstown House near Santry and later in Coolock House, now a residence for Sisters of Mercy. On the death of her father, Catherine McAuley went to live in Mary Street and there came under the influence of relatives and guardians indifferent or hostile to Catholicism. But she was a young woman of strong will and clung tenaciously to the church into which she had been baptised.
Drawing inspiration from the memory of her generous father, she felt impelled to practise charitable works and when her guardian left his entire fortune to her, she and several like-minded women from the Catholic middle and upper classes in Dublin set about founding an institution from which they might distribute food and clothing to the needy, visit the sick, instruct the poor and provide a haven for destitute women.
The site chosen for the new building, which was funded from Catherine's own inheritance, was in Lower Baggot Street and it was in this place - now the International Mercy Centre - that the Sisters of Mercy congregation was founded.
Catherine McAuley had never planned to found a religious order and indeed had been quite averse to the idea, but in 1831, at the suggestion of the same Daniel Murray, now Archbishop of Dublin since 1823, she pronounced her vows in religion and four years later, the new order received Papal approval.
Young idealistic women joined in droves - and died too. In the first 10 years of the order, between 1831 and 1841, 13 of the early Sisters died, all aged between 18 and 37, having contracted from their home visitations the dreaded diseases of that era, typhus, cholera and tuberculosis. All are buried in a vault of the Carmelite Church in Clarendon Street. When Mother McAuley herself died of TB in 1841, aged 62, the order established in a number of provincial towns in Ireland, rapidly spread to England, Scotland, Australia, New Zealand, Newfoundland and the United States. It was afterwards to become the largest female congregation within the Catholic Church, with 32,000 Sisters of Mercy worldwide in the early 1960s and 15,000 at the present time.
Some time after these congregations, in the second half of the 19th century, came yet another indigenous Irish congregation: the Sisters of the Holy Faith. This was founded by Margaret Aylward, born in 1810 in Waterford City, where her father was a wealthy merchant and Liberal councillor. Educated initially at a private Quaker Dame school, she entered the Irish Sisters of Charity as a novice. She left the order but did not lose the desire to serve, especially children who had no one to care for them.
There was a great need for such care in Dublin during the Famine years, where she moved to 1846. She was concerned about the homeless and neglected children roaming the streets, and the determined efforts of many groups to proselytise. Various sects throughout the country promised to deliver poor families and especially homeless children from the "yoke of Rome".
At one stage, Margaret Aylward was imprisoned for six months in Grangegorman Female Penitentiary on a dubious charge of child abduction. Although responsible for the establishment of an orphanage in Eccles Street in Dublin she gradually became opposed to this form of care.
She enlisted a group of like-minded women, the Ladies of Charity, who set up centres for both the learning and passing-on of Catholic beliefs and also arranged for the allocation of many homeless children to approved families in Dublin and Leinster through a network of foster-parents. The Holy Faith congregation eventually established 14 schools in Dublin, and in Celbridge, Skerries, New Ross, Greystones, Kilcool, Mullinavat and overseas in California, New Orleans, Trinidad, New Zealand and Australia.
It would be rash to conclude that, once these congregations had been founded and were up and running, life thereafter was comfortable and trouble-free. Far from it. All of them encountered difficulties, some serious, and these might have come from their families (particularly where inheritances were involved); tensions with local clergy and other congregations; grievances within their own groups; serious ill-health; disagreements with colleagues over implementing their ideas - any number of things. Despite the obstacles and difficulties, the founders and their successors persevered and the shape of the Catholic Church in Ireland, as we and previous generations this century have known it, is the result.
The members of the indigenous congregations described here were derived from ordinary Irish folk - our forebears. They were founded primarily for the Irish people, although it is obvious that they did have enormous influence overseas as well.
Despite the human failures of some of their members, personal imperfections, individual weaknesses or an occasional inability to follow faithfully the vision of their founders, their sole purpose was to care for and serve Irish society, especially when that society was most in need, both physically and spiritually. Overall, they have carried out their mission resolutely, conscientiously and faithfully.
Louis Power is a commentator on religious affairs.
