AT PRESENT there is a vehement argument about whether Roman Catholic congregations should contribute to the expenses incurred by that church because of the sexual abuse of minors by clergy.
This debate would have brought a knowing smile of bitter satisfaction to a dissident Catholic of the past, Michael John Fitzgerald McCarthy, an Irish writer of the early 20th century who has been almost completely forgotten, but whose works are absolutely ripe for rediscovery.
Born in 1862 in Midleton, Co Cork, McCarthy died in exile in London in 1928. The circumstances of his schooling and higher education were significant for his future: sent originally to a Vincentian seminary, from which the young MJF fled at about the age of 15, he later attended (the Protestant) Midleton College, and proceeded on a scholarship thereafter to Trinity College, Dublin, from which he graduated in 1885. He was later called to the Bar.
Thus, at a time when sectarian divisions were increasing among the majority of Irish people, MJF McCarthy, a Catholic, was educated largely in a non-Roman Catholic atmosphere.
Originally a nationalist and Home Ruler, he was to become famous throughout Britain and Ireland in the early 20th century as a polemic writer who denounced the Roman Catholic Church in terms so fierce that they have scarcely been equalled even today.
His early nationalism was by 1900 replaced by unionism, and a highly contentious suggestion in his first major book, Five Years in Ireland(1900), that the Home Rule project was injurious, not beneficial, to Ireland.
He expressed the reasons for his increasing alienation in his most famous book, Priests and People in Ireland(1904), a passionate denunciation of the domination of Irish life by the Roman Catholic Church which, read today, is truly shocking in its prescience of what was to happen in independent Ireland.
Selling in its tens of thousands, it may have been read by, and influenced, James Joyce. Stanislaus Joyce, in My Brother's Keeper(1958), records that he (Stanislaus) had a copy. Today, one could be forgiven for thinking that much of Priests and Peoplecame straight out of the Ferns, Murphy and Ryan reports.
McCarthy strongly attacked the process, already long in train under the British administration here, of the government paying capitation grants for every inmate of clerically-run industrial schools and Magdalen laundries.
Openly questioning whether the inmates of Artane were genuine young criminals in need of reform, he wrote that the institution was a cause “of lamentation” and effectively accused the Christian Brothers of something essentially found true by Mr Justice Ryan, ie that these schools and laundries were profit centres for the clergy who ran them.
In chapter after chapter, its author shows forensically, using census returns, how the Roman Catholic clergy grew in numbers between 1861 and 1901 so that by the latter year they represented a parallel economy to the actual one. In those 40 years, the population of Roman Catholics in Ireland fell by 27 per cent, but the numbers of clergy increased by 137 per cent!
McCarthy accused the Roman Catholic religious, in a phrase that has extraordinary resonance today, of being always “on the scent of money”, whether it be from industrial schools, laundries or from the solicitation, by means of wills and money for Masses, from wealthy Catholics of extraordinary sums.
He gives innumerable examples of this: after one garden party in the archdiocese of Armagh, for instance, Cardinal Logue came away with the (then) staggering sum of £30,000 for his new cathedral.
McCarthy deplored the (then) increasing hold of the church over primary school education. In a lecture delivered at various locations, and published as a pamphlet, Education in Ireland(1901), a copy of which is in the National Library, he asserted that "the National School teacher should obtain fixity of tenure during efficient service, under the supervision of the education department (ie today, the Department of Education) as a right from the nation, not as a concession from the priest."
What, one wonders, would the INTO have to say about that, over a century later? McCarthy also condemned what he saw as the materialist selfishness of the clergy. His factually-based novel, Gallowglass, contains a memorable account of a clerical "banquet" at which were served the best of "viands" and wines and "liquors," polished off by cigars. This, in a country where most members of Catholic congregations went to bed hungry.
It is in Gallowglassalso that McCarthy unwittingly (or perhaps not) left the most powerful of his smoking bombs to posterity. In a polemical introduction to this work, he asserts rhetorically and, sadly, truthfully: "The art employed by the priests in hushing up scandals is consummate; and the silence of lay Catholics about these domestic tragedies, especially where their priests and protégés are involved, is one of the marvels of Irish life."
McCarthy, with the zeal of the convert, had his blind spots: he idealised unionist Ireland, and failed to appreciate the glories of the Irish language. But his work will be proof for many that the shameful truths about the worst of Catholic Ireland cannot be said to be news.
Rather it was a history of which many more must surely have been aware.