Some allow their own deeply
held faith to colour their perceptions of what's happening during the Irish
revolutionary period and perhaps my agnosticism colours mine but I can write to
assure that the war fought by the Volunteers in Ireland was predominantly
concerned with achieving self-government in the form of a Republic - religion
playing little or no part in their calculations. The catholic bishops themselves
disapproved of it and some of them even threatened ex-communication for
nationalist belligerents so they cannot have been taking part in some kind of
religious crusade when their actions were denounced by their own spiritual
guides.
There is to be sure a tub-thumping strain of dogmatic Calvinism among some Presbyterian preachers who still held dear the Covenant of the Scots exemplified in the vociferous anti-Catholicism of the late Rev. Ian Paisley and from this small corner in Ulster emerged virulent opposition to both Home Rule and Republicanism equating it with the submergence of Ireland under the Vatican See. In many respects they were right and the dissolution of catholic authority in the Republic in more recent times has gone a long way to easing political tensions in the North - this virulent anti-Catholicism has always been a blind spot for many nationalist republicans many of whom wore their religion very lightly indeed.
Religion was a powerful tool to mobilise to create further division between the Catholic nationalist and Protestant loyalist communities up the north but down south it played a much more subsidiary role. Demagogues up the north could use altars and pulpits to stir up passions to advance loyalist or nationalist agendas knowing that they are at the coalface of denominational strife given the proportional balance of faiths. Down south, Protestantism in the face of the post-1916 nationalist "re-birth" would have been quite wary of sticking its toes into the fray as numerically speaking it was overwhelmingly engulfed. Also down south, relations with the Anglican church had improved enormously since disestablishment and the granting of the Catholic university.
I like Karen Armstrong's books; a former nun whose faith has lapsed but still retains an enormous respect for institutional religion; her latest foray has seen her lock horns with the militant atheists over this very issue. Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens in their recent "God-bashing" escapades attempted simplistically to pin blame on northern Ireland conflict (as well as Palestine/Israel & myriad other conflicts) on sectarianism & religious differences, whereas the fundamental driver, it seems to me, in most instances is an interplay of economic and political grievances. After all, it took a power-sharing Assembly up the North to calm things down not a cross-community Ecumenical Congress.
The evangelical Ditchens tub-thumping at times has the same non-accommodating sulphurous air as the fundo pulpit bashers its seeking to displace. Hardly surprising the Dawkins half of this "God is Dead" duo is bedevilled with criticism, not all of which is coming from religious leaders. Dawkins idea of the memeplex proceeds to atomise religion as a culturally transmitted mental virus; a notion and a topic outside the competence of an expert in biological evolution. Durkheim in fact gave us all we need on this .... once the larynx has dropped and man becomes a symbol-making animal his professional jurisdiction has been eclipsed by anthropologists & sociologists.
To answer his own scruples on Hoyle's idea of cosmic intelligent design (triple-alpha process etc.) I've even seen him tax quantum chromo-dynamics Nobellist, Steven Weinberg. Ironic too, in a dog-eat dog Palaeolithic I can see a spindly cerebral type like Dawkins actually inventing religion & posing as a shaman just to provide an ethical road-map for his hammer-wielding Neanderthal co-tribesmen. The role of the Church in sustaining learning has always impressed mediaeval scholars and the ignorance advanced by this pair in advocating wholesale demolition has been at times astonishing.
But back to our theme; were the Volunteers operating under the injunctions of the catholic hierarchy/was there a religious dimension to their thinking? Quite the contrary. When the bishop in Cork thundered his disapproval of IRA "ambushers" he threatened ex-communication for each and every one of them. Tom Barry, Cork IRA leader,on hearing of this, and seeing its effect on the men, gathered them all around for an earnest "pow-wow" and after much soul-searching, they decided to carry on. My great grandfather for instance ran a horse and carriage "taxi" business from Bray to Dublin from 1906 till the War and like Millet's peasants would stop in silent prayer for the Angelus, blessing himself too at each church he passed along the way (which is still seen today). Very devout man by all accounts. It went against all their instincts and better judgement to defy the church's authority.
Likewise, the 1922 Irish Catholic bishop's Pastoral Letter - "killing in an unjust war is as much murder before God" - denounced anti-Treaty republican "irregulars" in the same threatening vein they had earlier used against War of Independence Irish Volunteers.
Pastoral Letter - Essay - Justinucd2014
This incidentally, is where the Church by and large has had the sense today, thankfully, to retreat from, claiming especial insight into the deliberations of the Almighty concerning wars and their myriad justifications. The war to protect "plucky little catholic Belgium" which laid waste to an entire generation is hereby excused because the same Almighty presumably looked dimly on German militarism and not British imperialism which the Kaiser's naval programme sought to challenge, or, for that matter, the claims of Serbian nationalism. Waging war in the name of what "God" may or may not believe to be right is probably one of the silliest and dangerous notions the human race has ever had the misfortune to conceive. And considering the long line of folly involved here, that's really saying something.
But the point here is that the catholic church have ever rowed behind "officialdom"; broadly-speaking the Westminster centred government and after the Treaty the Free State - ever since, more precisely, the Pope acknowledged Hanoverian legitimacy with the death of the Jacobite Pretender in 1766. Even Fr.John Murphy of 1798 fame preached loyalty to the Crown till the brutality of the Wexford yeoman militias made pacificism untenable.
The early 18th c. is more complex. Irish Catholic French-trained priests (the seculars) were viewed with suspicion by Rome (and the exiled Stuart court) on account of the Gallic articles and their consequent tendency to take an independent line on theological matters. It was from this background that the more liberal voice of Dublin Catholic priest Cornelius Nary emerged in the 1720's, mirroring the same drift towards open-ness that we witness with the New Lights & forging that dialogue with, again, the softening latitudinarian elements within the (Protestant) Church of Ireland particularly with Anglican Bishop, Edward Synge. The Stuarts with their right to grant bishoprics opted for Dominicans and Franciscans (the orders) and it was this subversive element in mind that the British state focused penal scrutiny.
So let us confute entirely the notion that from the nationalist perspective at least there was some kind of religious crusade underpinning Irish conflict. The simple answer to the dwindling proportion of Protestants in the revolutionary vanguard, contrary to the misconception of an oft-cited catholic 'sectarian exclusivism' (a-la Hart, Myers & Foster) is that for the first time the ordinary Joe soaps could get involved. The United Irishmen were middle-class & propertied, & had the leisure-time to absorb French revolutionary ideas & the "Rights of Man". Their difficulty was to channel this message down. The Repealers stood or fell behind O' Connell & though he was gentry he had a strong rapport with the people but illiteracy and language barriers divorced their Westminster-orientated agitation from the bulk of the masses who still tended to huddle around the pulpit for guidance.
Residual aristocratic deference seen in the gravitation towards Parnellism scuttled the Fenians along with the increased penetration of the Catholic hierarchy whose post-Famine 'devotional revolution' tightened control on parish life around which local politics now increasingly circulated. The flattening of hierarchies; franchise & widespread literacy, politicised the bulk of the predominantly Catholic majority. They mixed socially, frenetically, in revivalist clubs, and with this new mutually supportive confidence laid assault to the pretensions of British rule.
It was not a "religious thing".
Religion was merely the social glue which bound together kin and family of like interests.
It was a "colonial thing".
Where else in Europe do you see Catholics and Protestants at each other's throat if not in northern Ireland? it is a question of marginalisation and dispossession; the exclusion from POLITICAL power, based not on one's religious faith but on one's nationalist leanings; the extent of Home Rule proffered, and the extent of independence desired.
So I ask again, where is anybody killing "in the name of religion" either latterly or in the period concerned?
These were all political disputes which though they may have been exacerbated by religious difference were not at root guided by theological squabbles.
There is to be sure a tub-thumping strain of dogmatic Calvinism among some Presbyterian preachers who still held dear the Covenant of the Scots exemplified in the vociferous anti-Catholicism of the late Rev. Ian Paisley and from this small corner in Ulster emerged virulent opposition to both Home Rule and Republicanism equating it with the submergence of Ireland under the Vatican See. In many respects they were right and the dissolution of catholic authority in the Republic in more recent times has gone a long way to easing political tensions in the North - this virulent anti-Catholicism has always been a blind spot for many nationalist republicans many of whom wore their religion very lightly indeed.
Religion was a powerful tool to mobilise to create further division between the Catholic nationalist and Protestant loyalist communities up the north but down south it played a much more subsidiary role. Demagogues up the north could use altars and pulpits to stir up passions to advance loyalist or nationalist agendas knowing that they are at the coalface of denominational strife given the proportional balance of faiths. Down south, Protestantism in the face of the post-1916 nationalist "re-birth" would have been quite wary of sticking its toes into the fray as numerically speaking it was overwhelmingly engulfed. Also down south, relations with the Anglican church had improved enormously since disestablishment and the granting of the Catholic university.
I like Karen Armstrong's books; a former nun whose faith has lapsed but still retains an enormous respect for institutional religion; her latest foray has seen her lock horns with the militant atheists over this very issue. Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens in their recent "God-bashing" escapades attempted simplistically to pin blame on northern Ireland conflict (as well as Palestine/Israel & myriad other conflicts) on sectarianism & religious differences, whereas the fundamental driver, it seems to me, in most instances is an interplay of economic and political grievances. After all, it took a power-sharing Assembly up the North to calm things down not a cross-community Ecumenical Congress.
The evangelical Ditchens tub-thumping at times has the same non-accommodating sulphurous air as the fundo pulpit bashers its seeking to displace. Hardly surprising the Dawkins half of this "God is Dead" duo is bedevilled with criticism, not all of which is coming from religious leaders. Dawkins idea of the memeplex proceeds to atomise religion as a culturally transmitted mental virus; a notion and a topic outside the competence of an expert in biological evolution. Durkheim in fact gave us all we need on this .... once the larynx has dropped and man becomes a symbol-making animal his professional jurisdiction has been eclipsed by anthropologists & sociologists.
To answer his own scruples on Hoyle's idea of cosmic intelligent design (triple-alpha process etc.) I've even seen him tax quantum chromo-dynamics Nobellist, Steven Weinberg. Ironic too, in a dog-eat dog Palaeolithic I can see a spindly cerebral type like Dawkins actually inventing religion & posing as a shaman just to provide an ethical road-map for his hammer-wielding Neanderthal co-tribesmen. The role of the Church in sustaining learning has always impressed mediaeval scholars and the ignorance advanced by this pair in advocating wholesale demolition has been at times astonishing.
But back to our theme; were the Volunteers operating under the injunctions of the catholic hierarchy/was there a religious dimension to their thinking? Quite the contrary. When the bishop in Cork thundered his disapproval of IRA "ambushers" he threatened ex-communication for each and every one of them. Tom Barry, Cork IRA leader,on hearing of this, and seeing its effect on the men, gathered them all around for an earnest "pow-wow" and after much soul-searching, they decided to carry on. My great grandfather for instance ran a horse and carriage "taxi" business from Bray to Dublin from 1906 till the War and like Millet's peasants would stop in silent prayer for the Angelus, blessing himself too at each church he passed along the way (which is still seen today). Very devout man by all accounts. It went against all their instincts and better judgement to defy the church's authority.
Likewise, the 1922 Irish Catholic bishop's Pastoral Letter - "killing in an unjust war is as much murder before God" - denounced anti-Treaty republican "irregulars" in the same threatening vein they had earlier used against War of Independence Irish Volunteers.
Pastoral Letter - Essay - Justinucd2014
This incidentally, is where the Church by and large has had the sense today, thankfully, to retreat from, claiming especial insight into the deliberations of the Almighty concerning wars and their myriad justifications. The war to protect "plucky little catholic Belgium" which laid waste to an entire generation is hereby excused because the same Almighty presumably looked dimly on German militarism and not British imperialism which the Kaiser's naval programme sought to challenge, or, for that matter, the claims of Serbian nationalism. Waging war in the name of what "God" may or may not believe to be right is probably one of the silliest and dangerous notions the human race has ever had the misfortune to conceive. And considering the long line of folly involved here, that's really saying something.
But the point here is that the catholic church have ever rowed behind "officialdom"; broadly-speaking the Westminster centred government and after the Treaty the Free State - ever since, more precisely, the Pope acknowledged Hanoverian legitimacy with the death of the Jacobite Pretender in 1766. Even Fr.John Murphy of 1798 fame preached loyalty to the Crown till the brutality of the Wexford yeoman militias made pacificism untenable.
The early 18th c. is more complex. Irish Catholic French-trained priests (the seculars) were viewed with suspicion by Rome (and the exiled Stuart court) on account of the Gallic articles and their consequent tendency to take an independent line on theological matters. It was from this background that the more liberal voice of Dublin Catholic priest Cornelius Nary emerged in the 1720's, mirroring the same drift towards open-ness that we witness with the New Lights & forging that dialogue with, again, the softening latitudinarian elements within the (Protestant) Church of Ireland particularly with Anglican Bishop, Edward Synge. The Stuarts with their right to grant bishoprics opted for Dominicans and Franciscans (the orders) and it was this subversive element in mind that the British state focused penal scrutiny.
So let us confute entirely the notion that from the nationalist perspective at least there was some kind of religious crusade underpinning Irish conflict. The simple answer to the dwindling proportion of Protestants in the revolutionary vanguard, contrary to the misconception of an oft-cited catholic 'sectarian exclusivism' (a-la Hart, Myers & Foster) is that for the first time the ordinary Joe soaps could get involved. The United Irishmen were middle-class & propertied, & had the leisure-time to absorb French revolutionary ideas & the "Rights of Man". Their difficulty was to channel this message down. The Repealers stood or fell behind O' Connell & though he was gentry he had a strong rapport with the people but illiteracy and language barriers divorced their Westminster-orientated agitation from the bulk of the masses who still tended to huddle around the pulpit for guidance.
Residual aristocratic deference seen in the gravitation towards Parnellism scuttled the Fenians along with the increased penetration of the Catholic hierarchy whose post-Famine 'devotional revolution' tightened control on parish life around which local politics now increasingly circulated. The flattening of hierarchies; franchise & widespread literacy, politicised the bulk of the predominantly Catholic majority. They mixed socially, frenetically, in revivalist clubs, and with this new mutually supportive confidence laid assault to the pretensions of British rule.
It was not a "religious thing".
Religion was merely the social glue which bound together kin and family of like interests.
It was a "colonial thing".
Where else in Europe do you see Catholics and Protestants at each other's throat if not in northern Ireland? it is a question of marginalisation and dispossession; the exclusion from POLITICAL power, based not on one's religious faith but on one's nationalist leanings; the extent of Home Rule proffered, and the extent of independence desired.
So I ask again, where is anybody killing "in the name of religion" either latterly or in the period concerned?
These were all political disputes which though they may have been exacerbated by religious difference were not at root guided by theological squabbles.
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