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In pre-Famine Ireland, for example, only 30 to 40 percent of the population attended Mass and many who identified themselves as Catholic had virtually no knowledge of the faith’s dogma and practices. Worse still, many still clung to pre-Christian pagan rituals and beliefs that had never fully died out after Ireland was converted to Christianity by Patrick and his successor missionaries. The response of Cullen and Hughes was to launch a campaign to instill faith, orthodoxy, and obedience among the people, a process historian Emmet Larkin famously dubbed, the “devotional revolution.”

For many readers, the idea that the Irish only recently became practicing Catholics strikes them as strange, if not false, given the deeply ingrained image of Ireland as a devoutly Catholic nation. How could it be that the “land of saints and scholars,” of monasteries and cathedrals, was until the 1850s a place where the majority of the population did not attend regular Mass? The answer is quite simple: centuries of British colonial policy, especially the Penal laws enacted in the 1690s, had succeeded in reducing the Catholic church in Ireland to a shadow of its former self. By 1800, there were only 1,850 priests and 122 nuns for Ireland’s approximately 3.9 million Catholics. Forty years late,r the numbers were worse: 2,150 priests and 1,000 nuns for 6.5 million Catholics. Beneath these grim statistics lay an additional problem: the ranks of Ireland’s priests were filled with men of low education and moral character. Drunkenness, womanizing, and greed (extracting fees and tithes for performing sacraments such as Confession) appear as widespread and persistent problems in Church records.

In America, the Church faced a similar situation. In 1815, Catholics in America numbered approximately 90,000 and most were not Irish. Most priests and bishops were English or French. They were highly educated but small in number and thus found themselves overwhelmed when the migration of Irish Catholics to America boomed after 1820, pushing the total number of Catholics in America to 1.6 million by 1850. The American clergy were shocked to find that while these new arrivals called themselves Catholics, most knew next to nothing about their faith. Many of these “unchurched” Irish, as they came to be called, had never attended Mass and could not make the sign of the cross. “Half of our Irish population here is Catholic,” wrote one priest in New York, “merely because Catholicity was the religion of the land of their birth.”

It was in this context that Cullen and Hughes launched their devotional revolutions on both sides of the Atlantic. Paul Cullen was born in Kildare in 1803. He received his religious training in Rome, returned to Ireland and rose to become Archbishop of Armagh (1849) and then Dublin (1852). John Hughes was born in Tyrone in 1797 and immigrated to the U.S. in 1818. He soon entered Mount St. Mary’s seminary in Maryland and was ordained in 1826. A combative personality, he soon achieved a national reputation as a fiery pro-Catholic polemicist willing to take on any and all nativists. He was made bishop of New York in 1842 and archbishop in 1850.

The devotional revolution consisted of three interrelated initiatives. First and foremost, Cullen and Hughes addressed the problem of the clergy. Simply put, they needed greater quantity and quality of priests and nuns. Both established seminaries and brought in Rome-educated faculty to ensure the creation of a new, thoroughly educated, and rigorously orthodox clergy. Because of the especially dire nature of his situation (a rapidly growing Catholic population versus Ireland’s declining post-Famine population), Hughes also pleaded with church leaders in Ireland and Rome to send more priests and nuns. Before long a steady stream of Irish priests and nuns — educated and shaped in the manner approved by Cullen — began flowing into America.

The revolution’s second goal was to transform the unchurched from Catholics in name to Catholics in practice. This was accomplished by proclaiming the obligation for Catholics to go to confession, attend Mass, and receive Communion regularly. They also encouraged a wide range of devotional practices, including using missals during Mass, reading catechisms, and praying the rosary. Likewise, Catholics were urged to participate in pilgrimages, retreats, and novenas and to develop special devotions to Mary or the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

Finally, the devotional revolution aimed to eradicate the remaining vestiges of pre-Christian traditions still popular among the Irish peasantry (a trend still evident today among many Haitian-American and Latino-America Catholics). For example, many Irish peasants celebrated ancient Celtic fertility rites that were thinly disguised as saints’ days (often for saints unknown at the Vatican). Similarly, Hughes and Cullen made a special effort to eliminate the raucous Irish wake, a practice that originated in pre-Christian Celtic tradition and involved copious amounts of alcohol, fighting, and ribald games. Ultimately, this latter goal was accomplished by proclaiming that families persisting in holding such wakes would be denied burial in consecrated ground. This decree did not cause the disappearance of the Irish wake, but rather its transformation into a more refined and respectable form.

Hughes died in 1864 and Cullen in 1878, but the revolution they helped unleash continued to evolve for generations thereafter. Even by the time of Cullen’s death, the Irish and their cousins in America had begun to achieve the now familiar reputation for their devotion to the Catholic Church. In both countries, an orthodox, conservative Catholicism became in increasingly central part of Irish identity and the Church enjoyed enormous prestige and influence in Irish and Irish American life. The 1960s and ’70s, however, would bring a host of challenges to the church, inaugurating a period of declining vocations, Mass attendance, and adherence to doctrine that persists to this day.

HIBERNIAN HISTORY WEEK

April 27, 1983: By notching his 3,509th career strikeout, Nolan Ryan of the Houston Astros surpassed Walter Johnson to become baseball’s career strikeout king.

May 1, 1169: The Norman invasion of Ireland begins.

May 1, 1960: Navy pilot Gary Powers’ U-2 spy plane is shot down after invading Russian airspace. He will be held for 17 months before being exchanged for a Soviet spy arrested in the U.S.

HIBERNIAN BIRTHDATES

April 28, 1878: Academy Award-winning actor, Lionel Barrymore, is born in Philadelphia.

April 29 1877: Sports journalist and cartoonist, Thomas A. “Tad” Dorgan, is born in San Francisco.

May 2, 1871: The “fighting priest” of World War I, Fr. Francis Duffy, is born in Cobourg, Ontario.

(Visit www.edwardtodonnell.com/irish.htm)