ART FOR ANTI-CLERICALISM'S SAKE
by PEADAR LAIGHLÉIS
THE DAY Napoleon escaped from Elba, the headline in Le Monde read "Renegade Leaves Elba". When he arrived in France, the headline ran "Napoleon Lands at Cannes". And when he approached the capital, the headline was "His Imperial Majesty to enter Paris". With this exercise in Realpolitik, the editor exercised the standard of objectivity we expect from today's print and electronic media.
I remember reading Mgr Michael Nolan's thesis some time ago in the Irish Catholic that people do not read newspaper's to inform themselves but to reinforce their prejudices. He gave an illustration of this some years previously when several respectable news outlets repeating the old canard that St Thomas Aquinas said woman was merely a defective male. Mgr Nolan is an expert on Aristotelian biology and it did not take him long to correct this. He could quote the Angelic Doctor's own refutation of the charge, but found it very difficult to find a publisher. Not even the Dominican Doctrine and Life would take it. So he continued until the Daily Telegraph carried it. Then he found another problem. Clergy were unwilling to purchase the Daily Telegraph because of its anti-Irish bias but seemed to have no problem buying the Irish Times in spite of that paper's well-documented attitudes towards Catholicism.
Obscure painter
You think I'm joking? Sometimes I wonder am I too harsh on the grey denizens of D'Olier St. But just when I think it may be safe to look once again at the newspaper rack, they give me something which reaffirms my original position. And on November 2, 2002, this came in the arts supplement. So how could the discovery of a painting by an unknown 19th century Irish artist in Edinburgh, and the publication of a collection of verse by a forgotten Irish poet of the same century, illustrate the anti-Catholic vitriol I attribute to Ireland's most influential newspaper?
Aloysius O'Kelly was an obscure painter who would have remained obscure but for the fact his Mass in a Connemara Cabin showed up in an Edinburgh drawing room this summer. This is a picture of a young priest giving the final blessing at a station Mass in a Connemara cabin and it is quite attractive. The table is laid for Mass with the altar cards, candlesticks, crucifix, missal and chalice. The priest's white vestments are depicted with detail; even the maniple can be seen on his left wrist. And the Spartan furnishings of the cabin - basic, but maintained neatly and not without some pride. The congregation are devout in their demeanour. One pious old woman is nearly prostrate. There is a solemn dignity about these tenant farmers and farm labourers and their families.
Three Redemptorists
Of course D'Olier St has to interpret this for us. They did so by providing a commentary by Dr Niamh O'Sullivan who teaches art history at the National College of Art and Design. Dr O'Sullivan allows three Redemptorist priests in Edinburgh do most of the talking. One, Father Richard Reid (a young priest), sees a prefiguration of the Second Vatican Council - an emphasis on the Eucharist and the sanctification of daily life. I wonder is ecclesiastical history taught so badly that a young priest would attribute this to Vatican II? Has he no knowledge of eucharistic piety stretching back to apostolic times in both East and West? Has he not heard the maxim of the English recusants: "It is the Mass that matters"? And in regard to labour and its sanctifying nature, any study of devotion to St Joseph, promoted by Pope Leo XIII, for example (who was Pope when this painting was exhibited in 1883) would fill in many gaps in Fr Reid's theological education.
Dr O'Sullivan gives more column space to the more subversive Father Hamish Swanston, Professor Emeritus of Theology at Kent University. Father Swanston sees anticlericalism in the picture. The laity are oppressed. Maybe they were, but by whom? By the clergy or by the largely Protestant ascendancy (unmentioned in this article)? And if by the latter, the second question is who provided leadership to the oppressed Irish labourers? The clergy or the Fenians? It is that last question that makes the painting interesting. Aloysius O'Kelly's bother James was a member of Parliament in Parnell's party and also a leading Fenian. So, if there is a hint of anticlericalism in the picture, it should be very obvious it had its origin in Fenian bitterness.
Following the debacle surrounding the Fenian raid on Chester castle in 1867, Mgr David Moriarty, Bishop of Kerry, famously announced: "Hell is not hot enough nor eternity long enough to punish those who have led these young men astray." The Fenians for their part held they took their religion from Rome and their politics from hell. It is true that the painting reflects Ireland at the time of the Land War
Outmoded aspirations
Dr O'Sullivan draws a parallel between the founding of the Land League and the apparition at Knock in 1879. No authentic Marian apparition takes place in an historical vacuum. To give other examples: the Rue de Bac apparitions which gave the Church the Miraculous Medal took place within weeks of the overthrowing of the Most Christian King, Charles X of France and Navarre, in 1830; Pontmain in Brittany occurred at the height of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871; and Fatima happened as the First World War was in its third year. The timing of the apparition at Knock in 1879 summoned the country's attention to the efficacy of the Mass and the Communion of Saints when more immediate solutions to Ireland's problems were considered - solutions which could lead to more problems. To see oppression in this particular painting is no reflection on the Irish Church in the 1880s, but rather the outmoded aspirations of a class of theologian either stuck in the 1960s or narrowly focused on some contemporary Latin American experiences.
The painting was discovered in Edinburgh's Cowgate district, a notorious Irish slum area in the 19th Century. James Connolly was born here in 1868. But for all the misery, it was here that the Edinburgh soccer club, Hibernians, had its origin, just as Glasgow Celtic emerged from the Gorbals.
If this were not enough, the arts editor of the Irish Times also ran a review of Selected Poems of James Henry. James Henry (1798-1876) abandoned his career in medicine on receiving an inheritance in 1846 and chose to wander around Italy instead. On foot. So it is hardly surprising his wife died in 1849. The reviewer applauds Dr Henry as a fearless free thinker. Yet anyone reading the review would see the poet-surgeon in fact failed to grow out of his adolescence and was most at home with the irresponsibility of an undergraduate. The reviewer doesn't point out that the Church at which most of the bile in Dr Henry's work is directed is most likely the Established Church of the time - the Church of Ireland. The reviewer describes Dr Henry as the scourge of humbug. I wonder? Some of the absurdities in his work were themselves humbug. A colleague of mine once told me his father advised him not to be a socialist unless he could afford it. Dr Henry appears to me to be in a category something like this. He could afford to versify his whims - and no one really cared until the poems were reissued recently. And the Irish Times deigned to draw them to our attention.
It is quite typical that the Irish Times should try to re-interpret 19th Century Irish art, literature and history through the spectacles with which it views the turn-of-the millennium period we are now enjoying. One asks oneself: how far is D'Olier St prepared to take its anticlericalism?
The Brandsma Review, Issue 63, November-December 2002
Dr O'Sullivan gives more column space to the more subversive Father Hamish Swanston, Professor Emeritus of Theology at Kent University. Father Swanston sees anticlericalism in the picture. The laity are oppressed. Maybe they were, but by whom? By the clergy or by the largely Protestant ascendancy (unmentioned in this article)? And if by the latter, the second question is who provided leadership to the oppressed Irish labourers? The clergy or the Fenians? It is that last question that makes the painting interesting. Aloysius O'Kelly's bother James was a member of Parliament in Parnell's party and also a leading Fenian. So, if there is a hint of anticlericalism in the picture, it should be very obvious it had its origin in Fenian bitterness.
Following the debacle surrounding the Fenian raid on Chester castle in 1867, Mgr David Moriarty, Bishop of Kerry, famously announced: "Hell is not hot enough nor eternity long enough to punish those who have led these young men astray." The Fenians for their part held they took their religion from Rome and their politics from hell. It is true that the painting reflects Ireland at the time of the Land War
Outmoded aspirations
Dr O'Sullivan draws a parallel between the founding of the Land League and the apparition at Knock in 1879. No authentic Marian apparition takes place in an historical vacuum. To give other examples: the Rue de Bac apparitions which gave the Church the Miraculous Medal took place within weeks of the overthrowing of the Most Christian King, Charles X of France and Navarre, in 1830; Pontmain in Brittany occurred at the height of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871; and Fatima happened as the First World War was in its third year. The timing of the apparition at Knock in 1879 summoned the country's attention to the efficacy of the Mass and the Communion of Saints when more immediate solutions to Ireland's problems were considered - solutions which could lead to more problems. To see oppression in this particular painting is no reflection on the Irish Church in the 1880s, but rather the outmoded aspirations of a class of theologian either stuck in the 1960s or narrowly focused on some contemporary Latin American experiences.
The painting was discovered in Edinburgh's Cowgate district, a notorious Irish slum area in the 19th Century. James Connolly was born here in 1868. But for all the misery, it was here that the Edinburgh soccer club, Hibernians, had its origin, just as Glasgow Celtic emerged from the Gorbals.
If this were not enough, the arts editor of the Irish Times also ran a review of Selected Poems of James Henry. James Henry (1798-1876) abandoned his career in medicine on receiving an inheritance in 1846 and chose to wander around Italy instead. On foot. So it is hardly surprising his wife died in 1849. The reviewer applauds Dr Henry as a fearless free thinker. Yet anyone reading the review would see the poet-surgeon in fact failed to grow out of his adolescence and was most at home with the irresponsibility of an undergraduate. The reviewer doesn't point out that the Church at which most of the bile in Dr Henry's work is directed is most likely the Established Church of the time - the Church of Ireland. The reviewer describes Dr Henry as the scourge of humbug. I wonder? Some of the absurdities in his work were themselves humbug. A colleague of mine once told me his father advised him not to be a socialist unless he could afford it. Dr Henry appears to me to be in a category something like this. He could afford to versify his whims - and no one really cared until the poems were reissued recently. And the Irish Times deigned to draw them to our attention.
It is quite typical that the Irish Times should try to re-interpret 19th Century Irish art, literature and history through the spectacles with which it views the turn-of-the millennium period we are now enjoying. One asks oneself: how far is D'Olier St prepared to take its anticlericalism?
The Brandsma Review, Issue 63, November-December 2002
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