On Church Grounds: Political Funerals and the Contest to Lead Catholic Ireland

Political funerals organized by Irish nationalists, who intended to use the heady mixture of sacred ceremony and political imperative to create a secular sainthood, bedeviled much of Cardinal Paul Cullen’s Dublin episcopate (1852–78). Cullen, who did not share the principles or aspirations of the men who sought his acquiescence in their funereal ventures, would not countenance the use of church resources or rituals as means to what he perceived as irreligious republican ends. In the competition for the political allegiance of Ireland’s Catholics these demonstrations came to epitomize the divide between the cardinal and nationalists from parliamentary and militant groups.