‘Greedo!’: Joyce, John MacHale, and the First Vatican Council from ‘Grace’ to Finnegans Wake

Throughout his writings, Joyce intermittently turns back to landmarks in Roman Catholic church history. Whether present in the thoughts and words of the denizens of Joyce’s Dublin, or the rich linguistic tapestry of Finnegans Wake, such events are frequently misremembered, appropriated, invented anew. Joyce’s treatment of the Great Council at the Vatican of 1869-1870 is one poignant example of such a tendency — ‘the greatest scene in the whole history of the Church’ (D, ‘Grace’ 627–8) as Martin Cunningham would have it in Dubliners. This essay begins by looking to the account of the First Vatican Council that appears in ‘Grace’; an account that is, on the one hand, deliberately garbled and absurd, and on the other the product of a peculiarly sharp kind of cultural memory. The second part of this essay is concerned with the manner in which Joyce revisits the First Vatican Council in Finnegans Wake. His abiding preoccupation with the dogma of pontifical infallibility, as declared at that Council, is shown to have particular significance for the exceptionally long and broad reimagining of Catholicism and church history that is a feature of the last work.