In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

It is impossible to overestimate the signi¤cance of the Roman Catholic Church in the daily lives and identity of the Irish and their descendants in Ireland and Irish America in the ¤fty years after World War II. Whether as a spiritual leader or as a target of rebellion and attack, the Church was a central institution in the lives of its people on both sides of the Atlantic. The ability of the Church to command and expect absolute obedience and acceptance of Catholic dogma passed soon after Vatican II, but its in®uence over the lives of its people remained, whether that in®uence generated respect or hostility. Lapsed practitioners and daily communicants alike were shaped by the religious, cultural, and social tenets learned in an Irish Catholic childhood. Niall Williams, a Dublin-born diarist who with his American-born wife returned to her great-grandfather’s farm in County Clare in the 1990s to raise their own children, described his boyhood church: I remembered the church as part of my growing up and adolescence. Although I had never quite forgiven the church building itself for replacing the old stone one, I had taken my thoughts there at several key times in a most natural and free way, kneeling under the high vaulted roof to ask for good examination results or a football win, or when my grandfather was ill, to pray. It was part of me, as I suppose churches were of all those children who grew up in my generation. And so, that evening, going with my father back down to Kilmacud church for mass, I felt more forcibly than I can say a deep sadness on seeing the church more than three-quarters empty. I sat there and kept waiting for the crowd to come in. . . . There  5 The Catholic Church: What Parish Are You From? We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem super¤cial, but it is indelible. —Oliver Wendell Holmes 1 were no teenagers in the pews. Coming from the older people who made up the congregation , the prayers seemed to take on the quality of melancholy.2 Pete Hamill, a second-generation Irish Catholic New Yorker born in the 1930s and educated in Brooklyn and Manhattan parochial schools, remembers the power of the Church as a less than positive in®uence: This was part of the most sickening aspect of Irish-American life in those days: the assumption that if you rose above an acceptable level of mediocrity, you were guilty of the sin of pride. You were to accept your place and stay in it for the rest of your life; the true rewards would be given you in heaven, after you were dead. There was ferocious pressure to conform, to avoid breaking out of the pack; self-denial was the supreme virtue. It was the perfect mentality for an infantryman, a civil servant, or a priest. And it added some very honorable lives to the world. But too often, it discouraged kids who aspired to something different. The boy who chose another road was accused of being Full of Himself; he was isolated, assigned a place outside the tribe. Be ordinary was the message; maintain anonymity; tamp down desires or wild dreams. Some boys withered. And the girls were smothered worse than the boys. They could be nuns or wives, brides of Christ or mothers of us all. There were almost no other possibilities.3 The formative power of the Church in the development of the character of its faithful was compounded by the Church’s role in in®uencing local political and social action. In Ireland the Church was conspicuous in its involvement in legislation and government policy, most aggressively in the ¤fties and sixties and less so in the eighties. Among the more controversial issues in which the Church asserted its authority were the Mother and Child Scheme proposed by Dr. Noel Browne, the Commission on Emigration and Other Population Problems 1948–1954 Reports, and the government commission called to consider the development of Irish television . The Church opposed the health care program proposed by Dr. Browne which would have established free (voluntary) pre- and postnatal care for mothers, as well as free medical care for all children under 16, without a means test. The Church raised moral and religious objections to the exposure of Catholic women to the advice of public health of¤cials whose treatment and counsel...

Share