A Chastened Communion: Modern Irish Poetry and Catholicism

5. Relics and Nuns in Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s Poetry: Sifting the Remains of Irish Catholicism

145 5 Relics and Nuns in Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s Poetry Sifting the Remains of Irish Catholicism By the turn of the millennium, the once imposing edifice of Irish Catholicism appeared increasingly derelict. Over the previous decade and a half, the authority of the Catholic Church had been badly damaged by legislative defeats on contraception and divorce as well as a series of scandalous revelations about sexual impropriety and abuse, beginning with the shocking disclosure in 1992 of the popular Bishop of Galway Eamonn Casey’s secret affair with a young American woman who had borne his child. Then in the summer of 2001, the relics of St. Thérèse of Lisieux came to Ireland and during their eleven-week tour of the country were venerated, according to the estimates of the event’s organizers , by 3 million people, three-quarters of the island’s population. The Sunday Business Post went so far as to designate the crowds that greeted the relics as “the greatest mass movement of the Irish people in the history of the country.”1 This extraordinary outburst of traditional Catholic devotion seemingly indicated that Catholicism in Ireland, despite the persistent rumors of its demise, was still a vital presence in Irish society. It was as if an act of cultural homeopathy had been performed. The enthusiastic reception of these sacred relics apparently inoculated the Catholic Church against the charge that it had itself been reduced to a relic. If so, the revival was timely. During this period when Ireland’s incredible economic boom was reaching its apex, Catholicism seemed to be one of the few viable counter-forces to the rampant consumerism spawned 146 | A Chastened Communion by the Celtic Tiger. That assumption was belied by the fact that the tour of St. Thérèse’s relics was marketed like the rollout of some cutting-edge consumer good or the appearance of a celebrity pop star, with posters announcing that she “would draw bigger crowds than rock legends U2” and that she “was more popular than pop star Madonna.”2 Moreover, the response to the relics that Bishop Brendan Comiskey of Ferns, the chief organizer of the event, promulgated—a “child-like” exercise of imagination that supersedes critical intelligence and submits to a mysterious presence —was less a counter to than an extension of a consumerist ethos.3 In this regard, we might recall that Marx fashioned his notion of “commodity fetishism” from the analogous relationship between the enthrallment of the consumer with the commodity in capitalism and the worship of objects like relics in religions such as Catholicism. In each case, the originating context of the object is obscured and the object itself is seen as imbued with a quasi-magical aura. When considered from this demystified perspective, the extraordinary popularity of St. Thérèse’s relics would appear to derive from their reification of an ostensibly purer Catholic faith while their well-publicized introduction into twenty-first-century Ireland looks suspiciously like an attempt to rebrand (à la Classic Coke) a superannuated and compromised product.4 In Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s poetry, we find a similar conjunction of relics and religious women, designed in this case not to shore up the existing structure of the Catholic Church so much as to radically destabilize it. Instead of fostering traditional pieties, Ní Chuilleanáin effects through this poetic motif a winnowing of Irish Catholicism that brings forth both the seeds of future liberation and the chaff of past oppression. As such, her poetry epitomizes the twofold process of critique and creative refashioning that characterizes the Catholic element in the strand of Irish poetry that we have been examining. For Ní Chuilleanáin, no aspect of Irish Catholicism is more culturally resonant nor more in need of a thoroughgoing recuperation than the role of religious women. She identifies this “preoccupation with nuns, and the reasons for their existence” as foundational to her effort to understand her cultural heritage, insisting that it “explains or rather provides always the first syllable of an explanation of the world I grew up in and the many worlds I inherit.”5 The definitive role that nuns play in Ní Chuilleanáin’s Relics and Nuns in Ní Chuilleanáin’s Poetry | 147 poetry has been acknowledged by critics as well. In the article that first introduced Ní Chuilleanáin’s work to an international...