"The Gates Were Shut": Catholics, Chapels, and Power in Late Nineteenth-Century Ireland

While traveling on his annual inspection of Catholic parishes in the summer of 1869, Bishop William Keane encountered a problem in Iniscarra, County Cork. Iniscarra's laity was up in arms over the appointment of a new parish priest, Thomas Murray. Previously the cleric of nearby Glantane, Father Murray had a reputation that preceded him. Throughout the 1850s and 1860s, he had been reprimanded by his superiors for his heavy-handed methods of discipline, including physically assaulting parishioners.¹ Word traveled fast in late nineteenth-century Cork, and when Bishop Keane decided to bring the unpopular priest to Iniscarra, two groups of parishioners approached the bishop "to request . . . another appointment, saying that from what they had heard of Murray, they were determined not to have" him.² When Keane denied their request, the people of Iniscarra acted. According to Keane, the three chapels

were closed against [Murray]—Strong personal dislike; nomass for several Sundays; and then, when the Chapels were opened, rumours were Spread of his Supposed hostility to Fenianism, in Consequence of which the Chapels were closed again—in all for about four months.³

Iniscarra's chapels remained closed, controlled, and patrolled by the laity, until a frustrated Keanemade peace and succeeded, finally, in bringingMurray to the parish in September 1869.⁴

While Keane's words seem to diminish parishioner actions—Iniscarra's chapels "were closed" and later "were opened" while rumors "were spread"—it is clear that the ordinary Catholics of Iniscarra demonstrated initiative, that brought local religious life to a standstill and, in the process, challenging the authority of their priests and bishops. And it was no accident that the parishioners chose to make their stand in their local churches: Catholic chapels had long been spaces of meaning and sites of power, and in the postfamine era, the chapel emerged as a key site of parishioner resistance.⁵ An examination of chapels demonstrates the ways in which Ireland's lay Catholic men and women negotiated clerical authority from 1850 to the early decades of the twentieth century.

The central place of the chapel in parish life—literally and figuratively—reminds us that the connection between Catholics and their religion was strong and was becoming more so in the key postfamine decades. Yet chapels also were sites of difference and conflict. While the Catholic hierarchy imagined its religious edifices to be disciplined and contained spaces where priests would be able to mold an orderly and obedient flock, in reality chapels were also places where priests and people confronted each other over clashing worldviews and expectations. Parish priests used the chapel to inform and instruct, but also to denounce and censure their parishioners; the latter sometimes led to dissent. In turn, lay Catholics like those of Iniscarra in 1869 claimed the space of the chapel as their own by literally taking it over and refusing to let priests enter. As they did so, they made a clear statement about the limits of clerical power.

Bishops' and priests' diaries and reports, lay-clerical correspondence, periodicals, diaries and memoirs, and oral traditions all reveal that the history of modern Irish Catholicism owes much to the actions of ordinary believers. This examination also encourages us to rethink the historiography of postfamine Catholic Ireland. Some scholars have asserted that late nineteenth-century Ireland was in the midst of an unprecedented Catholic revival, famously labeled a "devotional revolution" by historian Emmet Larkin.⁶ This transformation is often described as a revolution from above, led by what Lawrence J. Taylor has called a "diocesan regime" of powerful bishops and priests.⁷ This exploration of Irish Catholics and their chapels complicates the devotional revolution theory, demonstrating that the authority of the episcopacy and the clergy in the post-famine decades was not nearly as absolute as we once thought.⁸ It also disrupts what sometimes has been described as a neat narrative of religious renewal in modern Ireland, testifying instead that those lay Catholics who have not received enough attention from historians asserted their authority in parish life, resisted change from above, and made...