“Voices of the World”: National Identity and Musical Space at the 1932 Eucharistic Congress

The thirty-first Eucharistic Congress marked the formal debut of the newly independent Irish Free State on the world stage. The weeklong Congress—lasting from Monday, 20 June 1932, to the final Pontifical Mass at Phoenix Park on Sunday, 26 June—hosted an estimated one million pilgrims from at least thirty-two countries.¹ Because it functioned as a political as well as a religious gathering, it was a nation-building exercise drawing on mass public ritual and display that put forward an image of a newly formed Irish nation unified under the banner of Catholicism.

Many events throughout the week incorporated music, making the Congress exemplary of how composition functions as a vehicle for communal-identity formation. This process was complicated, however. Despite Harry White’s assertion that music in modern Ireland was conscripted and limited by its close associations with national-ism—with the Free State “incapable of responding to music other than as a potent signifier (or agent) of nationalist culture”—an exploration of the Eucharistic Congress’s deployment of that art form suggests otherwise.² Conflicts within the church hierarchy; a diversity of cultures, classes, and ethnicities among the congregants; and the various purposes to which music was put in the final Mass suggest a national identity at odds with cultural homogenization. The Congress did not fully impose a monolithic Irish, Gaelic, and Catholic identity on participants so much as it opened, however briefly, a musical space revealing a diverse community with a common sense of belonging. Thus, if the Eucharistic Congress sought to codify a modern Catholic nationality and a diasporic Irishness, it also encouraged a more fluid collective identity that arose from the diversity of its multinational participants.

Reunited for the Eucharist: The International Congress as Nationalist Event

The Congress billed itself as an international event promoting a global, cosmopolitan Catholicism and a diasporic Irishness. Although the nationalist narrative of the Congress’s organizers privileged precon-quest medieval Ireland as the repository of Christian learning, its Advance Programme constructed a teleological narrative in which Ireland extended its influence internationally, not through military conquest but through forced emigration throughout the empire and beyond it:

Betrayed by the perjury of alien kings and smitten with the scourge of famine and disease, they were scattered all over the earth. They went from a land made desolate, a land unable to support its people, out to the four corners of the earth. And wherever they made a resting-place, there also was a resting-place for their Eucharistic Lord. … Many a hard-fought field witnessed the courage of the Irish exiles. … In every far mission field they work to spread the Kingdom of the Hidden Christ.³

The Congress itself was framed as a victorious return of Ireland’s lost generations: “Scattered and broken for the Eucharist—they will be reunited for the Eucharist.”⁴ As an international institution, the Catholic church provided a sense of cosmopolitanism to its followers where it was otherwise unavailable; it offered, in Terence Brown’s words, a “sense of belonging to a worldwide religious community” that was “curiously linked to the internationalism of Irish nationalist feeling in the early twentieth century.”⁵ From this perspective the event marked the beginning of an independent Ireland as members of the Irish diaspora reclaimed their heritage. The Congress thus could be framed as the culmination of centuries of dispersal and devotion to faith and country—no less than “Ireland’s reward for all that her children have endured for the Eucharist during the darkness of centuries.”⁶

At the final Mass in Phoenix Park musical performances reflected contradictory versions of Irish nationalism. A choir of men and boys singing Palestrina’s Missa Brevis signaled the embrace of a wider European movement to reform church music. In Ireland that movement was closely associated with a conservative nationalism championing precolonial cultural forms that excluded influences regarded as modern and foreign. At the same time John McCormack’s rendition of César Franck’s “Panis Angelicus,” regarded...