Ecumenism helped shape the face of modern Ireland

The View

It is often overlooked that a major contributor to the opening up of Irish society from the early 1960s was the Vatican, when Pope John XXIII soon after his election summoned the Second Vatican Council. It had many outcomes and effects, but one of them, the ecumenical movement, was warmly received by many Christians inside and outside of the Catholic Church. It came at an important time in Ireland.

Crucial to a healthy nationalism are decisions, in the legal and political sphere first, but preferably also reflected in popular sentiment, as to who belongs”

Ecumenism created a shared space, involving mutual Christian recognition, however qualified, with an effort in subsequent decades, sometimes successful, sometimes not, to recapture common ground, without prejudice to the ethos, separate identity, and integrity of the positions and traditions of the Churches that participated. It meant that different churches and parishioners in the same locality were no longer required to respect mutual blanket exclusion and ‘no-go’ zones, when it came to the practice of religion, or, in theory at least, to believe the worst of the other faith.

Back in person in church on Sunday for the first time in five months, I took the opportunity after morning service to look again at a plaque on the wall of St. Mary’s, Tipperary, commemorating a joint service of nine lessons and carols on December 17, 1972, in which the Tipperary Choral Union played a central role. Its formation was the initiative of Thomas MacCormack, organist of St Michael’s, Tipperary. He had previously assisted in St Mel’s Cathedral, Longford. The service was conducted by Archdeacon Hogg, rector of St Mary’s with Msgr Frank Ryan PP, Tipperary, and Dom Bede OSB, popularly known as Fr Joe, from Glenstal Abbey (famous for its singing of Gregorian chant). My cousin Philippa was one of those singing that day. Long afterwards, when he was retired, I met Tom Mac Cormack on the doorstep at the 2002 general election. We had a lengthy conversation about everything except politics, ending up with a discussion on the respective merits of Bach and Handel.

At the outbreak of serious violence in Northern Ireland, the normalisation of relations between Churches in the Republic meant that generally, outside occasional serious incidents in border counties, the Protestant minority were not vulnerable to boycotts or other reactions on account of the conflict, that had occurred sporadically because of attacks on Catholics in Belfast in the early 1920s and mid-1930s.

Ecumenism was not welcomed by everyone. Despite this, there may have been a dawning realisation that being perceived as a monolith, was not necessarily to the long-term advantage of the Catholic Church. Unfortunately, mainstream Protestant churches in Northern Ireland found themselves under pressure from hardline anti-Catholic demagoguery, with every ecumenical act or gesture liable to be denounced as betrayal and used as an excuse for personalised harassment.

Healthy nationalism

National feeling is not just legitimate, but essential to social cohesion and stability. Crucial to a healthy nationalism are decisions, in the legal and political sphere first, but preferably also reflected in popular sentiment, as to who belongs. In Ireland, nationalism historically has been strongly connected to religion. Since the 17th Century, Irish nationalism oscillated between the conviction that its foundation was an Irish Catholic nation, originally formed by a merger between the two nations of mediaeval Ireland, Anglo-Norman and Gaelic, under pressure from Reformation and Plantation, and the more aspirational inclusive vision of the United Irishmen and Young Ireland. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, when, post-French Revolution, nations began to be invested with rights to independence and sovereignty, the Irish had to contend either with denials that it was a nation (“a country not a nation”, as Sir Edward Carson put it, debating the Government of Ireland Bill in 1920), or alternatively that it was two nations, two Irish nations as W.F. Monypenny put it in a book published around the time of the third Home Rule Bill in 1912, the implication being that the demands of one negated the demands of the other. Both Redmond and Pearse vehemently denounced the two-nations theory as heresy, because it blocked all-Ireland self-rule.

The 1916 Proclamation is a one-nation document, promising to cherish all the children of the nation equally, and oblivious of differences carefully fostered between majority and minority in the past, leading my father the historian Nicholas Mansergh to comment in 1975 that “there was no easy going back on that”. However, there was a tension between ideal and reality, reflected in Connolly’s order in 1916 that there was to be no shot fired in Ulster. The leadership of the rebellion did not want accusations afterwards that the Rising had been a sectarian bloodbath, as was claimed by loyalist history post-1798. Fr Michael O’Flanagan, from 1917 vice-president of Sinn Féin, a Roscommon-based priest often in trouble with his bishop, defended going ahead without unionists, on the basis that they were different and had excluded themselves. His two-nations opinion was seized on by Lloyd George to challenge the Sinn Féin demand for a united independent republic.

The Protestant population outside the future Northern Ireland was largely on the sidelines during the Irish revolution, its mainly unionist sympathies placing it on the losing side. When its future looked precarious, in May 1922 three of its leaders went to Griffith and Collins to ask whether they wanted Protestants to stay or to leave. Even if little could be done for their security short term, the official desire was that they should stay. In the 1937 Constitution, the minority churches were all recognised, while the Catholic Faith was recognised as that of the great majority (a formula first used in the Concordat of 1802 between France during the Consulate and the Vatican under Pope Pius VII). While there was a good deal of ambivalence on both sides for a generation, one of the important achievements of independent Ireland as well as of the religious leaders of the minority was to secure the commitment and contribution of a small but significant community, assisted in the 1960s by ecumenism and later acceptance of pluralism.