Greg DalyGreg Daly explores the extent to which the Rising was a Catholic rebellion
“We cannot adequately honour the men of 1916 if we do not work and strive to bring about the Ireland of their desire,” declared President Eamon de Valera in 1966, but it has not always been easy to say what kind of Ireland the rebels of 1916 sought to bring about.
The Rising was for decades seen as an almost holy affair, led by men who were spoken of in quasi-religious terms and who had sought to establish Ireland as a free and pure Catholic nation. Historians have long dismantled and refuted such simplistic readings of the Rising, but in rightly doing so have inadvertently left the ground free for others to claim the Rising for all manner of causes that would have been alien to the rebels.
It should be no surprise to anyone studying the period to see that freedom of religion was the first liberty proclaimed for the citizens of the putative republic.
“The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens,” began the Proclamation’s section on citizens’ rights, and although this was almost certainly intended at least in part as a response to the Ulster Covenant claim that home rule would be “subversive of our civil and religious freedom”, it reflected too how the national cause had long been inextricable from Catholicism.
Oppression
Discrimination against Catholics since Penal times had forged close ties between Catholicism and nationalism that flourished long past the ending of formal oppression; to many who took part in the Rising and the subsequent War of Independence, integral to the idea of Irish freedom was the freedom to be Catholic.
It is startling to see how few of the revolutionary generation the Bureau of Military History later interviewed would claim they were driven by economic or class grievances – especially given the impoverished living conditions and high mortality rates of early 20th-Century Dublin. Even members of James Connolly’s Irish Citizen Army would typically eschew claims of economic oppression in favour of celebrating previous rebellions and lamenting historical English wrongs including the oppression and persecution of Catholics.
For most Volunteers around the country preparations for the Rising began with their Easter devotions. “All the Cork volunteers,” for example, “went to Confession on Easter Saturday night,” according to Riobárd Langford, and it was only when the police “saw so many of the Cork Volunteers going to Holy Communion on Sunday morning”, Eamonn Ahern said, “that they began to suspect something was going on”.
Catholic devotions and sacraments were ubiquitous in the Rising. In the GPO, for example, where men queued for Confession beside the ammunition dump, the Rosary was prayed every evening and often throughout the day. One volunteer, Frank Burke, observed that it was not unusual “to see a Volunteer with his rifle grasped firmly in his hands and his Rosary beads hanging from his fingers”.
The Rosary was similarly recited every night at the South Dublin Union, where one Volunteer, Joseph Doolan, accidentally surprised Eamon Ceannt during his prayers. “I knocked, opened the door and saw him kneeling in the room, his Rosary beads in his hands, and the tears running down his cheeks.”
A large white car was designated the “General Communion Building” at Jacobs Biscuit Factory, where Máire Nic Shiubhlaing – who had played Cathleen Ni Houlihan in the eponymous play on the Abbey Theatre’s opening night 12 years earlier – said “every man in the place went to Confession”.
Thomas MacDonagh’s brother John later related how the Capuchin friars heard Confessions there, and described Major John McBride telling him of the satisfaction he had derived from his first Confession in many years. “Just kept putting it off,” he explained.
Devotions continued after the rebels surrendered, with W.T. Cosgrave describing how one night at Richmond Barracks, after the Rosary had been recited and the captive rebels had settled down, MacBride told him his life-long prayer had been answered. He had “said three Hail Marys every day that he should not die until he had fought the British in Ireland.”
Given how Catholicism and nationalism were intertwined, it is perhaps unsurprising that all those executed for their roles in the Rising died as Catholics, including Sir Roger Casement, who previously told his then fellow Protestant Bulmer Hobson the typical Irish Catholic man was a “poor crawling coward”, fearing the priest “like the devil” and terrified for his “miserable” soul.
Fearfulness
It was because of this fearfulness, he said, that “freedom of Ireland can only come through Protestants”. On August 2, however, Casement was received into the Catholic Church in London’s Pentonville Prison, less than a day before he was hanged.
Pearse, of course, was famously devout, a Catholic mystic who believed only a “blood sacrifice” could redeem Ireland . Imprisoned before his execution he penned a poem, ‘A Mother Speaks’, in which he casts his mother as likening him to Christ.
“Dear Mary, that didst see thy first-born Son / Go forth to die amid the scorn of men /For whom He died, / Receive my first-born son into thy arms, / Who also hath gone out to die for men,” he wrote.
Con Colbert, a daily massgoer who had taken Tom Clarke’s wife Kathleen to task for organising a ceilidh during Lent – unbeknownst to him, the Palm Sunday ceilidh was intended as cover for an IRB meeting – and who began Easter Monday by attending an early Mass, was no less religious.
Neither was Seán Heuston, whose brother Michael, then in formation in Tallaght to become a Dominican priest, has left a detailed account of his last encounter with his brother and Seán’s final appeal “Pray, pray hard for me,” or ICA Commandant Michael Mallin, who on seeing his infant son for the last time urged him to become a priest.
Willy Pearse and Michael O’Hanrahan were similarly religious, with the latter being described by the Capuchin Fr Augustine, who attended him before his death, as “one of the truest and noblest characters that it has ever been my privilege to meet”.
Éamonn Ceannt had personally received a papal blessing from Pope Pius X in September 1908 when visiting Rome as piper for the Irish contingent of the Catholic Young Men’s Society, and it was only because of a statue of Our Lady of Lourdes that Thomas Kent acquired for his household oratory that there were not more casualties in the gunfight at the house, his brother William believed.
Ned Daly’s devotion showed itself perhaps most poignantly when he was shown to the bodies of Pearse, Clarke, and MacDonagh in a Kilmainham shed the day before his own execution. According to the Dublin Metropolitan Police’s sergeant Michael Soughley, after Daly stood to attention and saluted the remains: “He then took off his cap, knelt down and prayed for some time. He put on his cap again, saluted again and returned to his escort.”
The son of a papal count and a distant relative of the martyred – and later canonised – St Oliver Plunkett, Joseph Plunkett was a lifelong devout Catholic, who famously married his convert wife Grace Gifford just hours before his execution, the two being permitted to exchange no words beyond their wedding vows.
His father visited Pope Benedict XV in early April, giving the Pope a letter containing an apparently garbled account of plans for the upcoming rebellion. Claims of a subsequent papal blessing thrilled the rebels, showing that the republic they wanted was a far cry from that of Wolfe Tone, who had famously lamented Napoleon’s failure to “destroy forever the papal tyranny”.
“Don’t you know that the Pope has blessed this thing?” Thomas MacDonagh asked his fellow Volunteer Liam Ó Bríain on Good Friday. His delight may seem strange given how, though deeply religious in his youth when he explored a vocation to the Holy Ghost Fathers, MacDonagh had long ceased to be a practicing Catholic.
At the last, though, he too received the sacraments, and a document circulated in Dublin purporting to be his court martial speech. The document reported him as claiming he and his colleagues belonged to the “great unnumbered army of martyrs whose Captain is the Christ who died on Calvary”.
Widely regarded as a forgery, it was characteristic of MacDonagh, “both in feeling and language”, according to his brother John who believed it was genuine.
It is possible to overplay the Catholicism of the rebels, of course, as the Catholic Bulletin and others did in the Rising’s aftermath. MacDonagh was not the only rebel leader to have had complicated relationships with the Church and the Faith.
Tom Clarke, for instance, was in many ways an old-fashioned anti-clerical Fenian, suspicious of ‘faith and fatherland’ nationalism and all too wary of how the Church had long opposed the Irish Republican Brotherhood as a secret oath-bound society.
On the night before his execution, he told his wife he had dismissed the priest attending him as he had wanted him to express sorrow for his part in the Rising. “I told him to clear out of my cell quickly,” he said. “I was not sorry for what I had done, I gloried in it and the men who had been with me. To say I was sorry would be a lie, and I was not going to face my God with a lie on my tongue.”
Seán MacDiarmada, who harboured anti-clerical sentiments of his own, was visited in his final days by his friend Fr Patrick Browne from Maynooth.
Fr Browne later wrote that while MacDiarmada had spoken “fairly bitterly about the Church”, citing the treatment by Thurles clergy of the late Fenian Charles Kickham, he said while he had kept away from the Church for some time, “he had made his peace with God and had received the sacraments”.
Calvary
Having written in 1910 of how socialism and Catholicism could be compatible, shortly before the Rising James Connolly took to adopting the kind of religious language one might more naturally associate with Pearse, writing for example that “in all due humility and awe we recognise that of us, as of mankind at Calvary, it may truly be said ‘without the shedding of blood there is no redemption’”.
Despite his frustration with how the Church had, he believed, interfered in the national cause in the past, Connolly was another who ultimately found solace in his faith, taking Communion before his death and urging his Protestant wife Lillie to become Catholic, which she did some months later.
Hagiographic accounts of such leaders’ lives misrepresent them, blurring out their complexities in order to exalt them as saints in Ireland’s patriotic liturgy, but though it is clear that the leaders of the Rising had not wanted the new Ireland to be a narrowly sectarian state, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that the “terrible beauty” born at Easter 1916 was a cradle Catholic.