Brendan Clifford

      Part Two (Part One appeared in the November issue of Irish Political Review)

 It follows from the Jewish decision to continue living as a nation after the territorial base of nationhood was lost, by tightening up on their internal connection, and to live as minorities in host nations, with which they will not merge, and to live by providing certain services to those host nations which would tend to arouse hostility, even if provided by the Gentiles themselves.  (Bear in mind that the Goy are benighted nobodies in the eternal scheme of things.  The God of Moses has not spoken to them.)

Jesus was rejected as a false Messiah because he did not seem to be equipped to restore the world to the order it lost when Adam was tempted by Eve into the world of Good and Evil, and he made confused statements about the Law, and in the end he was easily killed.

And the Christians themselves were despondent when Jesus died so meekly and then did not return in an explosion of Shock and Awe to bring a suitable conclusion to the world.  It is apparent from the Gospels themselves—the only account of the matter that there is—that the claim that somebody met him on the road a few days later carried little convictions.

Then Paul came along.  He was an orthodox Jew (a Saddeucean, I suppose) and a Roman soldier and citizen.  He heard the stories about Jesus.  Certain elements of them struck root in his imagination and, on the strength of them, he set out on a great propaganda campaign to remake humanity from the inside.  He acted in the first instance on the Jews dispersed around the Empire, and then on Gentiles for whom the credibility of Roman or Greek Gods was wearing thin.

I think it would not be completely wide of the mark to say that Paul brought about a change of heart on the part of the human race on which he acted—or that he made a slight addition to the contents of whatever it is that is metaphorically called the heart.

George Moore, the first novelist of nationalist Ireland—leaving aside Griffin, Carleton, and Kickham, who wrote before the post-Gaelic Irish took on the definite outline of a nation—describes how his father, a Catholic gentleman of Connacht whose family had somehow held onto a landed estate during the Penal Laws—discussed this matter with Archbishop McHale, who voted against Papal Infallibility at the First Vatican Congress.  Moore’s father was of the opinion that Paul was the actual founder of Christianity.

Such things were not discussed in 20th century Ireland, where the Church tried to secure itself by curbing doubtful thoughts.  The Christianity of nationalist Ireland was a kind of Jacobin Catholic nationalism.  This was an entirely new venture in Ireland, as I showed in Church & State articles in the early 1970s, which appeared as a pamphlet, The Rise Of Papal Power In Ireland.  The foundations of this power were flimsy, and it collapsed, apparently at a touch, about twenty years later.

An alternative form of religion was available.  It might be described as a rebellious Jacobite form.  In this form, which was in accordance with the historical form of Christianity in Ireland, there was a national intermediary between the Pope and the Church in Ireland.  I published an account of the conflict between the two called The Veto Controversy.  It met with no response.

The Veto in question was a proposal by Henry Grattan in the Union Parliament in 1808 that Catholic Emancipation—meaning the abolition of the Test Oath which prevented Catholics from sitting in Parliament though elected to it—should be enacted along with a provision that the Government could veto the appointment of particular individuals to Bishoprics.  Grattan, a Protestant of the Established Church, saw nothing objectionable in such an arrangement.  Neither did the Catholic Bishops—who had all been trained in the Continental system because of the Penal Laws.  And neither did the Vatican.  It was the kind of arrangement it had with all European states, Catholic and Protestant.

Where national Governments existed, it made agreements with them about the conduct of the Universal Church in the national state.  It was only in missionary territories that the Vatican exercised direct control.

But Grattan’s Veto proposal was vigorously opposed by the Catholic middle class that was in the process of taking over Dublin from the Ascendancy Protestants who had built it, and were abandoning it because the abolition of the Irish Parliament had deprived them of independent control of it.

The dispute went on for about 20 years.  O’Donnell, who was an honorary member of the Ascendancy at first, adapted to the radical feeling of the new Catholic middle class and became a militant anti-Vetoist.  The Bishops were made to recant their support of the Veto.  

British Ministers were not enthusiastic for it.  A distaste for Catholicism was inbred in them.  The strictly conformist Protestantism of the Nonconformists was on the rise with the approach of Reform.  Dealing with Roman Bishops—agents of the Anti-Christ—would have felt like touching pitch.

So, in the end, Catholic Emancipation was enacted unconditionally.

The first part of O’Connell’s slogan, “A free Church in a free State” was given effect.  When a British-approved state was set up by the Treatyites ninety-three years later, there was no question of amending the Church/State relationship—or absence of a relationship—of 1829.

Rejection of the Veto made the Irish Church a missionary Church in relation to its Irish flock.  The Church was remade on radical doctrinaire lines by the Vatican Plenipotentiary, Cardinal Cullen.  It was Jacobin in the sense that it was remade on first principles—treating traditional practices as deviancy.  I knew from experience that there were areas where it remained strongly Jacobite in spirit and practice.  I lived in one such area into my early twenties, and what I later understood to be the Cullenism in Joyce’s Ulysses grated on me.  But Jacobite persistence rested only on local stubbornness.  It had no representation in authority.  Authority was missionary and was external in source.

In Ireland there was a free Church in a (more or less) free state.  The State, whether Free State or Republic, had no structural connection with the Church within it.  Its State ceased to be British but its Church did not cease to be Roman.

The State as a secular State, in the sense that it had no formal connection with religion—and had no means of exerting influence on the religious body that made up most of the population.  It was a secular democratic state with a free Church within it.  A secular State has itself no principle except that it has no religious dimension, and democratic procedure has itself no content.  It must govern according to the opinion of its populace, and in Ireland the opinion of the populace was largely determined by the free Church to which it belonged.

The Church in question had no independent existence as a secular institution with material means of influencing the opinion of its members.  It had no control over secular life.  It had no great estates, as the Protestant Church that preceded it had.  It did not control admission to the the professions.  It was entirely dependent on the financial contributions of the populace, and it had no legal means of enforcing payment.

And yet this materially powerless institution lay at the heart of the public opinion which provided the legislative machinery of the Free State with the matter for legislation.

When I first saw Spain it was still fascist, and it was usually described on the Left as a clerical dictatorship.  But one of the first things that struck me about it was the timid character of the clergy, compared with the bold and confident attitude of the priests in Ireland. I inquired about it and discovered that in Spain the State allocated a role in the State to the clergy and limited them to it.  The clergy had no independent power and did not seek it.  They had their place in the public arrangement.

This arrangement was formally agreed with Rome, which was always willing to make arrangements with national states limiting the operation of the Universal Church in their territory.

Rome in its post-Imperial Papal development was not totalitarian.  In fact it seems to have been the medium in which both European nations and the very idea of a division between Church and State originated.

Back then, when I saw Spain for the first time, and was greatly surprised by it, the Irish public seemed perfectly content with the Church which they were financing by periodic instalments, paid publicly on weekly and seasonal occasions in the course of the year.

A very short while later the Church had collapsed, was being trampled on, and was denounced as a material tyranny which had somehow been imposed on the country, and had been overthrown!

The Dublin middle class, in a new mood, did not want to be reminded that nobody had imposed a missionary Church on them.  It was they who had insisted on it, by rejecting a renewal of the Jacobite Church/State relationship with the Hanoverian state.

A Vetoist settlement would have made the State responsible in some degree for the conduct of the Church, and if that had been the system given to the Free State by the British, some of the absurd middle class complaints of recent times might have been averted, and there might even be a viable national culture in existence.

The Jacobite approach was conducive to memory and continuity.  What Jacobeanism led to was a series of ruptures.

Brendan Clifford