The papal cross in Phoenix Park, Dublin, marks the site of the Solemn Pontifical High Mass, the high point of the 1932 Eucharistic Congress. (istock.com)
We concluded the second part of our article with a brief mention of the 1932 Eucharistic Congress, which was held in Dublin. While Pope Pius XI chose Dublin for the Congress to coincide with the 1500th anniversary of the arrival of St. Patrick in Ireland, there could hardly be any doubt that it was also an acknowledgement of the faith of the Irish who had suffered persecution for centuries. The location of the 1932 Congress had been announced in December 1929, in the wake of the centenary celebrations of Catholic Emancipation.
According to the Irish Times in December 1930, the then-President of the Permanent Eucharistic Congress Committee, Bishop Thomas Louis Heylen of Belgium, said that the centenary celebrations “…had interested the world in Dublin and that he had been informed that the gathering in 1929 was bigger than at any Eucharistic Congress.” Ireland, having come through several wars over the previous decade, had proved itself, even before the Eucharistic Congress, as a shining example of fidelity to the Catholic faith.
Space does not permit us to dwell too much on the details of the 1932 Eucharistic Congress. However, it was undoubtedly a resounding success. In preparation for the Congress, parishes around Dublin conducted retreats for men and women, and at the beginning of the Congress, midnight Mass was offered in every church in Dublin, including a Solemn Pontifical Mass at St. Mary’s Pro-Cathedral. Mass meetings of men and women with Cardinal Lauri in Dublin’s Phoenix Park attracted attendances of 250,000 and 200,000 respectively.
St Mary's Pro-Cathedral, the episcopal seat of the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Dublin and Primate of Ireland, was the location of a Solemn Pontifical Mass during the 1932 Eucharistic Congress in Dublin. (istock.com)
The climax of the Congress was the Solemn Pontifical High Mass in Phoenix Park followed by a procession and Benediction at Dublin’s O’Connell Bridge, which was attended by up to one million people. The Free State Army provided the guard of honor and gave the royal salute with their swords — according to a contemporary account by Colonel Seán Clancy, this was the first time that a royal salute was given in Ireland, as well as being the biggest guard of honor ever given for any affair in the history of the state.
As an aside, readers might be interested to know that the Venerable Fulton Sheen mentions a “tragic failure of memory” when he attempted to recite Joseph Mary Plunkett’s poem, “I See His Blood upon the Rose,” during the Eucharistic Congress in Dublin. Having been distracted by the applause of the audience a few moments before, he forgot the words at the ninth line. Admitting that he forgot the words, “thousands and thousands of Irish jaws dropped in disappointment, and when an Irish jaw drops, it collapses.” But what caused the applause that led to this “tragic failure of memory”? Sheen recounts in his autobiography, “Treasure in Clay,” that the audience had broken out into extended applause when he spoke the following words: “Ireland has never recognized any other king but Christ, and no other queen but Mary.” In this we see the great love of the Irish for Christ their King and Mary their Queen. Connected to this we may also note that Ireland was the first country in the world to be consecrated to Christ the King in 1946.
Servant of God Frank Duff, founder of the Legion of Mary
As Ireland moved into a period of independence in the twentieth century, many saintly men and women were raised up by the Lord to secure the prosperity of our Catholic religion. Most prominent among these, perhaps, was a layman, Servant of God Frank Duff (1889-1980), the founder of the Legion of Mary. Influenced primarily by St. Louis de Montfort’s writings, the Legion was founded in Dublin in 1921, its aim being to help Catholics to live out their baptismal promises in the service of the Church through fraternity, prayer, and active apostolate. As a lay organization, the Legion was sometimes met with suspicion in its early years. However, in a few short years there were branches (or Praesidia) throughout Ireland and a few in Scotland. Within a decade it had spread to France, Canada, the United States and even as far as India. Today the Legion of Mary remains the largest apostolic organization of laypersons in the Catholic Church. Such was the influence of Frank Duff and the Legion of Mary that Pope Paul VI invited him to attend the Second Vatican Council as an observer in 1965. Leo Jozef Cardinal Suenens recorded the moment when Mr. Duff entered the assembly:
I had the joy of having the Pope invite Frank Duff as an auditor to the Vatican Council. When Cardinal Heenan, Archbishop of Westminster, who held the floor at precisely the moment that Frank Duff took his place, saw him enter, he publicly announced the fact to the assembly. The 2,500 bishops rose to give him a warm and moving ovation. It was an unforgettable moment: the thanks of the universal Church to the pioneer of the lay apostolate.
Decades of decline
Yes, there were undoubtedly a number of high points for the Catholic faith in Ireland in the twentieth century. However, it is undeniable that the faith has suffered quite a catastrophic decline over the past sixty years or so. How did a country which had persevered faithfully for one and a half millennia fall so quickly in recent decades? How did its fidelity to Our Lord, Our Lady and the Church give way so rapidly to practices which had barely existed since the dark days before the arrival of St. Patrick?
Several reasons are given by Irish people for the decline in religious practice: some will say that it was due to the growing secularisation and increasing prosperity of the country, others will point to the horrific revelations of abuse which have plagued the Church in Ireland since the 1990s, while others will lay the blame squarely at the feet of those who initiated drastic changes in the Church — particularly in her liturgy — some sixty years ago. Readers will surely draw their own conclusions. However, the abuse scandals, while undoubtedly dealing a blow to the credibility of the Church in Ireland, came in the wake of decades of decline, although it is possible that they accelerated this decline.
Bishop Jeremiah Newman, Bishop of Limerick and former President of St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth
It is more difficult to ascertain to what extent secularism has been responsible for decline in religious practice in Ireland. Some would certainly argue that prosperity and materialism tend to result in fewer people practicing religion since many people tend to forget their need of God when things are going well. In addition to this, the newly independent Irish state was not insulated from societal changes occurring all over the western world. The potential impact of these changes was observed in a 1958 paper, “Priestly Vocations in Ireland,” by Bishop Jeremiah Newman, Bishop of Limerick and former President of St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth. Although the paper focused on vocations, Bishop Newman made the following observations with regard to the new and changing Ireland:
The Irish scene is changing in many respects, in a way that could eventually have adverse effects on the number of vocations. For one thing, now that the country has attained political independence, religion and patriotism are not as closely allied as they were before. There is also the fact of a gradually improving economic system, bringing new careers and greater opportunity of suitable employment. Side by side with this, there is a growing urbanisation, as a result of an industrial policy that has somewhat neglected the rural areas. These changes, I feel, could lead to a diminution in the number of vocations.
Although Bishop Newman undoubtedly made sound observations, he only referred to them as potential issues. Ireland was still a staunchly Catholic country. Only two years before Bishop Newman wrote his paper, the Irish Bishops, on the conclusion of the 1956 Plenary Council in Maynooth, issued a statement which included an appraisal of the Catholic faith in Ireland. It stated:
It is our privilege to serve a community whose love of God, loyalty to His Church and devotion to its head, the Vicar of Christ, are worthy of the highest praise. High standards of morality and of fidelity to religious duties, cordial relations between clergy and laity, sanctity of family life — these traditional features of Irish Catholicism are as manifest now as they have ever been.
In addition, there are many evidences of progress towards fuller Christian living. Our country is deeply conscious of its duty to God and to religion. We have witnessed a wonderful expansion of missionary effort in Ireland at a time when religion is being cruelly persecuted in so many parts of the world. Communistic and anti-religious influences, once they have been recognised as such, have gained little support here; indeed, the reaction to them has chiefly been a more active participation by the laity in the Church’s apostolate and a wider interest in her teaching.
Vocations in Ireland
So, while potential challenges were identified, as seen in Bishop Newman’s paper, Catholicism was still in a healthy state at least until the mid-1950s. From 1920 to 1956 the number of diocesan clergy increased from 3081 to 3772, while the number of religious clergy increased by almost 1000 to 1717. In 1956 there was one priest for every 593 Catholics. Within a decade, this growth would be unravelling at an alarming rate.
As we have looked to vocations statistics as one measure of the continued growth of Catholicism in Ireland in the mid-twentieth century, the vocations statistics tell one part of the story of its decline. As mentioned in part two of this article, the National Seminary in Maynooth had a total of 546 diocesan seminarians for the academic year 1962/63. Within six years this number had fallen to 395, and by the academic year 1974/75 there were 280 seminarians — almost half the number of twelve years previously. There was also a greater proportion of men leaving seminary by the mid-1970s — 15% compared to about 9% in the early 1960s.
We must also bear in mind that Maynooth College was not the only seminary for diocesan priests in Ireland — there were several others, including Holy Cross College in Dublin and St Patrick’s College in Thurles. Most of these seminaries had closed by the late-1990s, with the last of them — St. Malachy’s College in Belfast — closing in 2018. The desire for the Church to “come into the world” was rapidly realized in Maynooth: the wearing of the soutane was abolished by the mid-1960s (to be replaced with a suit, which was then replaced by informal attire), the supposedly rigid lecture system was supplemented with seminars and discussion groups, and rules on silence were relaxed. In his bicentenary history of Maynooth College, the late Monsignor Patrick Corish recounted how staff were consulted about the governance of the seminary in the mid-1960’s — of the replies which survive, only one did not approve of radical change. This dissenting voice “spoke of the need to take steps to counter what it called a crisis of faith and crisis of obedience.” This crisis of obedience would be exemplified in the late-1960s with prominent professors publicly rejecting Pope Paul VI’s encyclical, Humanae Vitae — without any censure whatsoever.
In terms of the general Catholic population of Ireland, it was estimated in the early 1970s that weekly Mass attendance was over 90 percent. Weekly Mass attendance currently stands at approximately 30 percent, while in some areas of Dublin it is reported to be less than 2 percent. While Mass attendance is still high compared to most of western Europe, one cannot but be astonished at how rapidly Ireland went from being “the most Catholic country in the world” (as Cardinal Montini had called it) to being a country which in 2024 seems to have more in common with pre-Christian Ireland than it has with the Ireland of sixty years ago. While the Irish Catholics of barely a century ago seemed to pride themselves on their devotion to the Mass, to Christ the King, and to Our Lady, Irish society today seems to pride itself on how radically it can repudiate its Catholic past. In 2015, Ireland became the first country in the world to legalize same-sex “marriage” by popular vote — 62 percent of voters approved, many among them undoubtedly nominal Catholics. In 2018, Ireland — again by referendum — allowed for the drafting of abortion legislation, which has resulted in over 30,000 abortions since 2019. Over 66 percent of voters approved.
The situation seems bleak. Ireland — that country from which so many around the world proudly claim ancestry — appears to be crumbling, and so-called Catholic Ireland has almost disappeared. However, we are not to be without hope. There can be a “new springtime,” but only fidelity to Christ and to the traditions of the Church as preached by St. Patrick almost 1600 years ago will revive the Catholic faith in Ireland. St. Patrick managed to win the Irish for Christ by being a faithful and strong shepherd; surely with faithful shepherds, Ireland can once again be won over to Christ.
By Father Gerard Quirke, FSSP, a priest of the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter who serves as associate pastor of St. Benedict Parish in Fort Worth. The fraternity is a clerical Society of Apostolic Life of Pontifical Right , that is, a community of priests who do not take religious vows, but who work together for a common mission in the Catholic Church, under the authority of the Holy See. The fraternity was canonically erected by Pope St. John Paul II in 1988. Ordained on June 3, 2018, Fr. Quirke was born and raised in Galway on the west coast of Ireland.
Catholic history of Ireland, Irish Catholic, Father Gerard Quirke, Catholicism in Ireland, trending-english