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| Migration Histories > Irish > Culture and Festivals |
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The Catholic Church | |||||||||||||||
The Irish community in Britain is popularly associated with the Catholic Church, but the reality is more complex than this. There are Irish people of other faiths and those who have none. However, most Irish migrants have come from a Catholic background and their presence is often documented in Catholic registers of baptism, marriage and burial.
Most such registers are held by Roman Catholic Diocesan Archives, but some early registers, mainly pre-dating the introduction of registration by the state, are held by the National Archives.
These registers occasionally record the place of birth in Ireland of the parents.
The Catholic faith as practised in the towns and cities of 19th century England was different to the forms it had taken in rural Ireland. Here worship involved pilgrimages and 'patterns', home devotions and family prayers, sometimes accompanied by superstitions and folklore tradition.
In Ireland, popular Catholic culture played an important part in people's lives and, in rural areas, might be associated with pre-Christian rituals and magic. Belief in fairies, ghosts, witchcraft and healing magic was widespread in the west of Ireland into the 20th century, but was already dying out.
In the 1880s, one Dingle farmer told Jeremiah Curtin, a collector of folklore, that when he was young 'nine men in ten believed in fairies, and said so, now only one man in ten will say that he believes in them'. The spread of Catholic Church schools played a part in this process as such beliefs were often dismissed by teachers as imaginary and untrue.
Regular formal attendance at the service of the mass was not always possible. Anti-Catholic legislation had only been repealed in 1829, and the Catholic church did not have enough priests or churches to minister adequately to the rural population.
As a result, services were held irregularly in farmhouses and cottages. One census of church attendance in 1834 in Irish-speaking areas of the west and south-west found 20 to 40% of eligible Catholics were going to Mass. Some Marist Fathers, working in the East End of London in the 1850s, spoke of how the Irish migrants arriving there lacked a basic awareness of 'the most essential truths of our Religion'.
Popular Catholicism often revolved around 'patterns' - celebrations of saints' days - and pilgrimages to holy wells or other sacred sites, such as St Patrick's Purgatory, an island in Lough Derg in Donegal.
These pilgrimages might involve elaborate rituals, such as circling the well three times on the knees, moving from east to west and reciting certain prayers (sometimes placing a stone in a pile for each prayer said). St John's Feast at midsummer was celebrated with hill-top fires.
Priests were sometimes believed to possess miracle-working powers. The Belfast Protestant Journal ridiculed the sprinkling of holy water on diseased potato fields during the Famine in an attempt to ward off the blight.
In England home devotions were still important as a source of consolation in the life of the poor, as Tom Barclay recalled of his youth in mid-19th century Leicester:
Before going to bed we all knelt down, after a supper of Indian meal, on the bare uneven brick floor and recited the Rosary, father leading off: one Our Father to ten Hail Mary's: one of the prayers spoken fifty times by the help of a string of beads: and we arose feeling good and comforted and strengthened for the morrow's work. Tom Barclay, Memories and Medleys: The Autobiography of A Bottle-washer(Leicester, 1934)
The emphasis of Catholicism, both in Ireland and elsewhere, was increasingly on regular weekly attendance at Mass. The so-called 'Devotional Revolution' in Ireland from the 1850s, part of a European Catholic Revival, and perhaps reinforced by opposition to the rule of British Protestants, left the Irish, in the words of Roger Swift, 'the most practising Catholics in the world'. There was, he went on to say, 'a whole new range of chapel and priest-centred devotions to the Blessed Sacrament, the Virgin and Saints'.
As a result of this 'revolution', confession and communion became more frequent and there was a new 'Roman' emphasis on music, singing, candles, vestments and incense. Traditions such as the funeral wake were actively discouraged or allowed to die away, and little was done to preserve devotions in Irish.
One Marist priest in the London district of Spitalfields in 1852 complained that 'the seven or eight thousand catholics who live here are devoid of all religious instruction, living and dying without the sacraments. Ten years later, it was claimed that one seventh of their parishioners had joined parish societies. However, the Rev. J S Flanagan, writing in 1864, claimed that vast numbers of the Irish immigrants and their descendants are living in habitual neglect of every religious duty ie they never come to mass, and never make their Easter confession and communion...I am inclined to think they are the majority'.
The Catholic church in England was itself, according to the historian David Fitzpatrick, 'profoundly altered by the Irish influx. Between 1800 and 1870 it was transfigured from being a small, proud, rich, and unpopular body to become a large prudent, poorer and unpopular body, with a vast majority of Irish adherents.'
Irish priests dominated the parishes of Liverpool and formed one third of London's Catholic secular priesthood, although the upper levels of the hierarchy remained dominated by English priests. The Catholic church in Britain sought to remain aloof from nationalist politics and politically was more concerned with the provision of church schools than home rule for Ireland.
As the Catholic presence grew, there were occasional outbursts of anti-Catholic rioting and attacks on churches. In Stockport in 1852, for example, the church of St Philip and St James was desecrated and the local Irish Catholics intimidated. This attack was sparked off by hostility to a Catholic charity school procession.
In the late 1860s, William Murphy, of the Protestant Evangelical Mission, toured the north-west, giving provocative lectures with titles such as 'The Teaching of Maynooth and the Confessional Unmasked', which attacked the Catholic faith. There were also regular clashes with Irish Protestants when processions were being held.
In the late 18th century, however, London had only three permanent Roman Catholic chapels generally open for public worship, and these were destroyed in the Gordon Riots of that year. One of the main churches to be established subsequently, serving the Irish community in St Giles, was St Patrick's Church, Soho Square.
By 1848, London's Roman Catholic community was sufficiently well-established to consecrate its own cathedral church.
Many other Catholic churches or mission stations were set up in this period, and their growth can be plotted from the annually published Catholic Directory, although, by 1851, it is estimated that there was still only seating for less than one-fifth of London's Catholic population. A religious census of that year showed less than one catholic in three attended mass in London on census Sunday.
By the end of the 19th century, the Roman Catholic presence was well-established throughout London, and a building boom of Roman Catholic churches was well underway. Many of these churches were furnished with brightly coloured pictures, statues, reliquaries and altars.
As well as encouraging devotional confraternitries, such as the Confraternity of St Brigid or the Sodality of the Children of Mary, the local Catholic church also provided a wide range of social services to its members. These included schools, often run by religious orders such as the Jesuits, Franciscans and Sisters of Mercy, social clubs, and charitable assistance through bodies such as the St Vincent de Paul Society.
The range of societies in the parish of St Mary's Batley is outlined in A Hundred Years 1870-1970. The History of St Mary of the Angels, Batley by Denis Walsh (1970). They included the St Vincent de Paul Society; the Sodality of the Children of Mary; the Boys' Brigade; the Union of Catholic Mothers; the Young Christian Workers; several Youth Clubs; the Guild of St Stephen (altar servers) and an Operatic Society.
In the 1920s, Liverpool had what has been described as a 'a micro-welfare state within the city', run mainly by Irish nuns. These included children's societies, a home for prostitutes, reform schools, orphanages, nurseries, prisoners' aid and clubs for the deaf and dumb and for merchant seamen. A Catholic Thrift Society provided personal insurance against unemployment and sickness.
These social concerns and activities have continued well into modern times, although many initiatives have now been overtaken by the provisions of the post-1945 Welfare State.
In Slough, Father Eamonn Casey of Limerick established a housing society in the 1960s to provide affordable loans for those looking to buy their own homes.
The church was an important focus for community life. In Diary of an Exile, Donall MacAmlaigh recalled that, 'Sunday is the day we like best here in Northampton. All the Irish gather here in the club after Mass - men, women and children'.
For some partisan observers, a comparison between the urban English poor and rustic Irish immigrants strengthened their belief in a romantic, morally superior Irish peasantry steeped in the Catholic faith.
The singular purity of the Irish heart, which, next to the fidelity with which it has clung to the olden faith, is the proudest boast of the Irish people, if not so signally marked here as at home, is nevertheless immeasurably superior to that of the people among whom our people are forced to reside. Go where you may, ask whom you will and the reply is the same. There is no comparison between the morality of the Irish and English people in the same class, or indeed in any class in the English towns. The Nation, July 1872
The journalist, Hugh Heinrick, writing in the Dublin-based newspaper The Nation in July 1872, had no doubts about the moral superiority of the Irish, claiming 'there is a perpetual epidemic of vice in London. Irish virtue is the only prophylactic which resists it'.
John Denvir' s autobiography, The Life Story of an Old Rebel, tells of a neighbour, one Mrs Crowley, who used to say: 'Sin is it ? Sure I never heard of sin till I came to Liverpool; there's no sin in Cor-r-k'.
Certainly some Irish people who came to this country regarded English society as immoral and feared the effects of it on their children. Tom Barclay recalled:
Whenever an English man or woman did anything disreputable, my mother was wont to remark 'Ah well, sure, what better could one expect from the breed of King Harry?'
Tom Barclay, Memories and Medleys: The Autobiography of A Bottle-washer (Leicester, 1934)
[Source : BL]
This perceived immorality is still a concern to some Irish parents today, who fear the impact of a more secular society on the lives of their children. However, Ireland itself is becoming increasingly secularized, at least in the towns.
In England, the rise of a more secular society has had more of an impact on the Church of England than the Roman Catholic Church, whose numbers of regular Sunday worshippers now match or exceed those who regularly attend the Established Church.
Creators: Aidan Lawes | ||||||||||||||||
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