Sermonizing and Civilizing

The Catholic Record of Waterford and Lismore published a two-page obituary in 1919 describing the life and legacy of a beloved priest, Father Flavin of Clonmel, who served the parish for almost fifty years. After Flavin's death, Clonmel witnessed a great outpouring of public mourning, showcased by Flavin's funeral, in which “all classes and creeds were represented.” The Catholic Record honored Flavin's memory by depicting him as “kindly, warm-hearted, hospitable, generous—a true pastor, ever watchful for the interests of his flock.” Flavin also admirably performed his parochial duties: “[O]n each Sunday morning,” he “never failed to address his people in a simple, homely style, which gave to his words a directness and force that were singularly effective.”Footnote ⁶ The Catholic Record’s focus on Flavin's preaching reveals the importance of priestly language and style. It reminds us that sermons were public performances requiring clergymen to use language and rhetoric to their greatest effect.Footnote ⁷

According to Ian Dickson, the study of preaching and sermonizing in nineteenth-century Ireland, Great Britain, and the United States sheds light on the “complex relationship between religion and society” as well as “the transmission of ideas and the dissemination of religious belief in Victorian society.”Footnote ⁸ By the mid- to late nineteenth century, preaching and sermonizing were subjects of discussion by all different Christian faiths on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet as the work of Dickson demonstrates, although the historiography on Protestant and evangelical preaching is extensive, historians and scholars of religion have paid scant attention to Catholic preaching and sermonizing in the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁹

While the focus on preaching and sermonizing in Ireland was echoed across nineteenth-century Britain and the United States, the nineteenth-century Irish Catholic parish, as Nicholas Wolf has pointed out, was unique in that it was linguistically diverse: while the Mass was said in Latin and priests conducted their affairs primarily in English, many lay Catholics spoke Irish.Footnote ¹⁰ In the early nineteenth century, members of the Irish hierarchy remarked that the laity's ignorance of Latin compromised its religious understanding. As a result, some proposed Irish-language prayers and vespers.Footnote ¹¹ By the late nineteenth century, as the Irish population became largely English speaking, English-language prayer books and catechisms dominated. While the Mass was still said in Latin, the sermon usually was given in English. Still, the linguistic complexities of the parish endured through the late nineteenth century. In particular, regional variation persisted; in the north and east, English dominated, yet in many southern and western counties, Irish was still spoken. In the 1870s in Cloyne and Ross, for example, most children were catechized in Irish, and in parts of Connacht, priests attempted to preach in both English and Irish.Footnote ¹²

After 1850, English was the language used by most Irish Catholic priests, who often came from English-speaking, middle-class families and became immersed in an English-language world at seminaries such as Maynooth.Footnote ¹³ Even in Irish-speaking areas, then, many priests said the Mass in Latin and gave their sermons in English. In a world in which the Latin Mass and English-language sermons were not wholly comprehensible to all Irish Catholics, form mattered just as much as, if not more than, content.Footnote ¹⁴ Recognizing the impact that preaching could have on parishioners, Catholic commentators wrote advice manuals on the topic, laying out the ways in which Ireland's clergy could learn to communicate most effectively with its flock.Footnote ¹⁵ Like Vincentian Thomas McNamara, most writers encouraged priests to focus not only on the content of sermons but also on their form: “But I would impress upon you with all earnestness,” wrote McNamara, “that it is not what you say, but the manner in which you say it, that will make impression, and produce its true effect.”Footnote ¹⁶ McNamara's fellow Vincentian, Felix Zualdi, concurred. In his The Sacred Ceremonies of Low Mass, first published in Dublin in 1881, Zualdi advised clerics to pay close attention to the aural dimensions of the Mass:

For McNamara and Zualdi, control over pitch and tone determined a priest's success at Mass; the cleric's capacity to reach his parishioners and “excite devotion” depended on his skills in managing his rhetorical powers.Footnote ¹⁸ “Exciting devotion” was a common theme in preaching manuals in the nineteenth century. O. C. Edwards Jr. argues that “an emphasis on emotion instead of reason” in European Christian preaching dates to the upheavals of the early modern era but reached its height during the Protestant evangelical revivals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Footnote ¹⁹

Catholics McNamara and Zualdi, then, broadcast a message that was also common among contemporary Protestant evangelicals, and they did so through a form—the preaching and sermonizing manual—that also was widespread across Christian faiths. In Britain, Ireland, and the United States, preaching manuals gained popularity by the mid- to late nineteenth century, becoming more detailed and lengthier in the process. Like other nineteenth-century preaching manuals, Thomas J. Potter's Sacred Eloquence; or, the Theory and Practice of Preaching (1866) and The Spoken Word; or, The Art of Extemporary Preaching (1872) specifically instructed priests on how to construct an effective sermon. Potter emphasized that preaching was “the ordinary means by which men are brought under [priests'] influence” and that “the means by which the sacred orator proposes to himself to obtain his end is by instructing, by pleasing, and by moving his flock.”Footnote ²⁰ Some novice priests, wrote Potter, demonstrated great fear of the pulpit, approaching it “with fear and trembling” and leaving it “with an intense feeling of relief and thankfulness.”Footnote ²¹ The solution to such anxiety, according to Potter, was preparation. Here, Potter, writing in the 1870s, worried that some priests did not know their people well enough and therefore could not “speak to them in the language of the soul, in language which will move their hearts.”Footnote ²² These clerics, he asserted, must focus on topics that were familiar to their flock and express themselves in accessible language, the “language of the soul.” Potter also argued that most people forgot much of what the preacher said “an hour” after the sermon; therefore, the clergy should focus on “one great leading idea . . . one great truth.”Footnote ²³

Like McNamara and Zualdi, Potter highlighted the importance of delivery, recognizing the priest's ability to use his oratory to excite his parishioner—to move him or her sensually, emotionally, and even, as in the case of Siobhán Lankford, physically. He thus underscored the value of style, pitch, and tone:

In her work on American Protestant preaching, Roxanne Mountford explores the long history of preaching-as-performance, arguing that delivery became the most central element of oratory by the nineteenth century.Footnote ²⁵ Similarly, Thomas J. Potter's words reminded Irish Catholic priests that they must control their own bodies, and voices, carefully. Speaking with quiet compassion, argued Potter, was effective enough for some. Raising one's voice and thundering God's judgments at sinners, however, were weapons that priests could employ effectively to shame more serious offenders. Like some of his peers, Potter also cautioned the clergy not to go too far: the diligent priest, he wrote, “will be careful never to assume a tone of bitter acerbity and angry reproach. . . . No man is ever gained to God by angry reproach, that is, by a reproach clothed in angry words.”Footnote ²⁶ In their writings, McNamara, Zualdi, and Potter assigned to the Catholic priest a difficult task: to use his pulpit effectively, the cleric must animate and inspire his flock yet reserve harsh words only for the worst sinners, stopping short of “bitter acerbity and angry approach.”Footnote ²⁷

Implementing the Devotional Revolution

As professor of sacred eloquence at the Missionary College of All Hallows, Thomas Potter made a career of teaching priestly performances and rhetorical style. As they wrote about the speaking power of the priest, clerics such as Potter also contributed to particular debates occurring in the contemporary Irish Catholic world. By the mid- to late nineteenth century, Ireland's devotional revolution hit full stride as the bishops and the Roman hierarchy endeavored to transform the Irish Church from a weak, disorganized, and largely symbolic institution into a modern, organized, centralized, and prosperous bureaucracy.Footnote ²⁸ Tom Inglis has argued that the Irish hierarchy's attempts to instill orthodoxy during the age of the devotional revolution were part of a larger Irish civilizing process. In Inglis's view, the British state, fed up with the undisciplined Irish, looked to the Catholic Church for help with educating and refining the Irish people. The Church took up this mission only too willingly, launching a campaign to impose “manners, discipline, and civility” on Ireland's Catholic laity.Footnote ²⁹

The disciplining of the body, the reworking of the topography, and the movement of people into enclosed, controlled spaces figured prominently in the Irish civilizing mission.Footnote ³⁰ In the first half of the nineteenth century, the government increasingly regulated drinking in Ireland, attempting to move it from the outdoors to the confined space of the pub.Footnote ³¹ Workhouses, prisons, hospitals, and asylums became common throughout Ireland, removing deviants both physically and symbolically from the social fabric and containing them within modern buildings. Space became demarcated based on behavior, social status, and gender.Footnote ³² The transformation of modern Irish space was nowhere more evident than in the massive chapel-building projects of the nineteenth century, particularly after Catholic Emancipation in 1829. With great success, priests and parishioners repaired, rebuilt, and constructed chapels. As a result, by the postfamine years, the majority of Catholics moved from worshipping in the open air or in private homes to attending Sunday Mass in a recently built chapel, and thousands of newly constructed, modern, and solid chapels mapped the Irish landscape.Footnote ³³

Encouraging the movement of rituals and the sacraments away from the open air and the home into the controlled space of the Catholic chapel was vital to the episcopacy's attempts to reform popular culture and parishioner conduct. This transformation resulted in what David Miller has called a new “chapel-based religious landscape” that was apparent by the 1860s.Footnote ³⁴ Once the Church built chapels, parishioners could congregate in them—something that was impossible a mere few decades before. The clergy therefore could have more officially sanctioned contact with its parishioners, focusing its efforts on instilling civility and discipline in them.

Serving as the main agent of cultural and religious change in the aftermath of the Great Famine of the 1840s, the Irish Catholic priest emerged as the central civilizing figure in the devotional revolution. In order to implement the civilizing goals of the revolution, the Church needed a numerous, well-trained, and disciplined secular clergy. Early in the nineteenth century, the Church had begun to produce not only a more carefully trained clergy but also a quickly expanding body of clergy. The famine decimated the population of lay Catholics, transforming the interactions between priests and people. In 1840 there was one priest for every 3,000 Irish people. Only three decades later, however, this ratio became one priest for every 1,250 people.Footnote ³⁵ In the postfamine decades, a continuously decreasing population and increasing numbers of priests meant that even the most remote parishes boasted a strong clerical presence. The Diocese of Killaloe contained one priest for every 4,000 Catholics in 1856. Fewer than fifty years later, in 1901, there was one priest for every 990 Catholics.Footnote ³⁶ By the dawn of the new century, in a complete reversal of prefamine conditions, Killaloe had a surplus of priests—so much so that it was exporting them to other dioceses and to America.Footnote ³⁷ The Catholic parish priest and curate, who ministered to the laity across the island, were poised to become the most important and influential authority figures in modern Ireland.

Before Ireland's growing clergy could reform its parishioners, however, it needed reforming itself. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the British government, Irish Protestant clerics, and Church authorities shared views of the Irish Catholic priest as undisciplined and inefficient.Footnote ³⁸ In his seminal Priests and People in Pre-famine Ireland, Sean Connolly summarizes several cases in which late eighteenth-century Catholic bishops complained about a “general weakness of ecclesiastical discipline,” which resulted in chaos on the parish level.Footnote ³⁹ Reworking the image and role of Catholic priests thus was essential to the devotional revolution. Guided by Dublin's archbishop (and later cardinal), Paul Cullen, the Irish hierarchy worked to professionalize curates and parish priests. In 1850, Ireland's bishops gathered at Thurles, county Tipperary, for their first national synod since the medieval era.Footnote ⁴⁰ Writing to a colleague several months before Thurles, Cullen clarified one of his goals for the synod: “[W]e cannot avoid, I dare say, making some regulations for the clergy, secular and regular, and commencing to remove any abuses that may have sprung up in the times of persecution.”Footnote ⁴¹

These abuses included what Cullen viewed as a too-familiar relationship with parishioners. In his opinion, the lack of discipline and organization in the Irish Catholic parish caused inefficiency, as well as led to a dangerously informal lay-clerical relationship. The prefamine priest often participated in every aspect of his flock's social and cultural lives, even those that the Church vehemently opposed: fantasy and superstition (including belief in supernatural fairies), dancing and singing, drinking, fighting, and gambling. Lay Catholics and their priests socialized and argued during patterns at holy wells, wakes, marriages, and funerals, which frequently became “celebrations like a carnival.”Footnote ⁴² The Thurles legislation did indeed address these abuses; it ultimately contained “24 decrees in which norms [were] laid down regarding the private lives of the clergy.”Footnote ⁴³ It insisted that Irish priests wear their collar at all times and urged that contact between priests and people occur exclusively in controlled spaces and preferably between physical barriers such as pulpits and confessionals. Baptisms, confessions, Masses, and marriages now, ideally, would take place only in the parish chapel, not in private homes as had been the earlier custom.Footnote ⁴⁴ Meanwhile, the priest would live in newly constructed parochial housing, mingling with his flock only at religious occasions. The building of new chapels and new parochial houses for the clergy thus also facilitated another goal of the devotional revolution: the priest's physical separation from the community.Footnote ⁴⁵

Limiting interactions between priests and people within the solid walls of the chapel reflected the Church's concern not only with lay-clerical contact but also with the control of the priestly body's appearance, function, and movement. Priestly conduct, comportment, and performance became central topics of discussion among the leaders of the devotional revolution. Bodily restraint and self-control, as Joseph Nugent has argued, were integral to the success of the new Irish priest, who became the “acme of the Irish-Victorian manly ideal.”Footnote ⁴⁶ The successful Irish priest wore his collar, lived in his newly built parochial home, and met with his parishioners in the controlled space of the chapel. He eschewed familiarity with his flock, and he did not engage in excesses of any kind, particularly bodily excesses such as drunkenness or gluttony. That the priest should be asexual and avoid any hint of sexual impropriety was also understood. The Thurles legislation, for example, decreed that priests should not hear women's confessions anywhere other than in the chapel confessional.Footnote ⁴⁷ In an 1852 letter to a novice priest, Cashel's archbishop, William Slattery, summarized many bishops' views on how priests should conduct themselves in the parish:

Roxanne Mountford examines the ways in which the twentieth-century American preacher's body was “controlled, tamed, and brought into use during a rhetorical performance.”Footnote ⁴⁹ She links the focus on bodily control in nineteenth-century preaching manuals to the development of muscular Christianity, asserting that the education of clergy increasingly focused not only on the development of moral character but also on creating masterful rhetorical performances that constructed an “exaggerated masculinity.” In these manuals, the preacher emerges as “bold, gallant, natural, earnest, physically fit—a Christian soldier doing battle with the secular world and conquering whole cultures for Christ, yet full of sympathy for those around him.”Footnote ⁵⁰

Mountford's work reminds us that developments at work in Catholic Ireland had clear parallels across the Atlantic and the Irish Sea. For late nineteenth-century Ireland, however, the context differed, particularly as nationalism and independence movements intensified. The success of Irish nationalism relied on a reworking of colonial gender norms. British colonialism constructed Irish men as feminized; in order to reject British rule, then, Irish men had to reinvent their masculinity. A “muscular” ideal Catholic manhood, as Patrick McDevitt has shown, was the result. The new ideal Irish man was physically capable, poised to both defeat Britain militarily and lead Ireland politically.Footnote ⁵¹

For the Irish priest, however, the new masculine Catholicism was more complex. Irish clerics, as Nugent argues, had to demonstrate their class status by mimicking the behavior of the Victorian gentleman, but they also needed to conform to the more aggressive norms of muscular Catholicism. Priests, according to Nugent, reconciled “the demands of masculine assertiveness and female-coded gentility . . . under the rubric of self-control.”Footnote ⁵² By the mid-nineteenth century, a new image of the Irish priest as proficient, controlled, and reserved became part and parcel of the devotional revolution. Now, as Patrick Corish explains, “[t]he priest was to regard himself as a man apart.”Footnote ⁵³

Literacy and Orality

Priests' education and preparation also facilitated both clerical discipline and the lay-clerical distance that authorities favored. A new generation of homegrown priests began to be trained at Maynooth, Ireland's first seminary, in 1795. Maynooth soon became key to the creation of a new masculine priestly ideal.Footnote ⁵⁴ The education that students received at Maynooth was firmly grounded in modern rationalism and literacy. At the seminary, Ireland's future priests encountered an elite, traditional education. Walter MacDonald, who attended Maynooth in the 1870s, remembered a schedule of Latin, Greek, algebra, English, Old Testament, and catechism during his first year, with philosophy and metaphysics, mathematics, geometry, trigonometry, mechanics, astronomy, and physics added during the second year.Footnote ⁵⁵ By the late nineteenth century, then, Irish priests were immersed in a religious culture based on discipline, self-control, and classical literacy.

Indeed, literacy and the written word were elemental to the civilizing mission and modernization in Ireland. For most priests, this meant knowledge of Latin and English, but not Irish. Historians and folklorists long have argued that the nineteenth century was culturally cataclysmic for traditional Irish orality as colonialism, technology, and the Great Famine destroyed the Irish language and assaulted oral indigenous traditions.Footnote ⁵⁶ A newly literate and English-speaking Catholic middle class emerged by the mid-nineteenth century, and its values and norms, wedded deeply to the written word and print culture, came to dominate Irish society. This middle class maintained strong ties to the Catholic Church, willingly subjecting itself to the dictates of the Church hierarchy and partnering with the clergy in the making of a distinctly modern, literate Catholic Ireland. Middle-class Catholics often scorned the Irish language and oral traditions.Footnote ⁵⁷ They embraced an English-language culture of popular print as well as visual Catholicism, consuming religious literature and devotional artifacts. The triumph of modern, middle-class, literate, English-speaking Ireland, then, seemingly came at the expense of rural, traditional, oral, Irish-speaking Ireland. Yet the transformation from orality to literacy was not complete in all areas. Most of Ireland remained rural through the early twentieth century, and in rural areas, orality persisted.Footnote ⁵⁸ As poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill recognizes, “a subterranean, hidden, native world view” endured in parts of Ireland despite the trauma it suffered at the hands of the colonial state and the Catholic Church.Footnote ⁵⁹ Across the south and west in particular, the spoken word still ruled. Here, oral legends and stories, sometimes related in English, but sometimes in Irish, constructed the fabric of daily life.

For some of Ireland's educated Catholic clergy, this cultural persistence presented a problem. Priests consistently revealed themselves to be grounded firmly in the written word and in the new culture of English literacy.Footnote ⁶⁰ As a result, some struggled to adapt to the oral culture of the Catholic parish, often uncomfortably juggling English literacy, and both English and Irish orality. Many priests did not speak Irish, and others, trained primarily in Latin, were not well prepared to practice their English-language verbal skills on the parish level.Footnote ⁶¹ Although there are no reliable statistics detailing exactly how many priests spoke Irish in the nineteenth century, Nicholas Wolf estimates that “between two-fifths and one-half of the student population at Maynooth [seminary] spoke Irish” in the 1850s and 1860s, with the figure decreasing to about 22 percent by 1891.Footnote ⁶² It is likely, then, that by the end of the nineteenth century, only a small minority of the clergy spoke any Irish. Sometimes, priests became translators and mediators, which afforded them influence but also could marginalize them. When they entered into parish life, curates and parish priests brought the written culture of the modern Catholic world to their parishioners, who were much more accustomed to orality. Clerics took written documents, such as sermons and pastorals, and read them aloud at Mass. They thus filtered outside information for their parishioners, making the world of literacy comprehensible to a people who still communicated primarily through the spoken word, and often in Irish. Priests also controlled print culture in parishes; in addition to managing the schools where children learned to read and write, they promoted a specifically Catholic literacy through the English-language catechism.Footnote ⁶³ Stephen Conroy, born in county Mayo in 1912, remembered that his strict parish priest “would visit the school and ask questions from the Catechism. . . . Anyone who gave the wrong answer got a sore ear.”Footnote ⁶⁴

Supported by the bishops, Ireland's clergy also encouraged “good” Catholic reading across Ireland. The advances and improvements of the Victorian world assisted the Church in this particular mission. The growth of the press and an expanding Catholic English-language readership, for example, allowed the hierarchy to reach many parishioners through the written word. Newspapers and Catholic periodicals expanded in the postfamine period; by the late nineteenth century, Catholic print culture was pervasive.Footnote ⁶⁵ Newspapers, books, and magazines printed detailed information about Catholicism and Church activities, from pilgrimage announcements to clerical obituaries to lists of people who contributed funds to the building of a new chapel.Footnote ⁶⁶ Some priests and bishops also directly addressed their parishioners in these publications by publishing letters and sermons in them. Meanwhile, periodicals such as the Irish Monthly, the Catholic Bulletin, and the Catholic Record of Waterford and Lismore published fiction with a Catholic message. Bishop Richard Alphonsus wrote a letter in the Catholic Record of Waterford and Lismore in April 1913, praising it for providing safe and useful literature for Catholics.Footnote ⁶⁷ As English literacy rates grew, parishioners increasingly were exposed to the attitudes and agendas of their priests, their bishops, and the Roman hierarchy.Footnote ⁶⁸ Even some who could not read engaged with printed materials; in the 1850s, Mary Fogarty's educated father read to his illiterate neighbors from the Freeman's Journal every Sunday after Mass.Footnote ⁶⁹

On the local level, the Irish priest not only oversaw Catholic literacy but also used his pen as a civilizing tool: he kept records of marriages and baptisms, recorded the names of dues-paying defaulters, and wrote lists of those who attended Mass and catechism classes. A significant amount of a priest's time was spent managing correspondence: priests wrote letters to each other, to newspapers, and to their superiors. Many also recorded their experiences in the parish, vigilantly keeping diaries and notes. John O'Sullivan, a Kerry priest, lived within the oral, Irish-speaking culture of the west of Ireland in the 1840s and 1850s. Through his English-language diaries and Praxis Parochi in Hibernia, his two-volume manual on clerical life for new priests, he transformed this oral culture into a written form, one that those unfamiliar with a rural and oral worldview could understand more easily.Footnote ⁷⁰ When writing Praxis, O'Sullivan declared himself a mediator between rural Irish-speaking communities and the outside world. Because other clerical guidebooks were, he wrote, “anything but adaptable to Irish habits and customs,” Praxis, he hoped, would fill a void for the novice priest who was often “at sea” during his first few years of parochial service.Footnote ⁷¹ O'Sullivan also took the opportunity, in Praxis, to chastise some of his peers for embracing middle-class worldviews, pointing out that, in the process, they were losing the “hearts” and “affections” of their parishioners:

O'Sullivan thus articulated the need for a translator between the new priest and his parishioners, between the modern, middle-class, literature culture of the Catholic clergy and the still oral, fluid culture of rural folk. That clergymen were located “at the boundaries of oral and literary traditions” is not a phenomenon unique to late nineteenth-century Ireland. As Donald E. Meek argues, early modern Scottish Protestant clergymen, particularly Gaelic-speaking ones, managed “those points where orality and literacy interacted.”Footnote ⁷³ In Catholic Ireland, however, the late nineteenth century was the key era of transformation, and the Catholic priest was the primary agent of change.

And despite the reforming Church's focus on literacy and the printed word, priests and people continued to communicate primarily through the spoken word. As Robert Scribner argues in his work on the Reformation, historians, by focusing on the diffusion of religious ideas through the written word, often miss both the ways in which oral communication transmits religious knowledge and the complex interactions between orality and literacy during times of upheaval.Footnote ⁷⁴ While private conversations between Irish priests and people, such as those that occurred in the confessional, remain inaccessible to us, evidence from visitation reports, correspondence, and diaries testify that public verbal exchanges did much to mold the lay-clerical relationship. For some priests, the transition from the seminary to the more fluid and oral world of the Catholic parish was a difficult one. In his analysis of Maynooth, Patrick Corish points out “two striking gaps in the training of priests”: how to give a sermon and how to teach the catechism.Footnote ⁷⁵ These were two of the most important duties of a postfamine priest, and they were the ones through which he could most directly shape and form the Catholicism of the devoted. Lacking the skills to catechize and give a useful sermon made it nearly impossible for young priests to influence their people's inner lives and mold their external behavior.

When in doubt, the novice Irish priest could call upon advice literature published by Catholic writers such as Potter, preparing his sermons and practicing his vocal style in the hope of animating his flock. Learning to use his voice and words effectively, however, remained a daunting task. Even Canon Patrick Sheehan, successful author and parish priest of Doneraile, who is still remembered as one of the most beloved clerics of the Cloyne diocese, struggled with oral communication.Footnote ⁷⁶ According to his biographer, when Sheehan first arrived in Doneraile, his “apparent aloofness and manner of speaking, together with a degree of shyness and reticence placed a temporary barrier between him and his flock.”Footnote ⁷⁷ We can assume that Sheehan's shy manner did not inspire passion or cause his young parishioners to faint in horror. Similarly, one Dingle priest, according to John O'Sullivan's diaries and notes, was hardworking but not “exciting” enough. “His forte was the confessional,” explained O'Sullivan, “but when he should have been animating and exciting the people and rousing their feelings in favor of their religion he was buried in the confessional hearing the scruples of some old hag.”Footnote ⁷⁸ In O'Sullivan's analysis, this priest may have been efficient in the confessional, but his private utterances did not make up for his lack of rhetorical prowess.

Power and the Pulpit

There was perhaps no more powerful rhetorical performance than the altar denunciation. Denouncing and shaming parishioners from the pulpit at Sunday Mass was a long-standing practice in Ireland. Public sinners and others who challenged priestly authority subjected themselves to verbal abuse from the parish priest.Footnote ⁷⁹ Liam Swords writes that altar denunciations in late nineteenth-century Achonry were “commonplace,” serving to address disorderly parishioner conduct and to oppose political radicalism. He gives examples of priests using the pulpit to denounce Fenianism and Sinn Féin, as well as to condemn landlords for evicting their tenants.Footnote ⁸⁰

More commonly, however, the denunciation was directed at parishioners whose conduct challenged the civilizing goals of the devotional revolution. Stories of clerical denunciations figure prominently in the memoirs of those who came of age in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ireland. In Remembering Ahanagran, Sara Walsh of county Kerry recounts her cleric's harsh rhetorical tactics in the 1920s, telling her son, “[t]here was no mercy in them.” According to Walsh's son, who later wrote down his mother's memoirs:

As Walsh's account highlights, sexual transgressions, and particularly unwed motherhood, were common topics of the altar denunciation.Footnote ⁸² Priests thus enforced gender norms and “proper” sexual behavior through their rhetorical admonitions. For some Catholic children, these clerical performances were pivotal moments, burned forever in their memories.Footnote ⁸³

Through the powerful altar denunciation, however, some priests crossed the line from civilizing to using “angry words.” Such encounters did indeed foster a new distance between the clergy and the laity, yet they sometimes went further than Church officials had intended, leading to alienation and fear. Patricia Kelly, born in Dublin in 1916, remembered that her priest “was a typical example of the cleric of the time, conservative, authoritarian, who believed in inculcating the tenets of religion by fear, the fear of God, of Hell. . . . From the pulpit he told [his parishioners] for whom to vote, and he wasn't slow to denounce the party he didn't favour.”Footnote ⁸⁴ In Siobhán Lankford's Cork parish in the early twentieth century, the local priest was fond of using the altar to condemn sinners. When he could not collect parish dues, Lankford's priest announced the names of the nonpayers from the altar. “The meager amount of each offering was read, too,” declared Lankford, “as was his assessment of the parishioner's means, and his idea of whether or not the farmer could afford more.”Footnote ⁸⁵

In another incident that speaks clearly to the performance quality of the denunciation, a priest confronted a man whose fiancée had recently died. The man claimed to be haunted by his fiancée, which upset the woman's family. The family became “very indignant and blamed the unfortunate young man for saying that their girl's spirit was restless and unhappy,” and sought the advice of the priest about the matter. The priest then made it his goal to publicly “make an example of this man who so speaks of his dead betrothed wife.” In order to shame the man most effectively, the priest used the altar as his stage: “Calling the man's name he [the priest] demanded that he come up to the altar rails. The congregation was tense as the poor young man walked quietly to the rail and knelt to receive the priest's castigation.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Here, the priest and the offending parishioner performed a drama that resonated with all in the congregation. In this particular case, however, the priest had a change of heart; at the last minute, his pity for the young man caused the priest not to denounce the mourning parishioner but to offer public sympathy instead. The tension of the imminent altar denunciation gave way to a sense of community and support. This priest, then, fully embraced the performative elements of the Mass, using emotion, shame, and fear to make his point but stopping short of “angry words” and thus effecting a catharsis in the entire parish. In Lankford's parish, the priest's words and tactics dictated the lay-clerical relationship; here, the laity was cowed by even the promise of the altar denunciation, and only the priest had the power to change the course of the drama.

By the mid-nineteenth century, however, as it focused on reforming the behavior of the clergy, the Irish episcopacy struggled with the efficacy of the altar denunciation. Priests shaming parishioners from the pulpit did not always fit well with the goals of the Irish hierarchy and with the civilizing mission; for some, the altar denunciation recalled not discipline, civility, and bodily control but something more emotionally unrestricted and uncivilized. How could parish priests and curates implement the goals of the civilizing mission if they were perceived to be hotheaded and rash? The Irish bishops recognized the potentially damaging effects of the altar denunciation and legislated against it beginning with the Synod of Thurles in 1850.Footnote ⁸⁷ Some priests, too, remained discomfited about the use of the altar denunciation. John O'Sullivan of Kenmare claimed that altar denunciations had been “carried too far in Ireland,” causing parish priests to “seek to carry out the law of the land, to enforce submission to it, to punish delinquents, to assume to a certain extent the place of the civil magistrates.” O'Sullivan also warned priests that they “can have no idea how sensitive people are to anything said from the altar.” The result of a denunciation taken too far, he maintained, was “the total estrangement” of the parish.Footnote ⁸⁸ While a respectable lay-clerical distance was desirable, “total estrangement” would serve only to trouble the goals of the devotional revolution. Most priests, however, continued to use the altar denunciation, demonstrating that, as they adapted to parish life, they felt the need to assert their power through public performances.Footnote ⁸⁹ As Mountford reminds us, the pulpit, whether in twentieth-century evangelical America or nineteenth-century Catholic Ireland, was a gendered rhetorical space, “associated culturally with male authority.”Footnote ⁹⁰ The clergyman believed that regular demonstrations of his priestly powers, particularly rhetorical powers, at the pulpit would keep his flock in line. Such a focus on denunciation and castigation, however, reveals that, in reality, Ireland's priests struggled with establishing and maintaining power. Clerical hegemony ultimately proved vulnerable.

Performing the Parish Missions

By the 1840s and 1850s, Ireland's people did not rely exclusively on their parish priests and curates to animate them; they heard fiery sermons from visiting Catholic missionaries as well. The parish missions movement was, according to historian Emmet Larkin, the most important element in Ireland's postfamine Catholic revival.Footnote ⁹¹ During the missions, religious orders traveled to parishes and stayed, stirring up devotion, for weeks. The missionaries preached doctrine, emphasized the importance of confession and the sacraments, and established confraternities and temperance organizations.Footnote ⁹² This, writes James Murphy, was “spirituality for a hostile age.”Footnote ⁹³ In nineteenth-century Ireland, uniformity of religious practice was rare, and alternative beliefs and disorder frequently undermined Catholic orthodoxy and the reforming efforts of the clergy. Proselytism also threatened the Church's hegemony; in certain areas of the south and west, such as Dingle in county Kerry, Protestant missionaries had already succeeded in converting hundreds of Catholics in the first year of the famine, and Catholic priests feared that thousands more may abandon their faith if the famine crisis continued. The Catholic missions, in many ways, were a direct response to the Protestant threat; it was no accident, for example, that the first mission in the west of Ireland occurred in Dingle in 1846.Footnote ⁹⁴ By the 1850s, the parish missions had reached throughout all of Ireland, becoming enormously popular with the laity. Even Joseph Guinan's fictional The Island Parish (1908) makes the claim that “the Irish people love a mission, with its thundering sermons, its crowds and its commotion.”Footnote ⁹⁵

The missionaries came to towns or villages for a short time, and when they did, they gave spectacular demonstrations of oratory. Indeed, their main task was to preach to the people, overwhelming them with their spectacular sermons. They commonly gave three sermons a day, in the morning, afternoon, and evening.Footnote ⁹⁶ Sources describe the missionaries' style as uniquely dramatic and passionate. They preached fiery sermons; they used strong language. Their showmanship became legendary, prompting visceral responses from the laity. Through what Lawrence Taylor calls the “performance quality” of their speech, the missionaries involved ordinary Catholics in their sermons, personalizing devotion for all involved.Footnote ⁹⁷ For Molly McDermott of Roscommon, the missions, even though they occurred only every few years, loomed large in her childhood memories. “The Sermons preached then,” she recalled, “put the fear of God in the hearts and souls of the young and old alike.”Footnote ⁹⁸

The role of the missionary was unique. Unlike curates or parish priests, missionaries were outsiders, sometimes from the Continent. “The missionary's otherworldly severity,” writes Taylor, “typically contrasted with the more comfortable mien of the local clergy, thus lending [him] something of the . . . charisma of the prophet.”Footnote ⁹⁹ Free from the need to maintain daily distance from parishioners, the regular clergy (unlike the secular clergy) stretched the boundaries of priestly masculinity, appearing less reserved and less disciplined than parish priests and curates. Missionaries used their bodies and their words to assault the laity's senses. At one mission, for example, a priest singled out a young girl who was watching a bird (and therefore not paying close enough attention to the sermon), thundering ‘The Devil can take any shape to fool us, even the form of an innocent bird!’ The girl, according to an observer, “fainted dead away from fright.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ While some fainted, others became emotional: “[O]ne might see,” wrote Guinan, “handkerchiefs furtively applied to moist eyes, or sleeves of [woolen] coats freely used to brush away the unbidden tear.”Footnote ¹⁰¹

In Sacred Eloquence, Thomas Potter recognized the missionaries' unique talents and attempted to explain their successes:

It was the burning words of the missionary and his focus on performance that distinguished him from the secular clergy. As Alice Taylor remembered of her childhood: “To me, the missioner on the altar provided a one man entertainment.”Footnote ¹⁰³

By all accounts, these priests' sermons were uniquely successful in affecting ordinary Catholics. A Galway priest recalled that the words of the missionaries

In another parish, Catholics recalled somewhat more vividly that the missionaries “simply frightened the lives out of us,” railing against “company-keeping, theft, and drunkenness.” The “frightening fires of Hell,” in addition, “were a subject discussed at length and consolidated by the renouncing of the Devils while candles were held aloft.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Edna O'Brien, who came of age in Clare in the 1930s, remembered a missionary

For Irish children in particular, the fear of hell that the missionaries inspired did much to solidify their later memories of a frightening Catholic upbringing and of an authoritative and largely unsympathetic clergy. The fiery words of the missionaries, then, could frighten and isolate some, contributing to negative impressions and even anticlericalism later in life. This reality testifies that all priests, even visiting missionaries, walked a fine line between provoking an overwhelming devotion and alienating ordinary Catholics.

The splendor of the parish missions also tapped into Irish Catholics' traditions of religious and political participation. Father Theobald Mathew began a modest campaign for temperance in the 1830s; by 1839, Catholics throughout the country, even in the rural south and west, flocked to the movement in thousands. Mathew, in many ways, embodied the ideal late nineteenth-century preacher/performer. Father Mathew's message of teetotalism was frequently overshadowed by his charismatic personality. His physical presence also was memorable. Mathew was “a man of decidedly distinguished appearance,” wrote an observer, “an imposing figure. . . . He usually wears a fine black great-coat, and his linen is dazzlingly white. There is something particularly distinguished and gentlemanlike in his entire person.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Like the missionary, Mathew was an awe-inspiring figure. His “gentlemanlike” presentation distinguished him from ordinary people and ordinary priests. The “dazzling” appearance of Father Mathew, combined with his dynamic sermons, fast made him a celebrity.

Similarly, Daniel O'Connell's monster repeal meetings of the 1840s lived in the memories of many late nineteenth-century Irish Catholics. Like Father Mathew's temperance campaign, the repeal meetings were, as Gary Owens explains, “elaborate . . . rituals that drew upon the active participation of the majority of those who attended.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The crowds that attended the parish missions resembled the crowds at monster meetings, and the fiery sermons of the missionaries recalled the powerful oratory of O'Connell. The excitement and anticipation of the missions also paralleled that of the repeal meetings. “In the country,” wrote one observer of meetings, “such an event is an epoch which fills a great portion of the peasant's existence; it is the hope of his entire family for months before, and the boast for months after.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Rural Catholics thus not only called upon religious custom when they attended missions but also perpetuated a tradition of political participation.

Overall, the clerical performances of the missionaries successfully engaged if not besieged the senses of the laity. After a Clonmel mission in 1863, parishioners composed a formal written response to the mission, thanking the priests for their efforts. “Of your labours in the vineyard of the Lord we would speak,” they wrote, “if language would permit us to characterise them as they deserve.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ The popularity of the parish missions suggests, as Ignatius Murphy has argued, that they “were touching something very deep in the people's psyche.”Footnote ¹¹¹ The missions tapped into parishioners' piety, guilt, fear, and curiosity. They also touched a desire for celebrity and drama. And they allowed lay Catholics to have profoundly sensual experiences. At the mission, the sounds of the preachers combined with the sight of the crowd (even holding candles, as in the case above) and the smells of human bodies in close contact. Processions and pilgrimages during the missions frequently were “colourful, with religious emblems, banners, [and] flowers.” Temperance soirees featured food and speeches, music and dancing.Footnote ¹¹²

Ireland's Catholics were not mere passive observers at the missions. They made their own voices heard; they wept, shouted, and cheered, and thus imprinted the occasion with their own powerful words. According to John Sharp, “loud sobbing and crying out during the sermons and public acts was a common feature” of the missions conducted by the Redemptorists in the nineteenth century. In one case, the noise and clamor were “so great that [one priest] had to ask for quiet, and elsewhere a bell was rung to stop the people's noise.” At the close of the mission, “[w]ails of lamentation” were regular occurrences.Footnote ¹¹³ These descriptions raise questions about the ways in which we should view lay-clerical interactions at the parish missions. While James H. Murphy has argued that the missions were “culturally imperialistic,” imposing the “religion of the towns” on the countryside, the process in reality was more complex.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Lawrence Taylor asserts more accurately that the missions were “interactive religious theatre,”Footnote ¹¹⁵ leaving room for performances by both clergy and laity. The laity's responses at the missions remind us that oratory and rhetoric in the Catholic parish were not dominated exclusively by the clergy.

The People Speak Back

The ways in which lay folk made their voices heard at the mission were repeated day in and day out in the Catholic parish when the power of the priest's words was tempered by the verbal interjections of his flock. In his description of the station Mass in Doon, county Limerick, Joseph Guinan narrated a scene during which the priest, Father John, addressed the people with a homily. Guinan described the priest's words and the parishioners' responses:

The exchange between Father John and his parishioners reminds us that the people of Doon saw their Mass as a collaborative process, one in which they were not passive and silent observers but active, and vocal, agents. In Father John's parish, laymen and laywomen did not quietly absorb the priest's words. They interacted with him and interrupted him, peppering his homily with their own words. As they did so, the Doon parishioners demonstrated their eagerness to engage in a dialogue with their clergy, to use their own voices and to thus have an active role in the popular Catholicism of the devotional revolution.

Parishioners also spoke back against their clergy in more direct ways. In Waterford in the 1880s, Bridget O'Donnell was arrested after she burst into the Catholic chapel and verbally abused her priest.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Altar denunciations sometimes provoked the most organized parishioner responses. Father Cavanagh of Knock, county Mayo, railed at several local men from the altar in 1879. In this case, however, the parishioners refused to be cowed; they organized a “protest demonstration” against the offending priest.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Just a few years earlier, when a priest who was angry about paltry collections denounced several members of his parish, one parishioner wrote to Archbishop Patrick Leahy to complain.Footnote ¹¹⁹ When they picked up their pens and wrote to a powerful member of the Church hierarchy, parishioners deliberately engaged with the world of Catholic literacy, demonstrating their abilities to navigate both oral and written culture. The parishioner's letter forced the priest, Father Duggan, to defend himself in a missive of his own. Duggan wrote to Leahy:

In this case, the parishioner's complaint successfully challenged the priest's authority, forcing Duggan to go on the defensive and explain the use of his own angry words.

Indeed, Ireland's late nineteenth-century bishops received letters from a variety of literate Catholics who protested their priests’ heavy-handed tactics. Bishop William Keane of Cloyne confronted the letters of several irate women in the 1850s. Two women, one from Mitchelstown and one from Cobh, complained to Keane that their priests had denounced them from the pulpit as “bad and wicked” brothel owners.Footnote ¹²¹ When William Watson became involved in a dispute with his parish priest in 1878, he composed a letter to Edward McCabe, his archbishop. “Most Rev Sir,” Watson wrote, “I hope you will Exkuse me for the liberty i take in Wrighting to our lordship it may not seem in contrast with your digtney but it is with all respect sir the case may seem of little importance but it is of the greatest truble to me and my faimley.”Footnote ¹²² The problem, according to Watson, was that his neighbors had spread a “falsehood” about his wife, calling her “the most scandles woman in the street.”Footnote ¹²³ Particularly upsetting to Watson was the fact that the parish priest believed the gossip.

William Watson wrote to Archbishop McCabe to complain about his priest and to seek help in rehabilitating his wife's reputation. When he picked up his pen and wrote to a powerful member of the Church hierarchy, Watson deliberately engaged with a world of Catholic literacy, one that had become increasingly important over the previous few decades. He used his own literacy to challenge his priest and interact with his bishop; he thus played to the conventions of the Catholicism of the devotional revolution. His correspondence testifies to the importance of literacy in late nineteenth-century Ireland. Yet in his missive, Watson also revealed that he and his priest were firmly situated in an oral culture, mentioning several times the rumors and gossip that had caused his family's troubles. His letter thus reveals the intersections of literacy and orality in the late nineteenth century, when Catholics, both male and female, used both the spoken and the written word to offset the written and verbal powers of their clergy.Footnote ¹²⁴

In her autobiography, Mother Ireland, Edna O'Brien recounts a story in which a local woman gets the better of the priest:

The veracity of this story cannot be proven, but it is the telling of the story that marks the real moment of resistance. By telling this story, parishioners spoke back against clerical authority and abuses. They called upon their traditions of orality and storytelling to qualify priestly power.

For most lay Catholics, however, challenging their priests directly in the age of the devotional revolution was a daunting prospect. Indeed, stories and legends that circulated in rural areas from 1850 to 1920 told of the ways in which priests sought revenge on parishioners who angered or challenged them. A Tipperary legend detailed the consequences faced by one errant member of the flock. The parishioner, a carpenter, reportedly ignored his cleric, Father O'Keefe, when the priest visited the man's shop. The next Sunday, O'Keefe “gave an awful sermon,” focusing on “the insolence of some of his parishioners.”Footnote ¹²⁶ Once more, this clergyman employed his oratory to shame and denounce. In this instance, however, lay Catholics used their own oral tradition—storytelling—to reference the priest's powers. By doing so, they both recognized and complicated the clergy's rhetorical powers. Dragging Ireland's newly professional and disciplined priests into the traditional, vernacular realm of legendry and oral traditions afforded lay Catholics an opportunity to moderate the clergy's influence. By making priests central actors in traditional narratives, laymen and laywomen demonstrated the continued prowess of orality and declared their belief in their own powerful words. To a reforming Church and clergy that were especially hostile to “superstitions” and oral traditions, stories of priests threatened to undermine the goals of the devotional revolution.

Priests, People, and Piseogs

In an environment of greater clerical control and Church centralization, folklore narratives and oral traditions provided an outlet of expression in which parishioners could both recognize, and, within the realm of fantasy, destabilize clerical hegemony. As Eugene Hynes points out, most narratives describe priests who are “engaged in constant battle,” giving voice to their pivotal yet contested status in postfamine Ireland.Footnote ¹²⁷ A Wexford legend, collected from a man who heard it from his father, references lay-clerical tensions, letter writing, and the altar denunciation. The narrative relates what happens when a parishioner wrote to the bishop with a complaint about the local priest, Father Willie. In response to the complaint, the bishop sent a letter to the priest in which he censured the cleric's behavior. All in the parish remembered what happened next: “Well, the next Sunday at Mass, the priest danced on the pulpit.” He cursed the complaining parishioner from the pulpit, warning that the man's hand (the one that wrote the letter) would rot off.Footnote ¹²⁸ This legend gives credence to the local importance of the altar denunciation and to the ways in which the laity challenged clerical power. It also references one of the most dominant tropes in Irish oral tradition: the vengeful and sometimes supernaturally sinister priest.

Narratives and legends tell of priests whose magical powers were unrivaled, who could cure or harm at will.Footnote ¹²⁹ One early twentieth-century Cork informer told folklore collectors that a Skibbereen priest never got along well with the other priests, who were “jealous” of his abilities to “perform miracles.”Footnote ¹³⁰ Within the realm of fantasy, priests commonly used their supernatural powers to punish wayward parishioners. In the 1930s, a Limerick carpenter recounted a legend about a local priest who lived around the turn of the century. The priest accused three local brothers of robbery. Maintaining their innocence, the brothers argued with their cleric, who then warned them, “You have a bad tongue but I'll quieten it for you.” Soon, one of the brothers died of tongue cancer. The carpenter summed up the message of this story: “Don't go against them [priests] and have as little as you can to do with them in that line.”Footnote ¹³¹ Significantly, in this case, it was the disruptive tongues of the brothers that were targeted by the powerful cleric, who likely viewed himself as the sole vocal authority in the parish.

Other narratives tell of equally sinister priestly attacks. County Limerick legends served to frighten children who cursed; the local priest was said to “to put a black strike on their tongues.”Footnote ¹³² In an Ennis, county Limerick, legend, when a man refused to host the priest by holding Mass in his home, the man's two sons drowned. And only the priest was able to find the sons' bodies.Footnote ¹³³ An oral history collected from Patricia Kelly, born in Dublin in 1916, recalls that the parish “was shaken” when the Virgin Mary reportedly appeared at the chapel. The parish priest, who believed that the apparition was a hoax, blamed the nuns in the convent for the local tumult. He “invaded the Convent, and denounced the nuns,” targeting one in particular, Sister Angelica, whom he believed responsible for the false claims. According to Kelly, when Sister Angelica died a mere three months after the denunciation, the parishioners, and in particular the children, lived in “terror” that they would meet a similar end should they garner the ill will of their priest.Footnote ¹³⁴

What questions should such menacing legends raise about the real-world relationship between priests and people in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ireland? We could view such narratives, argues Lawrence Taylor, as an expression of resistance to the nineteenth-century Church's intrusions upon local life. Taylor claims that stories of powerful priests, by “appropriating the very version of the priest that the Church rejects”—meaning the pre–devotional revolution priest—reflect “the people's response to the increasing domination of the institutional church, and perhaps a less conscious way of handling psychological repression.”Footnote ¹³⁵ These narratives recognized priestly power and fear of the priest, providing a warning to other Catholics to respect his power. Yet the telling of such tales also allowed ordinary Irish people to engage in a dialogue about clerical authority. By performing stories featuring their curates and priests, lay Catholics undermined and poked fun at the new professionalism and decorum of the cleric.

Folklore narratives about priests also present an interesting foil to documents written by Catholic priests. They contest the new literacy of the Catholic Church and the middle classes, asserting instead the continuous power of orality and tradition. These narratives give voice to the real stresses underlying lay-clerical interactions in the modern era and to the powerful oratory of the Catholic priest. The actual telling of the stories, however, does more. In his work on Ireland, Diarmuid Ó Giolláin, building on the work of Antonio Gramsci, places folklore within the context of the “culture of subaltern groups.”Footnote ¹³⁶ Moving to an analysis of the theories of anthropologist Luigi M. Lombardi Satriani, Ó Giolláin writes that folklore is “part of a mental heritage that is stable, collective and specific to the underprivileged, and ‘hence culturally subaltern,’ classes of a society.”Footnote ¹³⁷ One of Satriani's “levels of challenge to the dominant culture” seems particularly relevant to nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ireland: what Ó Giolláin describes as the “implicit challenge . . . of phenomena—such as beliefs, practices, and artefacts—which, by their otherness and their very presence, are an implicit opposition to the dominant order.”Footnote ¹³⁸ By telling stories about their powerful, and sometimes abusive, priests, Irish Catholics impeached the increasing hegemony of the Church. By making their clergy the subjects of much older vernacular customs, Catholics made a statement about the continuing power of their own oral traditions. The selective telling of particular stories could be a well-tested and effective mode of resistance for rural Irish people.Footnote ¹³⁹

A Tipperary narrative speaks to the conflicts between literacy and orality, between modernity and “superstition” that often pitted priests against people and, sometimes, against other priests. In this narrative, the curate Father O'Dwyer was a firm believer in piseogs, an Irish word meaning supernatural beliefs (sometimes translated as “superstitions”), including the evil eye and belief in fairies. The parishioners “were all running to him and getting him to offer prayers for them and say Masses” to ward off supernatural evils. However, the parish priest, Father Kelly, “came along and squashed the whole thing. He was there after going through the Great War, and he knew a thing or two. He said it was all nonsense and made a laugh of them all, Father O'Dwyer included.”Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Here, the narrative recognizes the advent of modern knowledge, tying the war to literacy and progress, but it does so within the context of oral traditions that continue to assert an alternative worldview. In another variant of the story, the disbelieving priest gets his comeuppance: a new and respectable parish priest comes to town. A local woman approaches him about her neighbors’ harmful curses. The priest laughs and then denounces the woman from the pulpit at Sunday Mass. Hardly cowed, the woman goes to the local curate, who presumably was more entrenched in parish life and local customs. The curate not only believes the woman but also ultimately convinces the parish priest that such “superstitions” do indeed exist.Footnote ¹⁴¹ The narrative creates a fantasy: not only the victory of a lower priest and a woman against the parish priest but also the triumph of local knowledge and tradition against modern, centralized knowledge and “progress.”Footnote ¹⁴²

Folklore narratives illuminate the difficult alliance between priests and people, manifested in devotion and respect, in censure and ridicule. In their stories and legends, Irish people questioned their complicated relationship with their priests. Through folklore, parishioners expressed their own worldview, one that was fluid and complex, difficult to contain, and even more difficult to commit to paper. Parishioners used storytelling and legendry to criticize the written culture of the institutional Church and demonstrate the value of their world, a world whose unofficial and oral power could still rival that of the formal Church, the literate Catholic middle classes, and even the increasingly authoritative priest.