Mags GarganStudies: An Irish Quarterly Review Winter 2014/15
Charles Lysaght
This special issue of Studies, the long-established Jesuit quarterly, reproduces the talks at a conference held last September to mark the bi-centenary of the restoration of the Jesuits, whose suppression had been ordered by the Pope Clement XIV some 40 years previously in 1773. This had happened at the behest of Bourbon sovereigns jealous of the influence exercised in their kingdoms by successive Popes through their Jesuit foot-soldiers.
The Jesuits had not much more than a tenuous existence in Ireland prior to the restoration. But there were interesting episodes such as the attempt to found a university in Elizabethan times. Education was their mission and their school in Dublin numbered among its pupils Peter Kenney, a boy of modest background, who led the Jesuits in Ireland when the Society of Jesus was restored by the Pope in 1814.
Their boarding school in Clongowes was founded in that year by Kenny and two of his upper class confreres Aylmer and Esmonde. It educated the existing and emerging Catholic elite. Its aspiration was to produce Catholics loyal to the Church yet ready to take their place in influential berths of a society dominated by a Protestant Ascendancy.
The same was true, albeit to a lesser extent, of Belvedere and the other schools the Jesuits subsequently founded. Their church on Gardiner Street (pictured) was in the district where most of the Catholic professional and merchant classes lived. They ran the University College for Catholics in Stephen’s Green where, incidentally, the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, an English Jesuit, spent five unhappy years before his early death in 1889. This is covered in an excellent piece by Lesley Higgins and Noel Barber SJ.
The identification of Jesuits with the more privileged and less nationalist elements in Catholic Ireland gave them an image with which some of their priests became uncomfortable in the course of the 20th Century.
Discomfort
The career and views of Fr McVerry, described in the editorial as “one of the very greatest contemporary Jesuits”, is indicative of such discomfort as, to some extent, was the work of Fr Richard Devane in the early years of the State. More typical of the Jesuits were less strident voices such as that of the wise and ever conciliatory Fr Tom Finlay seeking to shape opinion to achieve reforms rather than challenging the entire existing social order.
On national issues, the private views of most Jesuits would have mirrored those of Fr Francis Shaw (the subject of a penetrating essay by Patrick Maume) who wrote an article for Studies in 1966, which was not published for reasons of prudence until 1971, questioning the adulation of Patrick Pearse and the 1916 rebellion that had become an article of faith in republican Ireland.
It was of a piece with the manner in which the Jesuits had condemned the violence of the war of independence until the Crown forces embarked on a reckless policy of reprisals murdering several priests. Significantly, the Jesuits exiled those who took the republican side in the subsequent civil war.
Yet, it must be said that generalisations about the Irish Jesuits have to be treated with caution in that they have retained within their ranks priests of varied backgrounds with diverse views on social and national issues without too much disharmony in times when there have been sharp divisions in Catholic Irish society.
Is this, I wonder, attributable to the vow of obedience, or a sense that spirituality, not politics, is what really matters?
*Aside from the usual outlets, Studies is available from its editorial office, 35, Lower Leeson Street, Dublin 2; contact email: studies@jesuit.ie; website: www.studiesirishreview.ie; the annual subscription is €45.