NO SOONER is the future commentator on Irish affairs born than his - or her - parents hasten to notify the authorities of the glad fact and are given in return a certificate carrying the national emblem. It is a sign of things to come.
Soon he proceeds to a national school where he is taught the elements of the national language by a national teacher. He learns the words of the national anthem, and is told to stand whenever it is played or sung. He watches the programmes of the national television service and begins to read a national daily newspaper. In a more senior school he is taught the rudiments of national history - according, of course, to a syllabus approved by the Minister.
On a school outing he is taken to the national capital in a vehicle of the national bus company, travelliag along a national route. There he is shown the national parliament, the National Museum, the National Library, and the National Concert Hall. He travels to Europe on the national airline, and proudly displays the passport attesting to his national identity. Next he enters the portals of the National University.
He now avers that he has been brainwashed by the Catholic Church. In contrast, the nation - or more exactly, the nation-state - has educated him.
Thus fashioned, he begins to write on the affairs of state and church. Or rather, of church and church. For, as Michelet might have said, the nation- state is itself a church, a church that brooks no rivals.
I confess I grew up in another tradition. My father had married into an English family who had been Catholic throughout and since the Reformation. They were not nobility, simply retainers on the estate of a minor lord who had himself remained Catholic. The men were ploughmen, stockmen, foresters; the women worked at home and in the great house.
ON SUNDAYS they gathered in that house for Mass. There they shared the same memory there had been a time when the Church and Pope of Rome had been in the right and the King of England in the wrong. They were English as anyone can be English. They were as loyal as anyone can be loyal. Yet they knew their king had betrayed the church to which they had stayed faithful. They lived as the king's good servants, but as God's first.
Family circumstances brought me to Ireland where I encountered a new tradition, not in my family, but at school and in the surrounding world. The Catholic Church was no doubt a splendid religious entity, but the church and its clergy were to be judged, I learned, according as they supported, or failed to support, the national cause.
I came to know that Archbishop Troy was a "Castle Catholic": he had supported the Act of Union. I learned that the bishops had worked with the English to found Maynooth so that no breath of revolutionary freedom might touch Irish clerics. Cardinal Cullen had wickedly condemned the Fenians, and a Bishop of Kerry had invoked unimaginable torments upon them.
There had been exceptions. Archbishop MacHale had opposed an Anglicising system of schooling; Archbishop Croke had supported national games. But there had been no time at which the church and bishops had been in the right and those who worked for the national cause in the wrong.
I later learned that English Catholics were not alone in their memories. French Catholics recalled that the Republic had guillotined a community of Carmelite nuns, massacred Catholic country people in the Vendee, drowned priests in barges on the Loire. German Catholics recalled that their bishops had been imprisoned for opposition to the Kulturkampf Italian Catholics had difficult memories of the Risorgimento. Portuguese Catholics knew of the ravings of the Marques de Pombal. All recalled a time when the church was right and their nation-state was wrong.
IN IRELAND there was no such recollection: no folk-memory.of a time when the church differed from Irish political forces and was in the right. Not even among the clergy. Few among them knew that the Provisional Government, within a fortnight of coming to power, had sacked the Commissioners of Education, Catholic and Protestant bishops included, and put in their place a party worthy who promptly introduced a politically-correct syllabus into the schools. Fewer knew that in 1928 William T. Cosgrave and his cabinet had threatened to resign unless the Archbishop of Tuam publicly withdrew some criticism he had uttered.
The plight of the Catholic Church under English rule could, of course, be used to argue the brutality of the English. But when the English went? The self-concept of the nation-state would change. Would not the newly empowered scorn the base degrees by which they did ascend? They would, and did. Would not the state become the church, with acolytes as devout as Rome ever knew? It would, and did.
The Catholic Church would go elsewhere. One had childhood memories of Macaulay's phrases. "The proudest royal houses are but of yesterday when compared with the line of the Supreme Pontiffs ... The republic of Venice came next in antiquity. But the repubiic of Venice was young when compared with the Papacy; and the republic of Venice is gone and the Papacy remains ... She (the Roman Church) was great and respected before the Saxon had set foot in Britain, before the Frank had crossed the Rhine, when Grecian eloquence still flourished at Antioch, when idols were still worshipped in the temple of Mecca". The time, one suspected, might come when a nun from Africa would minister to nomads encamped amid the ruins of Dublin and gaze on the rusting aerial at Montrose.
Meanwhile, the church's place - to adapt a phrase of Thurber's - is in the wrong. Political correctness requires it and the politically correct teach it. Yet Max Beerbohm, I recall, had difficulty in keeping up with the leaders of modern thought as they disappeared beyond the horizon into oblivion.
