Unholy Catholic Ireland

Hugh Turpin’s Unholy Catholic Ireland: Religious Hypocrisy, Secular Morality, and Irish Irreligion poses a fundamental question about Irish society: why did Ireland, once a candidate for the title of most Roman Catholic of nations, secularize so rapidly and with such vehemence? The intelligent observer might be able to posit answers such as the abuse scandals that were uncovered from the late 1980s onwards, growing knowledge of the Magdalen Laundries, and the rapid globalization that came with the “Celtic Tiger” period of rapid economic growth. However, prior to the publication of Turpin’s work, no one has systematically tried to understand this phenomenon.

According to Turpin, this book “chart[s] the relationships between the widespread perceptions of religious hypocrisy and the emergence and character of religious rejections among a growing subsection of the Irish ‘ethno-Catholic’ majority. Drawing on anthropological and psychological insights into the complex constructs we call religion and morality. I examine how this nonreligious stance is locked in interaction with various other Irish orientations toward Catholicism, ranging from loose and fairly indifference cultural affiliation to devout commitment” (3).

 

Turpin achieves this presenting his material in an accessible style that helps us to understand contemporary manifestations of Catholicism in Ireland.

Although it was always denied, the Catholic Church in Ireland (n.b. the use of “Roman” before “Catholic” is seen as an insult in Ireland) was de facto the established church, in much the same way that the Church of England is the established church in England, with its access to power and close relationship to notions of Englishness. Turpin’s description of religious affiliation in Ireland as varying between cultural affiliation and devout commitment also describes Anglicanism in England. “Ethno-religion” or “cultural religion,” as it is called elsewhere in the book, is therefore nothing new and there is nothing particularly Irish about it.

The close relationship between Irishness and Catholicism is a consequence of the Catholic Emancipation Campaigns in the 19^th century, and the outworking of this relationship is what Turpin is analyzing today. Furthermore, despite the close relationship between church and state (which became the Republic of Ireland in 1937) throughout the 20th Century, the signs of secularization were apparent. This was the case particularly from the 1960s onwards, when state education run by the Catholic Church moved away from the liberal arts model (the focus of the Catholic education system) towards a more technical model focused on the sciences and industry. However, Unholy Catholic Ireland does not cover the historical dimensions of secularization. Such an overview would have greatly enhanced this book’s argument. However, the book’s key strength is its demonstration of the pervasive nature of cultural Catholicism in Ireland and provides one of the first analyses of secularization in a country that was once known for its religiosity.

Turpin’s exceptionalization of the Irish experience, as I have already alluded to, is also problematic and shuts down fruitful avenues for understanding why the Catholic Church’s dominance eroded so rapidly. For example, he writes that “Ireland was different. Alongside clerical abuse, it had a punitive and brutalising religious ideology that was widely accepted by the public of the time and was enforced by a considerable infrastructure of carceral institutions” (44). In making such a statement, Turpin fails to take account of the residential school systems in Canada and the US, as well as the experiences of the Stolen Generation in Australia. Each of these was also based upon a widely accepted and brutalizing ideology, and in failing to recognize these experiences, Turpin weakens rather than strengthens his argument, especially when one considers the global character of the Catholic Church and the networked nature of institutional abuse. He also makes much of the idea of “tactical religion” (i.e., children going through the Catholic rites of passage, baptism and communion) as a means of getting into the best schools. But there’s nothing uniquely Irish about this—it’s a globally recognized phenomenon which has been the subject of much research. Instead of trying to exceptionalize Ireland, it would have been more useful to place Irish Catholicism and secularization within an international context, allowing us to truly understand the unique aspects of the Irish experience and understand where its secularization coalesces with that of other countries.

That said, Turpin does a good job of describing the social pressures exerted upon communities to go through the important rites of passage, and his questions about how one truly leaves a church that is so bound up with identity are crucial to understandings of contemporary Ireland. These are important questions, which Turpin answers well.  But this book leaves me with many more questions than answers, and with the certainty that secularization in Ireland needs to be studied from a historical as well as anthropological and sociological perspective. 

Maria Power is a senior research fellow in human dignity at the Las Casas Institute for Social Justice, University of Oxford.

Maria Power

Date Of Review:

July 29, 2023