Recent exchanges on here have reminded me of something that I have thought for a long time.
One of the reasons why the Irish have been quite so anti-English has been that that completes a triangle of which the other two sides are Rome’s largely unrequited love for England, and Ireland’s entirely unrequited love for Rome.
It has never mattered what the Irish have done for the Catholic Church, or what the English have done to Her; it has always been the English that She has loved. I am not saying that this is a good thing or a bad thing. It is just a fact.
Now, there is no denying that first England and then Britain have always been richer and more powerful than Ireland. Nor that, both within English society and within the Catholic Church, the Recusant community has always exercised an influence out of all proportion to its numbers. Nor that the line of distinguished English converts at least from Ignatius Spencer onwards is without parallel.
But well before the emergence of the British Empire, Domine, salvum fac was ordered to be recited in England even though it was otherwise only used in countries with Catholic monarchs, and even though there still existed (and technically still exists) a rival, Catholic dynasty. At the height of Irish migration to the Anglophone world and beyond, Rome thought nothing of giving England three Cardinals while Ireland had none. And so on. All that, moreover, before the election of a Pope who, like many German intellectuals, is a seriously dedicated Anglophile.
Of course, the Irish do not help themselves politically, having widely declared to be Catholicism a basically Jacobin brew with heavy doses Marxism and other toxins thrown in, which requires those who imbibe it to identify with every Continental enemy of the Church during the “long nineteenth century”, not least those who destroyed the Papal States. It is no wonder that the heirs of Blessed Pius XII and of Leo XIII look askance, and see in the Mediaeval (or, it must often be said, faux Mediaeval) pageantry of England perhaps the nearest approximation to the European order that fundamentally they still prefer, Protestantism or no Protestantism.
After all, what is that next the Revolution, as all those Irishmen who fought for Britain (under an Anglo-Irish general) against Napoleon understood? Not to say all those French priests and Religious who sought refuge in England, keeping whole towns awake by singing God Save The King through the night.
But, again, this was Rome’s attitude even before the Revolution. Again, I am not saying that this is a good thing or a bad thing. It is just a fact.
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I think it was the novelist John (Joseph???) O'Connor who said that the English "cannot forgive the Irish for not wanting to be like the English".......you seem to personify it at times.
ReplyDeleteAre the Irish "anti-English"? Well some are and some arent.
But clearly the foundation of our nation state is ased on the concept that we are not English.
Am I anti English? Id be mortified if I was.
While protesting your admiration for Ireland you seem not to like the Irish very much.
I think thats normal.
Perhaps its just as normal for others to be rather fond of the English and not be overly fond of England.
Oh, I love the Irish.
ReplyDeleteIt's Popes and Vatican officials who never do. They much prefer the English.
Strange, perhaps. But undeniably true.
In your case loving the Irish does not extend to wishing them self determination. So you are perhaps in the same mindset that Southern Plantation owners had in ante-Bellum South Carolina.
ReplyDeleteWe are children of a lesser God with a penchant for not knowing our place.
As a republican....I mean that in a classical universal sense rather than a narrow Irish sense......I welcome the Vaticans conversion to republican symbolism where even our new Pope born in a Republic does not have a tiara on his coat of arms thus in tune with the previous two posts who refused to wear a tiara.
Not anticipating any rolling back this new tradition in athe future.
Does the Vatican prefer English Catholics to Irish Catholics?.
Well probably yes.
Although the epithet "semper fidelis" and the formalisation of "Mary Queen of Ireland" indicates a rapport I think.
Two minutes to midnight.
ReplyDeleteIs Cardinal Murphy O'Connor "elevated" to peerage?
No one's got it this time round. They don't see to do it like that anymore.
ReplyDeleteSelf-determination? You've had it. You've done it. Almost everyone in the Republic voted to give up any claim over Northern Ireland. And the clear majority in the North voted on the same day for a deal in which there can be no change unless it is approved by the majority of those definied by their voting No to it, which is obviously impossible.
Added together, that is the overwhelming majority in Ireland as a whole.
Even Sinn Fein told people to vote for that deal, which precludes a United Ireland for ever. So now they can get on with being Ministers on the British payroll. And they do.
Yes I was one of those who voted.
ReplyDeleteYet I am pretty sure that I knew what I was voting for.
And all of my countrymen and women on the same date.
Thats the self determination aspect.
Rather than try and convince Republicans that the GFA 1998 is NOT the way forward for them. Perhaps you should try convincing the unionists who plainly see that it isnt.
The problem with the GFA is that it puroports to be (in nationalist/republican terms) stepping stones to a united Ireland.
It purports also to be the mechanism that prevents the same.
Creative Ambiguity is the phrase.
Rather obviously it might be one...or the other. Maybe even neither. But it cant be both.
Here on the ground unionists and republicans have no real doubt.
Either Plan A (the current Stormont) or Plan B (joint authority) .......its heads Republicans win and tails Unionists lose.
"Perhaps you should try convincing the unionists who plainly see that it isnt"
ReplyDeleteTUV will be lucky to survive the loss of Jim Allister's seat, so whom does that leave to articulate any residual Unionist unhappiness?
Even the DUP is over the problem of governing with Sinn Fein, having seen Sinn Fein's real agenda. In return for co-option into office and respectability, it has signed up to an arrangement in which "both communities" or "both traditions" have to "consent" to any change. But one of those is defined specifically by NOT consenting. So, by definition, it can never consent. So there can be no change. Ever.
They knew that Ian Paisley would say No even to that, just because it was any deal at all. So they could sell it to their own voters as "a stepping stone to a United Ireland", because, er, Ian Paisley said so. And faced with that, he would say so even louder, making the official Sinn Fein case even stronger.
The SDLP leadership was probably more or less comfortable with this arrangement anyway, even if it couldn't frighten the horses too much by saying so out loud. But the Sinn Fein leadership either simply didn't understand it (which I don't believe for one moment), or very successfully deceived its own constituency. In return, as I said, for co-option into office and respectability. After all, Gerry and Martin weren't getting any younger.
On the same day, the voters of the Republic renounced all claim to the North, which they had long ago stopped thinking about, and the Nationalist population of which has in any case been despised, one way or another, by every Southern politician of any importnace in living memory. Once securely in office, what did even de Valera ever do for you? And now, no one down there will ever even pretend to want to. When did they last do even that, anyway?