The Twelfth

A Papal Blessing was sent to William III when he set out for Ireland, and there hangs at Stormont a painting depicting his crossing of the Boyne with, in the sky, a vignette of the Pope with his hand raised in blessing. The Lateran Palace was illuminated for a fortnight when news of the Battle of the Boyne reached Rome. But then, it had been the Pope who had first given the Kings of England the Lordship of Ireland. That he was English is neither here nor there. He was the Pope.

During the 1798 Rebellion, the staff and students of Maynooth sent a Declaration of Loyalty to the King. The tiny number of priests who adhered to that Rebellion were excommunicated, the bishops calling them “the very faeces of the Church”. Into the nineteenth century, Catholic priests participated in the annual prayer service at the Walls of Derry, an ecumenical gesture with few or no parallels at the time. Jacobite and Hanoverian were always united in supporting the closest possible ties among the historic Kingdom of England (including the Principality of Wales), the historic Kingdom of Scotland and the historic Kingdom of Ireland.

Prominent Belfast Catholic laymen chaired rallies against Home Rule, with prominent Catholic priests on the platforms. There were numerous Catholic pulpit denunciations of Fenianism, which is unlike any of the three principal British political traditions in being a product of the French Revolution. Hence its tricolour flag. And hence and its strong anti-clerical streak, always identifying Catholicism as one of Ireland’s two biggest problems.

Princely absolutism was incompatible with the building up of the Social Reign of Christ. Likewise, ethnically exclusive nation-states deriving uncritically from the Revolution do not provide adequate means to that end. By contrast, the absence of any significant Marxist influence in this country has been due to the universal and comprehensive Welfare State, and the strong statutory protection of workers and consumers, the former paid for by progressive taxation, and all underwritten by full employment. These are very largely the fruits of Catholic Social Teaching.

Such fruits have been of disproportionate benefit to ethnically Gaelic-Irish Catholics throughout the United Kingdom. Even in the 1940s, Sinn Féin worried that they were eroding its support. She who led the assault on these things remains a Unionist hate figure. The Civil Rights Movement was explicitly for equal British citizenship. Even the old Nationalist Party, never mind Sinn Féin, was permitted no part in it. And it was classically British Labour in identifying education, health care, decent homes and proper wages as the rights of citizens, who are demeaned precisely as citizens when they are denied those rights. The fruits of Catholic Social Teaching, indeed.