Ireland during the Second World War by Bryce Evans

Author:Bryce Evans [Evans, Bryce]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, History, Ireland, British
ISBN: 9781526111302
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2016-05-16T04:00:00+00:00

6

Church and state

The key to Irelandis the Church, its pontiffs, the Nuncio, MacRory and McQuaid and I think we should bother less about relations, good or bad, with the Government and more with relations with the Catholic Church.

John Betjeman, 21 March 1943

Subsidiary function

The exercise of collective responsibility to overcome material shortages infused political, economic and social debate during the Emergency. It also came to affect many aspects of everyday life: Irish people were not used to queuing, yet during the Emergency, food queues became a ‘fact of life’.1 These new ‘facts of life’ were ordered by the state. At the same time, Catholic social thought proffered an alternative form of social and economic organisation. In this schema, by contrast, the state’s role was reduced to a ‘subsidiary function’.2 Catholic social doctrine was based on the papal encyclicals Rerum Novarum (1891) and Quadragesimo Anno (1931). The latter elaborated papal doctrine on twentieth-century social and economic questions, declaring that in its pursuit of the ‘common good’, the state should extend ‘special care and foresight’ to the ‘great mass of the needy’.3 On the other hand, the state should not encroach on the just freedom of individuals and families. It reaffirmed the rights of private property and declared that the state was ‘not permitted to discharge its duty arbitrarily’.4

Party political affiliations to Catholic social thought became confused in the turbulent political circumstances of the 1930s.5 De Valera’s 1937 Constitution was pervasively Catholic in comparison to the Free State Constitution of1922. Nonetheless, a substantial number of clergy and theologians remained unreconciled to Fianna Fail, and around the middle of the decade, several senior ecclesiastics endorsed the United Ireland Party, an amalgamation of the Blueshirts, Cumann na nGaedheal and the Centre Party.6 During the Emergency, social Catholicism, or vocationalism, persisted as an influential form of public opinion, and conformity with the church’s moral and social principles remained a priority for Irish Catholics.7

The government responded to the growing prominence of vocationalism by establishing the Commission on Vocational Organisation in January 1939. The commission’s 1943 report warned of the danger, on the one hand, of ‘competitive anarchy’ and, on the other, of ‘state regimentation’.8 The latter consideration united a commission delayed in its appointment and hamstrung by its size and diversity of interests. To quote its chairman, Bishop Michael Browne of Galway, ‘the one point on which all the members are agreed is that they abhor totalitarianism or state- domination in any form … whether communist, socialist or fascist’.9 During the Emergency, the state accumulated power and initiated schemes which, in encroaching upon individual freedom and property rights, tickled this particular nerve. This chapter details the complex interactions between church and state at this time in the spheres of the regulated marketplace, civil and canon law, and money and credit.

‘A sin that cries to heaven for vengeance’: church, state and marketplace

Using the Irish Press, Radio Eireann, and its power of censorship over the rest of the media, the Fianna Fáil governments of the Emergency carefully cultivated an image of the Irish people as exceptional in shunning the base lure of materialism.

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