The Shamrock and the Cross by Sullivan Eileen P.;

Author:Sullivan, Eileen P.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
Published: 2016-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Importance of the Priest to the Irish Catholic Community

In the end, priests in these novels never succeed in compelling obedience, but they care for the spiritual and material welfare of their people, who therefore love and follow them. Catholic popular literature, which proved compatible with varying views of the Church, had a more uniform effect on conceptions of legitimate leadership, confirming David Reynolds’s thesis in this respect. In popular culture, whether Protestant or Catholic, leaders deserved allegiance because they served their followers and treated them with loving kindness. Like the early Catholic writers, the Irish Americans used their characters to respond to Protestant charges that priests were tyrants who manipulated or controlled people to advance their own power. But even more than their predecessors, they reflected and strengthened their Catholic readers’ loyalty to the priests and attachment to the community they represented.

The priests’ importance in these novels can also be seen in the effects of their absence. In Sadlier’s novels of the 1860s, priests play an unusually minor role in the life of the characters in America. In these works, Sadlier also becomes the only Irish American writer to show that immigrants are not able to establish satisfactory Catholic lives in the northeastern American cities. Her characters either return to Ireland or establish settlements in the west.78 Sadlier signals the characters’ lack of community by showing them—faithful Catholics all—living without relationships with priests, her point being not that the immigrants left the cities because they could not find a priest to love and follow but because they disliked American culture and, in one novel, also because they suffered discrimination in economic and social life. The absence of ties to a priest is a symbol of the larger lack of a community or home.79

In Confessions of an Apostate and Bessy Conway, the main characters return to Ireland. In the former, the lead character, Simon O’Hare rejects the chance for community in America for many years. Even when he returns to the Church in guilt and misery, Simon has no relationship with any particular priest. He is never shown interacting with the unnamed mission priest who restores him to the Church, or with another unnamed priest to whom he gives a large donation to build the first church in New Haven. Once Simon returns to Ireland, however, his life is centered not only on his faith but also on a priest, with a name. “The only one whom he visited was the parish priest, and with him many of his hours were spent,” Sadlier reports. Bessy Conway also returns to Ireland, but hers is a happy ending. The absence of a relationship with a priest in her life in America reflects her status as a single woman and her ultimate rejection of life in her new country. She practices her faith but has no personal connection to the priest, Father Daly, who is never alone with her and never directs any help or advice specifically to her. Bessy’s lack of community

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