Assessing Clergy Attitudes: Ideology and Institutional Superiors

Extract

Introduction

It is difficult to overstate the centrality of the Catholic Church in Irish society. In the eighteenth century, Catholicism came to provide the raw materials of Irish nationalism in the face of British colonial oppression. Protestantism, on the other hand, came to represent a national connection with Britain. When the Republic of Ireland emerged as a fully independent state in 1937, the Catholic Church and Catholic values were enshrined in the new constitution, firmly establishing the Church as the Republic's cultural and political hegemon. In that context, and absent any real anti-clericalism, Catholic clergy have not traditionally needed to engage in political advocacy to promote Church teaching because Catholicism already defined the boundaries of acceptable social and political discourse.¹ The situation is vastly different in Northern Ireland (NI), however, where the Catholic Church, as the lodestar of Irish nationalism, never developed a similar social influence given the sectarian divisions between Protestant and Roman Catholic churches, which interlock with the divisions over the constitutional status of the six counties. The NI case is also a departure from the American context, where clergy exist in a pluralistic, competitive opportunity structure, and routinely engage the political system to advance their values (and those of their church).²