blackisthelight

Authoritarian Catholic overlord of mid-century Ireland

John Charles McQuaid was born in Cootehill, Co. Cavan in 1895 and would go on to become one of the principal architects of mid-century Ireland, shaping the political and cultural spheres into a reflection of the authoritarian Catholicism that he represented.

His father was a doctor and his mother died shortly after his birth. McQuaid was academically gifted and moved to Dublin to study at Blackrock College at the age of 15 where a Holy Ghost Father who worked there made a strong impression on him. Eamon DeValera was working there as a maths teacher at the time. After a year, McQuaid transferred to Clongowes Wood College in Sallins which was run by the Jesuits. Joseph Walshe was a French teacher here at the time and the two would remain allies for years as Walsh became a top civil servant and diplomat. At the end of secondary school McQuaid opted to become a priest and joined the Holy Ghost Fathers. One of the principal teachers McQuaid encountered at the seminary was Fr. Denis Fahey who had taken up his role in 1912, the year before McQuaid arrived. Fahey was a virulent and prolific theological antisemite who played a large role in shaping the opinions of Father Charles Coughlin the US and whose legacy still resonates today. Fahey was an important figure in shaping McQuaid’s philosophy, although later in life he would reject some of his ideas as being extremist.

McQuaid went on to study at UCD during the turbulent years of the First World War, Easter Rising, Russian Revolution and Spanish Flu epidemic. Interested in world events, he came to the conclusion that the Pope had been excluded from the Versailles Conference by Freemasons. McQuaid also studied as a teacher under Fr. Timothy Corcoran, a nationalist Catholic educator who co-wrote the provisional government’s submission to the Versailles Conference with Sean T. O’Kelly and had a vision of a new Irish state ruled by a Catholic elite. While the Church was never fully supportive of Republican ideals, it was tending more nationalist as a means for greater independence from a Protestant British government.

McQuaid began writing for the Holy Ghost mission magazine and came to see his journalistic output as an important part of his work. He was ordained a priest in 1924. This was followed by a period in the Vatican, living at the Holy Ghost Seminary, where he would regularly visit the grave of Pius X for whom he had great admiration. The Holy Ghosts were engaged in the battle against modernity that had been called for by successive Popes and led by an Action Française supporter named Fr. Henri le Floch. Le Floch had been a significant influence on Fahey, and another notable student of Le Floch’s around this time was Marcel Lefebvre who would go on become Holy Ghost Superior General and found the Society of Saint Pius X. After a couple of years, McQuaid was sent back to Dublin to become Dean of Studies at Blackrock College. The roles of Blackrock College and Clongowes Woods College in particular as incubators of the political elite in twentieth century Ireland should be recognised, and the significant power the leadership of these schools had to shape the country. Coming from both of these schools himself, McQuaid quickly found doors opening to him in the upper workings of the Free State which was quickly becoming more and more of a Catholic state. McQuaid befriended DeValera through his son Vivion who was studying at Blackrock. Father Edward Cahill, leader of the Catholic Action group An Ríoghacht , and Father Fahey were invited to speak at Blackrock by McQuaid to celebrate the Feast of Christ the King and the founding of An Ríoghacht in October 1926, McQuaid became President of Blackrock College in 1931.

McQuaid held the writers Hillaire Belloc, GK Chesterton and Jacques Maritain in high regard, all unapologetically Catholic writers, and had little regard for Protestant writers or modern Irish writers like Joyce or Yeats. Following a trip to France in 1932, McQuaid returned to Cavan and made a lengthy speech setting out his version of a large conspiracy of Jews, Freemasons, Communists and Protestants who were in league with Satan to destroy the traditional Catholic world.O’Brien,36 The speech particularly singled out Jews as eternal enemies of the Church, and has strong echoes of Fahey’s style of antisemitism:

“You will find Jews engaged in practically every movement against Our Divine Lord and his Church…But further, Satan has other allies…I want you to remember the truth very clearly: by Satan we mean not only Lucifer and the fallen Angels, but also those other men, Jews or others, who by deliberate revolt against Our Divine Lord have chosen Satan for their head.” The speech wound its way through centuries of conspiracies, from Bavarian Illuminati to Trotsky and the Bolsheviks, via Freemasonry and international banking, all apparently backed up with proof. McQuaid claimed the truth of these affairs could not be aired due to Jewish control of print media and Hollywood. The final objective of all these schemes being to control the world through the “Jew-controlled League of Nations”.

The sermon also contained accusations that Freemasons had contrived to create secular states since the French revolution, and that Jews were controlling Hollywood film productions. He blamed the 1929 stock market crash on Jewish bankers, and named a Jewish financier as being particularly responsible. Fahey was at that point also teaching at Blackrock. June 1932 saw a huge celebration of Catholicism being held in Dublin, the International Eucharistic Congress, and McQuaid was at the centre of the celebrations. The opening day celebrations were held in the grounds of Blackrock College and included a long list of diplomats and Catholic hierarchy dignitaries from around the world, and McQuaid cemented his close relationship with DeValera, the new Taoiseach.

McQuaid began to become more involved in politics and influencing social matters. He instigated a boycott of mixed-gender athletics events, opposed lay influence in education, lobbied against the sale of contraceptives and for Catholic control of hospitals and persuaded advertisers to abandon the Irish Times for its coverage of the Spanish Civil War. McQuaid was also involved in An Ríoghacht ’s proposals to the Banking Commission which involved proposals to nationalise irish banking along the lines of the Portuguese Estado Novo model.

McQuaid got the job of counselling DeValera on the new Constitution and wrote to him daily in 1937. They often met in Blackrock to talk about the wording of articles, with McQuaid acting as a researcher and advisor. Many of McQuaid’s suggestions and changes were adopted into the final wording of the document and he is generally recognised as having written Article 43 on Education and Article 41.2 regarding a woman’s place in the home. McQuaid was probably the third most important writer of the Constitution, behind DeValera and John Hearne, and articles concerning family, divorce, religion and education bear the hallmarks of his influence. When the wording of Article 44 on Religion was revealed to him, McQuaid and other clergy were angry at the refusal of DeValera to allow for the recognition of Catholicism as the one true religion. Pope Pius XI was also unimpressed but did not go so far as to publicly condemn the wording. The wording of Article 44 recognised the existence of Protestant and Jewish faiths in the country which must have come as blow to McQuaid, Cahill and Fahey despite the overwhelmingly Catholic nature of the new Constitution. However, McQuaid held his tongue for the most part and did not burn bridges with DeValera. McQuaid was moved on from his post as President of Blackrock, but soon found himself installed as Archbishop of Dublin following the death of Edward Byrne in February 1940.

During the Emergency, McQuaid put the Catholic Action groups to work on social work, setting up the Catholic Social Services Conference, and used his close working knowledge of the State to ensure that state funds were kept flowing to church projects. He embarked on an ambitious program of church building using cheaply acquired state land around newer areas of Dublin. McQuaid cemented his grip on the Irish Church, and did not tolerate any opposition to his rule or Catholic supremacy. He shut down two groups set up by the Legion of Mary to support inter-faith dialogue – The Mercier Society and the Pillar of Fire Society, which had been started to foster relations with Protestant and Jewish groups respectively. Attempts were made to reduce the agency of Protestant led organisations such as the ISPCC and St. John’s Ambulance, in an attempt to assure Catholic dominance of the state. He also refused to officially recognise Maria Duce, founded by Fr. Fahey, but was relatively lenient compared to the Mercier Society. The censorship of literature was fully supported by McQuaid as a tactic to defeat any liberalisation of Irish society, and the country became steeped in overbearing Catholic restrictions on culture and society during the 1950s, probably the high water mark for the Church in the country. Moral panics over comic books and tabloid newspapers were the order of the day along with Red Scare paranoia and mass detention of women, children and the infirm in a Catholic run detention system that exceeded the per-capita inmates of the Soviet gulags. Horrific child abuse and torture took place in many of these institutions, and perpetrators were protected by the power of the Church, headed by the politically connected McQuaid. Police co-operated with abusers and refused to investigate allegations against the religious orders running the homes, laundries, borstals, schools and psychiatric hospitals. Children born into the system were often sold for adoption to the US without their parent’s knowledge or approval and the infant mortality rate was much higher than the national average.

McQuaid stepped into international Cold War politics in 1948 with a speech decrying the threat of a Communist win in Italian elections and a fund-raising drive to assist Catholics in Italy. This was a rare foray for an Irish clergyman, but was in line with the anti-Communist tendencies of the new Interparty government. He also raised objections to the trial of Cardinal Mindszenty in Hungary in 1949 and dedicated the traditional Mayday march to his cause. Mindszenty had been arrested and convicted of treason for opposing the new Communist regime. McQuaid set up his own spy agency to watch for Communist activity in Ireland run by the Catholic Information Bureau. Lists of suspected communists were passed on to parish priests and government officials which tied in with Catholic Action vigilance committees and a general pervasive aura of control and oppression emanating from the Church. One of the biggest interventions McQuaid made under the guise of fighting socialism, was ensuring the failure of the Mother and Child Scheme, a proposal to provide state-funded healthcare to children and mothers. McQuaid chose this as a battleground to defend Catholic-run health care centres from state interference at the expense of generations of underprivileged children whose families could not afford doctor’s fees in a country that had the highest infant mortality rate in Europe at the time. The defeat of the scheme and the resignation of its author, Dr. Noel Browne, an idealistic young Clann na Poblachta minister, confirmed that the Republic’s policies were subject to a veto by McQuaid and the Church.

McQuaid forbade any socialising between Catholic and Protestant youth and his close links with successive governments became the embodiment of the Unionist slogan ‘Home Rule is Rome Rule.’ Catholics were forbidden from attending non-Catholic weddings, funerals and other services. When the Second Vatican Council was convened in 1962, McQuaid was on the far right of the delegates and broadly opposed to all modernising efforts that the council would adopt, finding himself aligned with the likes of Cardinal Lefebvre. He took particular umbrage at the approval of inter-faith reconciliation with Protestants. Despite the official relaxations from Rome, McQuaid notably refused to take part in ceremonies to celebrate the opening of the Garden of Remembrance in 1966 alongside Protestant and Jewish celebrants.Cooney,299 As society and the priorities of Irish Catholics were changing around him through the 60’s, McQuaid’s influence waned slightly, but he remained a dominant figure, and reacted strongly to any move to liberalise contraceptive or divorce laws. He stepped down as Archbishop in January 1972 and died in 1973 aged 77.

Sources:

Anglo-Celt, March13, 1932

Beatty, Aidan and O’Brien, Dan (Eds.) (2018) Irish Questions and Jewish Questions – Crossovers in Culture Syracuse: Syracuse University Press

Cooney, John (1999) John Charles McQuaid Dublin: O’Brien Press

Keogh, Dermot and McCarthy, Andrew (2005) The Catholic Church and the Writing of the 1937 Constitution History Ireland , History Ireland May – Jun., 2005, Vol. 13, No. 3 (May – Jun., 2005), pp. 36-41

Luddy, Maria (2005) A 'Sinister and Retrogressive' Proposal: Irish Women's Opposition to the 1937 Draft Constitution Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , 2005, Vol. 15 (2005), pp. 175-195