'I have nothing but gratitude for the spiritual remnants of that upbringing'

In this edited extract from John McGahern’s 1993 essay, ‘The Church and its Spire’, recently reprinted in the posthumous collection, ‘Love of the World’, the novelist recalls growing up in Ireland at a time when ‘the Church had almost total power’

I WAS born into Catholicism as I might have been born into Buddhism or Protestantism or any of the other isms or sects, and brought up as a Roman Catholic in the infancy of this small state when the Church had almost total power: it was the dominating force in my whole upbringing, education and early working life.

I have nothing but gratitude for the spiritual remnants of that upbringing, the sense of our origins beyond the bounds of sense, an awareness of mystery and wonderment, grace and sacrament, and the absolute equality of all women and men underneath the sun of heaven. That is all that now remains. Belief, as such, has long gone.

Over many years I keep returning to a letter Marcel Proust wrote to Georges de Lauris in 1903 at the height of the anti-clerical wave that swept through France:

“I can tell you at Illiers, the small community where two days ago my father presided at the awarding of the school prizes, the curé is no longer invited to the distribution of the prizes since the passage of the Ferry laws. The pupils are trained to consider the people who associate with him as socially undesirable and, in their way, quite as much as the other, they are working to split France in two. And when I remember this little village so subject to the miserly earth, itself the foster-mother of miserliness; when I remember the curé who taught me Latin and the names of the flowers in his garden; when, above all, I know the mentality of my father’s brother-in-law – town magistrate down there and anti-clerical – when I think of all this, it doesn’t seem to me right that the old curé should no longer be invited to the distribution of the prizes, as representative of something in the village more difficult to define than the social function symbolised by the pharmacist, the retired tobacco-inspector and the optician, but something which is, nevertheless, not unworthy of respect, were it only for the perception of the meaning of the spiritualised beauty of the church spire – pointing upward into the sunset where it loses itself so lovingly in the rose-coloured clouds; and which, all the same, at first sight, to a stranger alighting in the village, looks somehow better, nobler, more dignified, with more meaning behind it, and with, what we all need, more love than the other buildings, however sanctioned they may be under the latest laws.”

Proust’s plea is for tolerance and understanding that come from a deep love, a love that is vigorous and watchful:

“. . . let the anti-clericals at least draw a few more distinctions and at least visit the great social structures they want to demolish before they wield the axe. I don’t like the Jesuit mind, but there is, nevertheless, a Jesuit philosophy, a Jesuit art, a Jesuit pedagogy. Will there be an anti-clerical art? All this is much less simple than it appears.”

The Church grows in the very process of change, Proust asserts, and he argues that it had assumed an influence even over those who were supposed to deny and combat it, which could not have been foreseen in the previous century, a century during which the Catholic Church was “the refuge of ignoramuses”. He names a number of great writers of the time to show that the 19th century was not an anti-religious century. Even Baudelaire was in touch with the Church, Proust argues, if only through Sacrilege.

There is no danger, even today, of the parish priest being excluded from a school ceremony in Ireland. In any of the small towns it would be as much as a person’s social life was worth to try to keep him away, which does not make Proust’s truth less applicable. If the 18th-century church in France was “the refuge of ignoramuses”, my fear is that the Church in 20th-century Ireland will come, in time, to be seen similarly, and my involvement was when it was at the height of its power.

My early grammar was made up of images. The first image was the sky; in that, at least, it is in harmony with the spire of Illiers. Heaven was in the sky, and beyond its mansions was the Garden of Paradise. House of Gold, Arc of the Covenant, Gate of Heaven, Morning Star were prayed to each night. One of my earliest memories is of looking up at the steep, poor rushy hill that rose behind our house and thinking that if I could climb the hill I would be able to step into the middle of the sky and walk all the way to the stars and to the very gate of heaven. I could not have understood then that it was necessary to pass through death to reach that gate.

If heaven was in the sky, hell was in the bowels of the earth, but not our earth, an earth that was elsewhere. A great dark river overhung with swirling mists flowed past an entrance screened by mountains and great boulders. Across a wide desolate plain came the souls of the damned from the seat of judgement, naked and weeping, bearing only a single coin to give to the boatman to take them across the river and into eternal fire.

Between this hell and heaven, purgatory was placed. It had no entrance and descriptions of it were vague, probably because everybody expected to spend some time there before gaining heaven, as the saints alone went straight to God. The physical heat of the flames was as great as in hell but the suffering was leavened by the expectation of the eternal happiness to come, the sight of the face of God in heaven.

Situated between earth and purgatory was limbo. Grave-faced children or infants with no stain but original sin had to wait there through all eternity, but without pain. Once we learned that limbo was no longer open to us after baptism and that we were faced with the likelihood of hell or, at best, certain purgatory, limbo appeared to be not such a bad place at all.

ALL THIS WAS learned in the home, through answers to ceaseless questioning, later through the catechism learned by rote in school, reinforced by constant images and daily rituals: the Pope’s hand raised in blessing, the lamp that burned all day and night before the Sacred Heart on the high mantelpiece, the silence that fell when the Angelus rang, the Rosary each night, the Grace before and after meals. We followed the life of Christ as a story that gave meaning to our lives through the great feasts of Christmas and Easter and Whitsun when it was dangerous to go out on water.

The time came when the religious centre moved from the home and school to the church. This was a natural, unconscious movement, and almost certainly began with the reception of the sacraments. All the doctrinal and ritual preparations for First Confession and First Communion took place in the school. The preparation for Confirmation was more elaborate because we were going to be examined by the Bishop. This took up much schooltime, but part of our instruction was given in the church by the old parish priest, Canon Glynn. On good evenings Canon Glynn would walk up and down the avenue of limes that ran between the presbytery and church, reading his breviary while we played among the evergreens and headstones in the churchyard. At the time, people kept guinea fowl, and there was a boy in our class who had learned to imitate their call. So perfect was his imitation that when he climbed high up in the cypress by the gate he was answered by the fowl in the farmyards around. It was a terrible shriek. Mikey Flanagan was his name but all his life long he was never known as anything but Guinea Flanagan.

I remember little of Canon Glynn’s instruction, other than the smallness of the class and overcoated priest in the empty vastness of the church, but I remember Guinea’s call from high in the cypress branches with piercing clarity. The Bishop came that Easter. With his crozier and rich colours and tall hat, he was the image of God the Father. At the altar rail he struck us lightly on the cheek. We were now soldiers of Christ. I became an altar boy, in scarlet and white, and began to take a more direct part in the ceremonies.

Before the printed word, churches were described as the Bibles of the poor, and they were my only Bible. I never found the church ceremonies tedious. They always gave me pleasure, and I miss them still. The movement of focus from the home and school to the church brought with it a certain lightness, a lifting of oppression, a going outwards, even a joy, that is caught in the very opening movement of the ordinary of the Mass: “Introibo ad altere Dei/ Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meum (I will go unto the altar of God/ To the God who giveth joy to my youth).”

There were the great ceremonies of Christmas and Easter, but the ceremonies I remember best are the stations of the cross in Lent and the Corpus Christi processions. There were never more than a handful of people present at these Lenten Stations gathered beneath the organ loft. In the dimly lit church, rain and wind often beating at the windows, the church smelling of damp, the surpliced priest, three altar boys in scarlet and white, one with a cross in front, two bearing lighted candles, moved from station to station, the name of each echoing in the nearly empty church, “Veronica Wipes the Face of Jesus”, along with the prayer, “O Jesus who for love of me didst bear Thy cross;/ To Calvary in Thy sweet mercy grant to me to suffer;/ And to die with Thee”, chanted at each station.

Corpus Christi was summer. Rhododendron and lilac branches were taken by cart and small tractors from the Oakport Woods and used to decorate the grass margins of the triangular field around the village. Coloured streamers and banners were strung across the road from poles. Altars with flowers and a cross on white linen were erected at Gilligan’s, the post office and at Mrs Mullaney’s. The host was taken from the tabernacle and carried by the priests beneath a gold canopy all the way round the village, pausing for ceremonies at each wayside altar. Benediction was always at the post office. The congregation followed behind, some bearing the banners of their sodalities, and girls in white veils and dresses scattered rose petals from white boxes on the path before the host.

Jung remarks in his letters that the Gospels in themselves are such crude and naive documents that the myth of Jesus could not have taken root and expanded over centuries throughout the world if it didn’t echo both current and older myths of a divine messenger taking on human form. Surely the simple Corpus Christi procession was a symbol of the divine leaving the tabernacle and visiting the ordinary human village for one mortal-immortal hour beneath the sky.

In contrast, there was the mission. Every few years Redemptorists came to the village like a band of strolling players and thundered hell and damnation from the pulpits for a whole week. Stalls selling rosaries, medals, scapulars, prayerbooks and Stations were set up along the church wall for the macabre carnival.

These Redemptorists were brought in to purify through terror, but in my experience they were never taken seriously, though who can vouch for the effect they might have had on the sensitive or disturbed. They were evaluated as performers and appreciated like horror novels. “He’d raise the hair on your head,” I heard often remarked with deep satisfaction. Poorer performances were described as “watery”.

Some of the local priests were a match for these roaring boys, and while they were feared and accepted I don’t think they were liked by the people, though they’d have a small court of pious flunkies. They were often big, powerfully built men. In those days it took considerable wealth to put a boy through Maynooth, and they looked and acted as if they came from a line of swaggering, confident men who dominated field and market and whose only culture was cunning, money and brute force. Though they could be violently generous and sentimental at times, in their hearts they despised their own people.

Church and school and state worked hand in hand. Years later when I was a national teacher I totted up the teaching hours and discovered that slightly more than half the clár of that particular day had gone on religious instruction and the teaching of Irish. How the children received a rudimentary education is difficult to imagine, and probably the truth is that many of those less fortunate in the kind of homes they came from did not.

I LEFT NATIONAL SCHOOL to go to the Presentation College in Carrick-on-Shannon.

All through this schooling there was the pressure to enter the priesthood, not from the decent Brothers but from within oneself. The whole of our general idea of life still came from the Church, clouded by all kinds of adolescent emotions heightened by the sacraments and prayers and ceremonies. Still at the centre was the idea: in my end is my beginning. The attraction was not joy or the joyous altar of God; it was dark, ominous, and mysterious, as befits adolescence and the taking up, voluntarily, of our future death at the very beginning of life, as if sacrificing it to a feared God in order to avert future retribution. There was, too, the comfort of giving all the turmoil and confusion of adolescence into the safekeeping of an idea.

The ordained priest’s position could not have been easy either. No matter what their power and influence was, they were at that time completely cut off from the people, both by training and their sacred office which placed them on a supernatural plane between the judgement seat and ordinary struggling mortals. Though they were granted power, they were also figures of sacrifice, and, often cynically, they were seen to be men who had been sacrificed.

I went from Carrick to train as a national teacher in St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra, Dublin. Teaching was known then as the second priesthood. Everything that happened during that training pointed to the fact that our function had been already defined by the Church. We were being trained to lead the young into the Church, as we had been led, and to act as a kind of non-commissioned officer to the priests in the running of the parish. In all things we would be second to the priest, including education. They gave us no education to speak of other than some teaching practice. What was under scrutiny at all times was our “character”, not in the true sense of the word but in the sense that we would be religious in observance, obedient and conventional, cogs in an organisational wheel. The scrutiny took place mostly in the first of the two years. “Ní bheidh sibh ar ais” was the dreaded sentence, and every year a number of students were not “ar ais” to complete the second year of the course.

Each college day began with morning Mass and ended with evening Devotions in the chapel. Each meal was served by small boys from the orphanage in Artane in the huge refectory framed by public prayers of blessing and thanksgiving. All the societies in the college were religious. There wasn’t a literary or historical or philosophical or, even more surprising, a Gaelic society. A few did attempt to start some kind of intellectual society, but they were hounded mercilessly by other students and dubbed Oideachas Éireann. They were seen, in the grand Irish phrase, as getting above themselves. Not to attend daily Mass or evening Devotions was to invite certain expulsion. Not to belong to a religious society in the first year was to put oneself in danger.

As soon as I could, I joined the Society of St Vincent de Paul. (Ambrose Bierce’s definition of a coward is one who in an emergency thinks with his heels.) I remember well visiting an old woman in a slum off Talbot Street. There was the unmistakable smell of poverty in her room, a photograph of a British soldier in uniform was on the peeling wallpaper. Myself and the other Brother were 18 years of age. We sat and questioned the woman on the state of her soul. Her answers were properly hypocritical, she got her food tickets, and we solemnly reported on the visit to the Society.

We were allowed to go outside the college on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons and all day on Sundays, but even then we had to be back for meals. The gates were locked at 10. Anybody late had to climb the high barbed-wired wall or enter through the president’s house. That required serious explanations. Any whiff of alcohol was guaranteed disgrace and freedom in the morning.

After the Presentation Brothers in Carrick I found the college half-barbaric and hid behind a kind of clowning. It is only fair to add that those students who came from the Diocesan seminaries found the place quite agreeable by comparison. Seminaries at that time were pointed firmly towards Maynooth, and as ours was the second priesthood it could afford to be less rigorous.

When we left the college, the dean, a Fr Johnston, a strange figure known as “the Bat”, gave us all a little packet of salt, very like promotional packets of breakfast cereals that are pushed through letter boxes nowadays. I think it was called Cerberus. The Bat informed us that while we had our own Catholic country now, nearly all the wealth of the country was controlled by Protestants or Jews. This salt was the one brand owned by a Catholic company. Saxa, the best-selling salt, was in the hands of the Protestants. As we were sent out to lead the little children unto God, we were given the little packets of Cerberus to promote Catholic salt and all things Catholic. At the time when I had acquired the sky above the rushy hill as the image of heaven and all eternity, we were told that if we could manage to place a pinch of salt on a bird’s tail we could capture the bird, even in flight, and we threw salt time and time again towards branches where birds sat. The little packets of Cerberus, I am happy to report, proved as ineffectual as the other grains of salt we had scattered so hopefully on the swift birds.

The full version of The Church and its Spireappears in Love of the World: Essays by John McGahern, published by Faber and Faber.