Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Catholic Footprint in Victorian Dublin

2023; Oxford University Press; Volume: 28; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/jvcult/vcad018

1750-0133

Gerry Kearns,

Irish and British Studies

Religions make their mark in cities already bearing the legacies of earlier spiritual encodings, decodings and re-codings.We might describe these marks as a sort of footprint.The Catholic footprint, then, would, in the manner of the urban figure-ground relation, include the churches, schools, hospitals or other edifices that comprise the mission of the Catholic Church. 1 It would extend to various street-and place-names that, for many people, have Catholic associations.Less tangible but still evident, the Catholic footprint in a city might include land owned by the Church, and the control that this allows over urban development.All senses might register the Catholic footprint.Candles and incense are most intense within the walls of a church, but even they are occasionally carried in procession into city streets.Bells call the faithful to mass or, as with the Angelus, to other religious observance.The footprint extends to the realm of memory and cities are replete with religious relics, from graveyards to sites where once stood religious institutions, or where in time past sacred matters transpired.Some of these sites are invested with commemorative practice and in this way become places of public memory. 2Others are more covert, haunted by histories of state-perpetrated violence or under the erasure of active state suppression, they serve as a spectral trace of injury and elision. 3 In many cities, faith-based communities are not hegemonic and in claiming a space must contend with competition both from a range of secular functions, and from communities expressing a different or even no faith. 4 Hervieu-Léger describes the legal and political settings in which religious expression must be negotiated as framing the 'territorial modalities of the communalization of religions', and how in turn this shapes the 'religious symbolizations of space' . 5 The Catholic footprint in Ireland's cities is an expression of just such a contentious history.As in many parts of northern Europe, the Reformation devalued Catholic institutions in Ireland and claimed their property for other purposes, some religious some not.However, the principle of cuius regio, eius religio was only ever an aspiration in Ireland and unlike in the rest of Europe the religion of the vast majority of the people did not follow that of their nominal ruler.In these circumstances, the spectres of Catholic hegemony were more insistent in Ireland than in most nominally Protestant countries.