Irish Catholicism: The Specter of Jansenism
Robert Cherry
Broeklundian Professor
Department of Economics
Brooklyn College
Email: robertc@brooklyn.cuny.edu
Phone: 718-552-2744
Abstract
Rigorist behavior was widespread among Irish Catholics after the devotional revolution in the second half of the nineteenth century. Many observers of the Irish community, both in Ireland and America, came to characterize this behavior as Jansenist, a France-based religious movement that may have entered Ireland after the French Revolution. By contrast, important historians dismiss this contention. This paper will be the first attempt to identify systematically the evidence of a link between Jansenism and the rigorist behavior associated with Irish Catholicism.

Irish Catholicism: The Specter of Jansenism
Irish Catholicism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century embraced rejection of pleasure as part of its strong devotional movement. As Joan Chittister wrote,
“The continuing war against the body was a bitter and brutal one. Spiritualities from
Gnosticism to Jansenism abound, far into the twentieth century, intent on the suppression of physical needs, physical pleasure, physical joy, and physical reality. … Religious zealots have denied the right of the flesh, whipped the flesh, starved the flesh, and cursed the flesh.” 1
Chittister’s reference to Jansenism is representative of many twentieth century observers who were angered by the anti-pleasure views that they believed dominated Irish Catholic thought.
When providing the social context for the Kennedy family, Arthur Schlesinger wrote,
“Jansenism pervaded the Irish Church, encouraging clerical tendencies toward censoriousness and bigotry. … It explained that man was weak and life more than a little absurd, unless redeemed by the grace of God mediated through the church. The culture of Robert Kennedy’s great-grandparents transported to Boston was filled with this conviction of the bloodiness of life.
The sense of disorder, tragedy and evil was not unlike that of the Puritans, three centuries earlier.
But what the Puritans had placed on the isolated soul in quest of salvation, the Irish assigned to the family and the church.” 2
1 Joan Chittister, Heart and Flesh: A Feminist Spirituality for Women and Men (Eerdmans Publishing, 1998) 23; and
Joan Chittister, In Search of Belief (Liguori Publications, 1999) 86. See also Charles Curran, The Catholic Moral
Tradition Today: A Synthesis ( Georgetown University Press, 1999) 129.
2 Arthur Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy (Mariner Books, 2002) 4.
1

Schlesinger’s perspective was probably informed by his Harvard colleagues, Nathan Glazer and Patrick Moynihan who wrote,
“It is notorious that Catholics have produced hardly a handful of important scientists. … The failure of the American Catholics seems deeper than that. Neither have they produced a great poet, a great painter, a great diplomatist. None of the arts, none of the achievements that most characterize the older Catholic societies seem to prosper here. ‘Is the honorable adjective
‘Roman Catholic’ truly merited by America’s middle-class-Jansenist Catholicism, puritanized,
Calvinized [people].’”
3
According to James Wilson, “For Irish realist writers in the 1940s, ‘Jansenism’ denoted a sense of Irish inferiority in the face of other European cultures that had entered with far less trauma onto the cosmopolitan riches of modernity. Ireland was the provincial, backward, and wounded state that refused to recover from its sutured legacy of military defeat and Catholic piety.” 4
Wilson contends that for writers like Patrick Kavanagh and Sean O'Faoláin, Jansenism
‘became a way of leveling accusations of backwardness, primitive repression, and anachronism on Irish culture in the face of continental Europe's cosmopolitan progress, [while in Denis]
Devlin's hands, the term became a means of expressing the condition of the modern par excellence
.” 5
Anti-Pleasure Views among the Irish
3 Nathan Glazer and Patrick Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot (MIT and Harvard Presses, 1970) 231.
4 James Matthew Wilson, “Poetic Jansensim: Religious and Political Representation in Denis Devlin's Poetry,” Eire-
Ireland 42 #3/4 (Fall/Winter 2007): 35.
5 Wilson, 40.
2

There is little disagreement that Irish Catholicism was severe in its prohibitions against bodily pleasures. For example, Paul Donoghue recounts his mother’s behavior: “Laughter and enjoyment, let alone sexual pleasure, are not for God-fearing Jansenists. She gave to every charity but not to herself. She loved flowers but could never buy them for herself.”
6
Hasia Diner notes, “[F]rom pre-Famine days through the early twentieth century, commentators remarked on the lack of popular interest in food. Even when times got better, when the Famine and mass migration had removed the very poorest from the countryside, Irish women and men still said little in memoir and literature about food.” 7
These attitudes carried over to the Irish-American community. While they were grateful for the bountiful food in the United States, Irish-American women understood that though it
“prevented hunger, they did not look to it with great pleasure.” 8 When remembering his mother,
Frank O’Conner recalled that after cooking for her family, she would “bless herself and then add her own peculiar grace: ‘Well, thanks be to God, we’re neither full nor fasting.’ ” 9
Irish Catholicism was one important reason for this attitude towards food. Diner stated,
“The vast majority of Irish also subscribed to … a distinctive form of Catholicism that made little room for religious celebration by feasting. … Before the Famine Irish church fathers propagated strict regulations governing fasting … After the Famine, … the culture of fasting intensified. No religious festival brought food into the church to complement the joyous world of sacred time. Abstention from food, it seems, heightened Irish spirituality.” 10
6 Paul Donoghue, The Jesus Advantage: A New Approach to a Fuller Life (Ave Maria Press, 2001) 96.
7 Diner, Hungering for America , (Harvard University Press, 2001) 97.
8 Diner, Hungering for America , 114.
9 Quoted in Diner, Hungering for America , 98.
10 Diner, Hungering for America , 86. Diner (105-106) supplements this with a non-religious explanation.
3

Beginning in the 1830s, the Irish Catholic Church tried as much as possible to eliminate festivals which they considered environments that encouraged drunkenness and immorality.
They particularly focused on the Donnybrook Fair, an annual event since 1204. Maria Luddy noted, “The reforming cleric Fr John Spratt observed the impact of the fair, noting that despite drunkenness ‘many, many an unfortunate female [who] now rolls in the abyss of prostitution, would have been [an] honourable member of society but for that sink of pestilence and carnival of crime.’” 11 As a result of church efforts, the fair declined and was gone by the 1860s.
The damaging effects of these attitudes may have continued well into the twentieth century.
Extrapolating from instances of Magdelan excesses in the mid-twentieth century, the film historian, Richard Leonard contended, “The film [Magdelene Sisters] demonstrates that institutionalization of Jansenism. In a world view preoccupied with ‘sins of the flesh,’ it is acceptable to save young women … by locking these women up and working them to exhaustion.” 12
Broadly interpreted, “sins of the flesh” did preoccupy Magdelan institutions but their concerns were much broader. When William Logan, a Scottish mission worker visited Ireland in
1845, the nun in charge at the Sisters of Charity Magdalen asylum informed him that intemperance, dancing parties and a love of dress were the major causes of prostitution.
13 Since personal vanity was considered sinful, all penitents who enter Magdalen asylums immediately had their head shaven. Leonard is also correct that these asylums consider “constant employment” to be central to their rehabilitation. As Luddy noted, “The inmates, it was stressed,
11 Maria Luddy, Prostitution and Irish Society, 1800-1940 (Cambridge University Press, 2007) 24.
12 Richard Leonard, Movies that Matter: Reading Film through the Lens of Faith (Loyola Press, 2006) 149.
13 Luddy, 23.
4

were changed by work; industry allowed ‘the mind to be tranquillised and made the penitents more amenable to religious instruction.’” 14
When studying rural Irish folkways in the 1960s, Nancy Scheper-Hughes claimed that childrearing practices were a product of an ascetic Jansenist tradition. She asserted,
“There is a strong tendency among Irish mothers and fathers to repress, deny, and ignore babies’ demands for physical gratification and stimulation (including sucking, rocking, and holding) to the extent that Irish toddlers are remarkably undemanding and frequently shy and withdrawn. …
[Indeed,] rural infants and toddlers spend an inordinate amount of time by themselves, unrocked, unheld, and unreassured.”
15
Similarly, after studying the Irish fishing community he called Inis Beag in the 1950s, John
Messinger suggested that Irish celibacy was rooted in Irish Catholicism: a “tradition steeped in sexual repression, mistrust of the flesh, and the glorification of the ascetic virtues of temperance, continence, and self-mortification.” Messinger found that the emphasis of sermons, particularly at the periodic missions to Inis Beag, was “controlling one’s passions.” This control begins early in each child’s life. Messinger found that any forms of direct or indirect sexual expression “are punished severely by word and deed … and physical love as manifested in intimate fondling or kissing is rare in Inis Beag.” This repressed behavior is promoted by “religious journals, found
14 Quote found in Luddy, 86. Leonard, however, is wrong to think that the Magdelan institutions desired to keep as many women as possible “locked up.” According to Luddy (86), these institution saw “time being usefully filled up in washing and working for the public” as a means of “refit[ting] them, to fill, at some future date, their proper station in society.” Moreover, after evaluating nineteenth century records, Luddy found that the majority of
Magdelan penitents left the institution, particular those in their twenties and thirties. Of those who remained, she contends that these were voluntary decisions, most often based on a lack of family ties in the outside world and the above average material standard of living the asylums provided.
15 Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland (University of
California Press, 1982) 133-134.
5

in most homes [where] many of the articles therein deal with sexual morality of the Irish
Catholic variety.” 16
Indeed, because nudity was singularly associated with sexuality, “care is taken to cover the bodies of infants in the presence of their siblings and outsiders.” Most startling, virtually none of the fishermen Messinger met were unable to swim because the undressing necessary was considered indecent. He stated, “The sexual symbolism of nudity not only has resulted in the drowning of seamen who might have saved themselves had they been able to swim, but the death of men who were unwilling to face the nurse when ill, because it might mean baring their bodies to her, and thus were beyond help when finally treated.” 17
Repression of cross dancing was a consistent religious theme. In the 1860s, Paul Cardinal
Cullen took the wicked newspapers to task for “advertising dances like the polka, which Cullen decreed ‘repugnant to the purity of Christian morals.’” 18 Similarly, Whyte highlighted the Irish clergy’s special concern in the 1920s that new dancing lent itself to sensuality. He quoted the displeasure of the Archbishop Gilmartin of Tuam, who claimed that “actual hours of sleep have been turned into hours of debasing pleasure.”
19
Messinger believed, “There is considerable evidence to suggest that the rigid body and arms of the step dancer is an early nineteenth century product of Jansenist doctrine in the church, which attempted to desexualize dancing. Most of the movement is below the hips of the dancer, and it is the feet of the performer which are watched intently by the audience, at least openly.” 20
16 John Messinger, Inis Beag: Isle of Ireland (Holt, Winston and Rheinhart, 1969) 108, 111.
17 Messinger, 108, 110.
18 Desmond Bowen, Paul Cardinal Cullen and the Shaping of Modern Irish Catholicism (Guill & Macmillian Ltd.,
1983) 163.
19 J.H. Whyte, Church and State in Modern Ireland, 1923-1970 (MacMillan, 1971) 25.
20 Messinger, 120.
6

Finally, there is some evidence that, as a result of the rejection of bodily pleasure, Irish
Catholic leaders were either indifferent or hostile to labor organization efforts to raise the standard of living of Catholic workers. John Whyte reported that in Dublin, “the main force for social change in the years before the First World War was the volcanic James Larkin, who organized the unskilled labourers to fight against the inhuman conditions in which they worked; but Larkin was not a practicing Catholic, and the attitude of priests to him ranged from aloofness to hostility.” 21 In the United States, Dorothy Day, a convert who organized the American
Catholic workers movement, may have faced similar church resistance. Her biographers, Mark and Louise Zwick quote Day as saying, “The moral theology we are taught is to get us into heaven with scorched behinds. What kind of an unwilling, ungenerous love of God is this? We do little enough and when we try to do more we are lectured on Jansenism.” 22
Many historians of the Irish religion reject Jansenist influences. For example, Thomas
O’Connor deplores that Jansenism “functions as a code for a version of a Catholic moral rigorism that judges all sexual activity to be deviant and has, accordingly ‘blighted’ the lives of generations of Irish at home and among the Irish diaspora, especially in America.” 23
For
O’Connor, ”Neither as a theology nor as a political attitude did Jansenism recommend itself to the Irish Catholic community, either at home or abroad. The frequent claim that Irish
Catholicism was Jansenist-influenced springs from the tendency to confuse Jansenism with mere moral rigorism.” 24
Those who point to Jansenism believe the link to Irish Catholic behavior is so self evident that no detail supportive evidence is necessary. Similarly, those historians who reject any link
21 Whyte, 64.
22 Mark Zwick and Louise Zwick, The Catholic Workers Movement: Intellectual and Spiritual Origins (Paulist
Press, 2005) 149.
23 Thomas O’Connor, Irish Jansenism, 1600-70 (Four Corners Press, 2008) 15.
24 Thomas O’Connor, “ Jansenism.
” The Oxford Companion to Irish History. 2007. Encyclopedia.com.
7

are equally self assured so also are brief in the documentation of their position. Hence, I believe this will be the first paper to explore the issue systematically. It will document that there is sufficient circumstantial evidence to reject dismissing the link and maybe enough to support those who believe Jansenist belief were part of the teaching at Maynooth during the first half of the nineteenth century, providing a foundation for the spread of anti-pleasure views after the
Great Famine.
The Great Famine and Catholic Transformation
By the time of the Great Famine, Irish Catholics had endured two centuries of victimization beginning with Oliver Cromwell’s brutal suppression of the 1641 rebellion. Tens of thousands were slaughtered, including the town of Drogheda in which all 9000 inhabitants, men, women, and children were murdered. When Irish Catholics continued to side with the continental enemies of British rule, a series of penal laws were established that severely restricted their rights. In particular, land was confiscated so that the Catholic ownership fell from 21percent in 1641 to 14 percent in 1700 to only 5 percent in 1775.
25
The penal laws also placed heavy restrictions on the Catholic Church. It was not until 1795 that the English allowed Maynooth College to be established for the training of Catholic priests on Irish soil. Prior to that, Catholic priests were trained at the Irish College in Rome or in seminaries throughout France where they may have been exposed to Jansenist teachings.
26
For example, it is alleged that Cardinal Marefoschi placed the Irish College in 1771 under the care of an Italian Jansenist, Luigi Cuccagni. The first prefect of studies he appointed was the Jansenist
25 John O’Beirne Ranelagh, A Short History of Ireland , 2 nd edition (Cambridge University Press, 1994) 69-70.
26 For a summary of Jansenism, see William Doyle, Jansenism (St. Martin’s Press, 2000) and Alexander Segwick,
Jansenism in 17 th century France: Voices in the Wilderness (University Press of Virginia, 1977).
8

Pietro Tamburini. A few of the Irish College students became teachers at Maynooth College when it opened.
27 At Maynooth, they were joined by many French priests who may have had
Jansenist beliefs.
Between 1800 and 1845 the number of Catholics in Ireland increased from 3.9 to 6.75 million. In response, peasants switched to the highest-yielding strains of potato, which were often the least disease-resistant. Sporadic local crop failures began taking their toll on the populace in the 1830s so that probably 2.5 to 3 million Irish were in a state of semi-starvation most years before the Great Famine.
28
In the 1840s, crop failures reached disastrous levels. In 1845, about 30 percent of the crop failed but in 1846, it was near total failure. By the Spring of 1847, death was widespread.
Particularly, gruesome was the situation in the South, especially in Skibbereen. During March and April alone, 10 percent of the population there died. Charles Morris recounted,
“Wild dogs and giant rats unearthed bodies and gnawed at them in the throughfares; in one case neighbors brought a man his wife’s head, which dogs had been tossing in the yard. … In the peasant huts, where families slept in a heap, health workers had to untangle the dead from the living, who were often found lying amid the corpses of the families, too exhausted to move or to cry out, even as the rats began their work on the bodies around them.” 29
27 Tim Pat Coogan, Wherever Green is Worn: The Story of the Irish Diaspora (Palgrave MacMillan, 2002), 82;
Paolo Corsini, Pietro Tamburini e il Giansenismo Lombardo (Brescia: Morcelliana, 1993); The Church of St.
Ignatius of Loyola, “How the Irish Discovered the Church.” March 6, 2003. http://www.saintignatiusloyola.org/pdf/essaymarch16.03.pdf
28 Charles Morris, The American Catholic (Random House, 1997) 32.
29 Morris, 27.
9

The chief administer of Irish famine relief was Charles Edward Trevelyan who “was convinced by Malthus’ theory that any attempt to raise the standard of living of the poorest section of the population above the subsistence level would only result in increased population which would restore the previous situation, aggravated and enlarged.”
30
By the time the worst of the Famine ended in 1850, the Irish population had dropped by two million; one million had emigrated while at least another million had died. It was in this environment that Paul Cullen ascended to leadership of Catholics in Ireland.
For many observers, Cullen’s impact was substantial. “The Irish Catholicism of Joyce,
Farrell, and Gordon, the rigorist, militant brand of Catholicism that found its broadest field in
America, is a recent phenomenon, one of the most enduring offspring of Ireland’s Great
Famine,” claimed Charles Morris. “To a striking degree, it is the creation of one man, Cardinal
Paul Cullen, who between 1849 and 1878 utterly transformed the Irish Church, and through the agency of thousands of emigrant Irish priests, transformed the Church in America as well.” 31
Morris and others believe that a modest pre-Famine religious revival was largely confined to the ‘respectable’ better-off class of Catholics. Since this class generally survived the Famine intact, while large numbers of cottiers, laborers and paupers were swept away by starvation, disease, and emigration, the Church actually had a stronger devotional nucleus relative to absolute numbers in 1850 than in 1840. Cullen also derived great advantage from the psychological impact the Famine had on those who remained in Ireland. Perceiving the famine as God’s wrath, the Irish people were ready for a great evangelical revival.
32
30 Ranelagh, 116.
31 Morris, 40.
32 Emmet Larkin, The Devotional Revolution in Ireland, 1850-75” in Emmet Larkin, The Historical Dimensions of
Irish Catholicism (Arno Press, 1976) 639.
10

When Cullen arrived in 1849 he “was remarkably unmoved by the Famine. That is hardly surprising, for his worldview was pre-modern: famine was simply the work of Providence, ‘a calamity with which God wishes to purify … the Irish people.’ While still in Rome, he urged the hierarchy to reject British aid. During the worst of the recurring mini-famines in 1859-63, he raised tens of thousands of pounds from Catholic parishes for the Vatican’s military forces. One of his correspondents, apparently reflecting Cullen’s own attitude, said of a cholera epidemic,
‘One can hardly regret its long continuance among us’ since it was ‘enforcing penance and weeding out the ungodly.’” 33
And after all – it’s the next life that’s important, not this one.
Settling first as archbishop in Armagh, Cullen set about to increase religiosity. National jubilees and days of atonement were accompanied by an almost endless stream of new devotions.
Confession and communion, which usually had been associated with a practicing Catholic’s
Easter duty in pre-famine Ireland, now became much more frequent. Pastoral gains made were consolidated by the introduction of a whole series of devotional exercises designed not only to encourage more frequent participation in the sacraments but to instill veneration by an appreciation of their ritual beauty and intrinsic mystery. The spiritual awards, of course, for these devotional exercises were the various indulgences, which shortened either the sinner’s or the sinner’s love one’s time of torment in purgatory.
34
Against local opposition, Cullen placed Ireland under the special patronage of the Blessed
Virgin rather than St Patrick. In response, The Dublin Evening Mail
“crowed that it had
‘predicted the downfall of the old national saint.’ The legate’s authority would bind the Irish people to ignorance and superstition.” 35
The main purpose of proclaiming the dogma of the immaculate Conception in 1854 was to emphasize how depraved the rest of humanity was, and
33 Morris, 43.
34 Larkin, 644.
35 Bowen, 130.
11

consequently how unfit for self-government. According to Morris, “To a Catholic pope, as to an
English puritan, both steeped in a two-millennium tradition of aboriginal human depravity,
[liberalism] could only be the work of Satan.” For this reason, Morris is not surprised that
“Pius’s most famous broadside, the 1864 ‘Syllabus of Errors,’ [ends] with the ringing declaration that the Pope would never ‘reconcile himself with progress, with liberalism, and with modern civilization.’” 36
Economic considerations reinforced the religious constraints on sexuality. If a Catholic strong farmer hoped to survive the chaos engulfing rural Ireland, he had to increase the size of his farm, keep it intact, and manage it with great thrift and discipline. He could not give his sons land, and he could not afford dowries for more than one or two daughters. Thus, it was the need to limit family size that explains the broad embrace of late marriage, limited sexual relations within marriage, and celibacy.
37
In just a few decades, the average age of marriage in Ireland jumped as striving Catholics enforced strict sexual discipline over their children. As a result, with only a minority of Irish men and women marrying, Joseph Lee surmised, “Sex, therefore, must be denounced as a satanic snare, in even what had been its most innocent pre-famine manifestations. Sex posed a far more severe threat than the landlord to the security and status of the family. Boys and girls must be kept apart at all costs.” 38
36 Morris, 68, 69; also Bowen, 148.
37 Morris, 43. Susan Cahill [ For the Love of Ireland: A Literary Companion for Readers and Travelers (Ballantine
Books, 2001)] writes: “The marriage drought is probably more attributable to the ancient fear of property loss through impoverishing alliances than Jansenism and Victorian prudery. As many Irish short stories tell it, when marriages do take place, the talk is of the bride’s heifers and fields, not her charms.” 301
38 Joseph Lee, "Women and the Church since the Famine." In Women in Irish Society: The Historical Dimension ."
Ed. Margaret MacCurtain and Donncha Ó Corráin (Arlen House, 1978) 39; quoted in Tom Inglis, “The Origins of
Irish Prudery: Sexuality and Social Control in Modern Ireland,” Éire-Ireland 40:3&4 (Fall/Winter 2005) 9-37.
12

By the late nineteenth century, the maiden aunt and bachelor uncle were fixtures in Irish families, and possibly a third of Irish adults could expect never to marry.
39 Under this new postfamine regime, girls from the tenant farmer class had to be “continuously watched and subjected to gossip,” Tom Inglis concluded. “The silencing, hiding, and denial of sex, the confinement of talk about sex to the confessional, significantly influenced the way in which men and women perceived and understood the world.” Even among married couples, sex became shamefaced and fleeting.
Ireland was replete with images of “a grimly dour view of sexuality; the cult of the mother to the celebration of the Blessed Virgin; a world that is separate, strictly ordered, and submissively obedient.” 40
This is the milieu found in “James Joyce’s Dubliners , of the narrow emotional compasses of his middle-class spinsters and bachelors, where the priest is the font of final wisdom, the flames of Hell a constant reality, and life a continuing round of devotions – the
Forty Hours, the Stations of the Cross, the retreats, the temperance pledges.”
41
As Hasia Diner noted,
“The rural priest played a role in keeping any deviant young men and women apart from each other. Irish priests patrolled the country roads at night, some armed with cudgels or umbrellas, ready to drive away any amorous couples who had sought some place for romance.
Priests in various towns labored to wipe out crossroads dancing and games, theatrical companies, or any other activities where the sexes could mingle. The example of the celibate priest and the eternally chaste nun meshed with the economic dictates of the Irish social order, confirming that
39 Morris, 43.
40 Tom Inglis, Moral Monopoly: The Rise and Fall of the Catholic Church in Ireland . (Dublin Press, 1998) 129.
41 Morris, 40.
13

nonmarriage was a legitimate option, that male-female socializing not only led to unfortunate and improvident matches but carried with it the stigma of sin.” 42
Indeed, the adverse view of male-female socializing was reflected in the gendered lives within the family that the Church encouraged. Husbands and wives went to church separately, ate separately, and had separate social lives. Diner noted,
“When a temperance worker in the early twentieth century, trying to point out to a man in
Cork that he was wasting too much money on alcohol, instead suggested he ‘put aside every day
… a nice little sum, and you could go somewhere with your wife and children for a real good holiday. ‘Go with my wife and children!’ echoed the man in disgust, ‘Sure I never yet walked the length of the street with them.’ He spoke in much the same tone of indignation as if he had been asked to go for a walk with a domestic cat.” 43
Nancy Scheper-Hughes also found this same pattern continued in rural Ireland through the
1950s. She stated,
“In all the months I spent in Ballybran I never saw a married couple walk together down the main street of the central village, and rarely did I see a couple appear together at one of the few public social functions. Even at wakes, when all adult parishioners are expected to pay their
42 Hasia Diner, Erin’s Daughters in America (Johns Hopkins Press, 1983) 22-23.
43 Diner, Erin’s Daughters , 20.
14

respects, married couples came at separate hours. And, following the church funeral and burial, men took once again to the pub, and women to each other’s homes.” 44
Summarizing the extreme gender segregation, Scheper-Hughes suggested,
“A general rule can be said to be observed: wherever men are, women will not be found, and vice versa. … Men are nervous and uncomfortable in the kitchen: they eat rapidly and either before or after the women and young children. If possible, they escape the family rosary, led by the mother or grandmother, and quickly flee to the pub, since men generally feel more comfortable socializing with each other outside the home.” 45
Given the long history of Irish asceticism, it is certainly possible that Cullen was simply giving the people what they wanted. This argument suggests that the extreme Catholic retrenchment pushed for more than thirty years by Pius IX, and his agents in Ireland found a more welcoming populace than anywhere else in Europe.
46
In addition, the embrace of
Catholicism was aided by the corrosive loss of national identity, after a century of steady
Anglicization. The Irish had been gradually losing their language, their culture, and their way of life for nearly a hundred years before the famine. For many Irishmen becoming practicing
Catholics became a way of fulfilling their desire for national unity.
47
Some observers ignore even mentioning the ascetic nature of Cullen’s efforts. Most prominently, Larkin simply characterizes his efforts as increasing the devotionals, never
44 Scheper-Hughes, 106-107.
45 Scheper-Hughes, 104.
46 Morris, 46.
47 Morris, 45; Larkin, 649.
15

mentioning their repressive effects of all forms of pleasure.
48
Instead, Larkin emphasizes its salutary effect on the Irish populace:
“Most of the two million Irish who migrated between 1847 and 1860 were part of the prefamine generation of non-practicing Catholics, if indeed they were Catholics at all. They congregated in the ghettos of English, American and Canadian cities where they acquired a fearful reputation for ignorance, drunkenness, vice, and violence. What the famine Irish actually represent, therefore, was a culture of poverty that had been in the making in Ireland since the late eighteenth century because of the pressure of population on the means of subsistence. That culture produced all of the circumstances and most of the values that the British and the
Americans were to find most repugnant in the Irish. The crucial point here, however, is that after the famine that culture of poverty was broken up in Ireland by emigration and the new circumstances created by that breakup allowed for the emergence of other values.
“What these crude figures suggest is that the Irish were transformed as a people – men and women alike – into practicing Catholics. The succeeding waves of these recently created devotional Catholics brought their cultural and religious needs and corresponding values with them when they emigrated and in doing so they helped to reclaim those lapsed and nonpracticing ‘shanty’ Irish. The newer, ‘lace-curtain’ Irish found it progressively easier to assimilate to their new environment, because they were objectively less objectionable.”
49
Criticism of the Larkin Thesis
48 In Jeffrey Sluka and Antonius Robben, Ethnographic Fieldwork: An Anthropological Reader (Blackwell, 2006),
Nancy Shelper-Hughes writes, “In her incisive review of my book for Commonweal Sydney Callahan charged me with religious bias suggesting that I was ‘strangely insensitive to the religious idealism of the people’ … If the rural
Irish values of self-discipline and mortification of the flesh contributed to their isolation, celibacy, depression, madness and alcoholism of bachelor farmers, they may also account for the extremely low incidence in the Republic of Ireland of physical assault, rape, adultery and divorce.” 207
49 Larkin, 652.
16

There is no question that the Irish Catholicism that emerged after the Famine, under the leadership of Paul Cullen, embraced Augustinian notions of sinfulness with its strong rejection of bodily pleasure. At issue is whether or not it is appropriate to characterize it as Jansenist. In particular, is their sufficient evidence that Jansenist training at Maynooth was an important building block of post-Famine Irish Catholicism?
The Larkin thesis contends that pre-Famine efforts to increase the number and intensity of practicing Irish Catholics were ineffective. For Larkin, there were too few priests to affect significantly the religiosity of the Irish masses in the pre-Famine period so that the training at
Maynooth is inconsequential in understanding the post-Famine devotional revolution. For others like Diner, the austere Augustinian values promoted by the pre-Famine clergy “increasingly embodied the same attitudes as the bulk of the population.” 50 Similarly, Frank Murphy contends, “Where discussions centered on the twentieth century have frequently seen the priest as the principal force behind the obsessive chastity of the Irish, a longer perspective suggests that his true role was rather to articulate and reinforce an outlook whose roots lay far deeper in the structure and assumptions of the society of which he was himself a product.” 51
James Connolly agrees that by the 1830s, “changes in the training and social position of the lower clergy … had begun to bring their attitudes more closely into line with those of their ecclesiastical superiors.” 52
He claims, however, that despite individual successes, “the overall influence exerted by the Catholic clergy was a very limited one. Clerical opposition to the pattern-day gathers at holy wells, whose popularity had already begun to decline before 1845,
50 Diner, Erin’s Daughters , 22.
51 Frank Murphy (ed.) The Irish Bog: Who They Were and How They Lived (Penguin Books, 1987) 139. Murphy is paraphrasing J.S. Connolly, Priest and People in Pre-Famine Ireland, 1780-1845 (St. Martin’s Press, 1982) cf.
215-218.
52 Connolly, 268.
17

had at best a partial success [and] little effect on faction-fighting.”
53
Thus, in support of Larkin,
Connolly believes that the Famine was a fundamental turning point.
Even if Connolly and Larkin are correct that fundamental change occurred only in the post-
Famine era, those trained at Maynooth were still important. According to Nigel Yates, “By 1844 no fewer than nineteen of the twenty-seven bishops then in office had been educated at
Maynooth.” 54
In 1853, Maynooth-trained priest comprised 53 percent of all priests in Ireland.
55
Without the efforts of these priests, Cullen’s transformation would have been much more difficult to accomplish.
In contrast, there is now a body of literature that forcefully argues that the so-called
Cullen devotional revolution built substantially on changes that had unfolded during the first half of the nineteenth century.
56
Michael Carroll points to the breakdown of pilgrimages and roundings at Irish sites, themselves practices devised during the Counter-Reformation period that melded Catholic Tridentine to Irish communal practices. He believes that the new parish priests, trained in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century turned against these practices, explaining the progressive decline in their popularity during the pre-Famine period.
57
These pilgrimages blended the sacred and the profane. Typical is a description of the 1813 pilgrimage to Gougaun Lake in celebration of St. John. After partaking of religious activities, the chronicler described the festivities:
53 Connolly, 271.
54 Nigel Yates, The Religious Condition of Ireland, 1770-1850 (Oxford, 2006) 106; see also R. Dubley Edwards
“Ireland on the Eve of the Great Famine,” in T. Desmond Williams (ed.) The Great Famine (Boone & Nolan Ltd.,
1956) 66.
55 Connolly, 46.
56 For a sympathetic discussion of the Larkin’s work, see Stewart Brown and David Miller, Piety and Power in
Ireland, 1760-1960: Essays in Honour of Emmet Larkin (University of Notre Dame Press, 2000).
57 Michael Carroll, Irish Pilgrimage: Holy Wells and Popular Catholic Devotion (Johns Hopkins Press, 1999).
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“Almost every tent had its piper … [and] are generally so crowded that the dancers have scarcely room for their performance: from twenty to thirty men and women are often huddled together in each, and the circulation of porter and whiskey amongst the various groups is soon evident in its effects … towards evening the tumult increases, and intoxication becomes almost universal.” 58
Other observers believe that the Irish clergy also transformed Irish attitudes towards sexuality.
Joe Lee contends,
“Irish Pre-Famine Irish society was renown for its chastity, but prudery was conspicuously absent. … As Gaelic values were eroded, prudery seeped through Irish society, and came close to being equated with morality itself. The physical realism of the Irish love poems as late as the eighteenth century, for instance, was notably absent from the sentimental slush that passed as love songs in English in post-Famine Ireland.”
59
Lee’s assessment reflected the sensual love songs that were handed down by word of mouth, like the following lyrics from “I Shall Not Die for Thee:”
Slender waist or swan-like limb,
Is’t for them that I should die?
The round breasts, the fresh skin,
Cheeks crimson, hair so long and rich;
60
58 Murphy, 179.
59 Lee, 40.
60 Murphy, 118-119.
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Louis Cullen goes even further. He contends, “Into the eighteenth century, a whole range of misdemeanors which were becoming uncommon in western Europe existed, ranging from irregular marriage to libertine conduct in which sexual favors were sought at lower social levels.”
61
According to Louis Cullen, this all changes in the early nineteenth century thanks to the efforts of the Maynooth-trained clergy. Ken Connell noted, “The sharp insistence of the Irish priest on sexual conformity is sometimes attributed to a puritanical, Jansenist, strain brought to
Maynooth by its original professoriate in 1795, retained and refined thereafter as vacancies were filled by men of their own persuasion and rearing.” 62
Whatever its source, Maynooth training was quite puritanical. Connolly cites an official church historian who found that “teaching given there in its early years was strongly influenced by … ‘rigorism’, the moral system of those who draw too tightly the reins of law in restriction of man’s natural liberty of action; who are inclined to make precepts out of counsels, and mortal sins out of venial ones.’” 63
For Carroll and others, the rigorist training novices received at Maynooth reflected their own values as sons of the strong farmer class. This class embraced the stem family policy by which landholdings were passed along to only the oldest son so that they would not be diluted.
The local clergy drawn from this class would have shared the cultural values most consistent with the stem family system: family solidarity, obedience to authority, and sexual restraint.
Vincent Twoney contends that the Irish language had insulated Catholics from falling “prey to the Calvinism and Puritanism of their English overlords.” As English became the dominant language, the “social pressure exerted on the ‘upwardly mobile’ Irish, especially in the cities, to conform to the prevailing norms of ‘Christian behavior’ as determined by the Protestant ruling
61 Louis Cullen, The Emergence of Modern Ireland, 1600-1900 (Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1981) 133-134.
62 K.H. Connell, Irish Peasant Society (Clarendon Press, 1968) 86.
63 Connolly, 44.
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class must also have been considerable.”
64
As a result, English influences provided an additional incentive for the strong-farmer class (and the urban middle classes) to embrace these rigorist values. Thus, Maynooth training reflected the demands of its students and those funding the college not the values imposed by its émigré faculty.
No doubt strong-farmer values were part of the explanation for the maintenance of this training but it understates the sizable share of students at Maynooth that did not come from strong-farmer families. Since their sons did not dominate Maynooth enrollment, strong farmer values could not have dominated Maynooth teaching if the faculty had wished otherwise.
65
Moreover, as Connolly recounted, Maynooth training had a “new and more puritanical tone”
66 that placed a greater emphasis on ascetic behavior than even the sons of the strong-farmer class desired. As Louis Cullen notes, “If viewed narrowly from a sexual perspective, the Church’s
[pre-Famine] zeal might seem excessive: illegitimacy in rural Ireland was, and remained, low.” 67
Indeed, the training was characterized as having “a good deal of monastic discipline” which for some represented “the iron rule of St. Bernard revived in the nineteenth century.” 68
Patrick
Corish reports on two priests ordained at Maynooth in the 1820s who separately complained of the “excessive rigorism introduced into the national seminaries by French professors and their disciples.” 69 For these reasons, Connolly contends that the severe discipline imposed on students at Maynooth and the rigorist nature of the doctrines taught there “was the product of the early professors [who] had brought their ideas with them from France.” 70
64 Vincent Twoney, The End of Irish Catholicism?
(Veritas, 2003) 53-54.
65 On social origins of the Maynooth priests, see Connolly, cf. 35-40.
66 Connolly, 47.
67 Cullen, 134. There Cullen also states, “There is no need to seek refuge in an innate Puritanism or in the transmission of French Jansenism to Ireland though links in the education of the Irish priesthood.”
68 Connolly, 45.
69 Patrick Corish, Maynooth College, 1795-1995 (Gill & MacMillan, 1995) 122.
70 Connolly, 46.
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Finally, Connell suggests that the values among the strong-farmer class evolved over the nineteenth century, and only came to dominate its thinking after the Famine. He recounts, “In the two or three generations following the 1780s peasant children, by and large, married whom they pleased when they pleased.” Landlord policies encourage family holdings to be enlarged showing “peasants how easily and (it seemed) painlessly second sons might be established and, as these sons married young, soon there were yet more second, and third sons.” According to
Connell, it was only by “the decade or two before the Famine that the price of this improvident pleasure was brought home to the peasant: many a holding was so reduced, the land so exhausted that in the aggravating run of bad seasons, there was acute shortage of potatoes: many fathers no longer dared divide” their land holdings.
71
If Connell’s assessment is correct, it reduces further the likelihood that the training at Maynooth in the first quarter of the nineteenth century reflected primarily the values of the strong-farmer class.
Jansenist Beliefs at Maynooth
The evidence presented indicates that the pre-famine clergy had a significant influence on the religiosity of the Irish populace and that their training at Maynooth was driven by the values of the émigré faculty. The remaining issue then is to what degree the values of the émigré faculty can be linked to Jansenism.
72
In a footnote, Morris comments on this possible link:
“Irish rigorism is conventionally attributed to Jansenism imported from Europe by Frenchtrained Irish priests. There is some truth to the story, but it is far too simple an explanation.
71 Connell, 115.
72 It is certainly possible that the rigorism imparted at Maynooth was at least partially home grown. For one notable example, Dr Doyle, Bishop of Kildare and Leighlin and a devout Augustinian monk, see W.D. Killen, Ecclesiastical
History of Ireland , vol. 2 (Macmillan & Co., 1875) cf. 414-417.
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There was French influence at Maynooth, the most important Irish seminary, but it tended toward anti-Vatican nationalistic stance that placed the faculty and Cullen at swords’ point for much of his tenure. Cullen’s rigorist party, as often as not, were recruited from the Irish College in Rome, which he controlled.” 73
Here Morris is commenting on the Gallican beliefs of the émigré faculty: their unwillingness to support the dictates of the Church in Rome on political matters. It is often characterized as a struggle between Gallicanism and Ultramontanism. In the volume honoring Larkin, there are a number of articles on this conflict but not one article on the origins of the rigorist beliefs that dominated nineteenth century Ireland. In the volume’s only discussion of the training at
Maynooth, Donal Kerr notes, “Delahoghue and Anglade, who had taught in Gallican seminaries in France, set the theological tone for the first two generations of Maynooth priest.”
74
Kerr’s assessment of Delahogue is certainly correct. In the 1820s, Corish reported,
“Propaganda … was pleased to hear that things were going so well at Maynooth, but that
Delahogue’s Gallicanism was not acceptable.” 75
As to Anglade, he may have been associated with Jansenist beliefs as the only criticism “was that in his treatise on Ethics he followed a system of probabiliorism verging on rigorism.” 76
Most important, Morris does not comment on the claim that Jansenist beliefs were found among Maynooth faculty. With their uprooting from continental Europe, it appears that the
Jansenist philosophy becomes more personally-rooted than part of a collective social movement.
According to Desmond Keenan, “The characteristic notes of Jansenism, its ‘respectful silences’,
73 Morris, 44n.
74 Donal Kerr, “Priests, Pikes, and Patriots,” in Stewart Brown and David Miller (eds.) Piety and Power in Ireland,
1760-1960 (University of Notre Dame Press, 2000) 25.
75 Corish, Maynooth College , 82.
76 Corish, Maynooth College , 83
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its ‘interpretations’, its ‘appeals to general council’ were not found. … Nor were there any
Jansenists tenaciously holding on to condemned beliefs while at the same time saying they were loyal members of the Church.” 77
What seemed to remain of Jansenism was its personal piety and austerity.
This circumspect behavior might also have reflected the unease those with Jansenist beliefs might have had at Maynooth inception. In 1798, Corish reports, “The Trustees … approached
John Lanigan, an émigré Irishman from Italy, where he had taught at the University of Pavia.”
Given that the Jansenist Pietro Tamburini was director of studies and professor of theology there,
“Bishop Moylan of Cork demanded that he sign an anti-Jansenist declaration.” 78
When Lanigan refused, he was not hired but, at some later point may have been “awarded a professorship” at
Maynooth.
79
Many observers who focus on the rigorism and piety, not the struggle for home rule, believe Jansenist beliefs were present at Maynooth. Desmond Keenan believes that it was the
Jansenists ideas held by these émigrés that was the source of the rigorism taught at Maynooth.
80
Desmond Bowen contends, “The clergy were greatly influenced by … Jansenism, which tended to put more emphasis on confession than on holy communion – the latter being received no more than annually by most of the people.” 81 Ronald Knox contended that “disapproval of dancing was one of the marks of Jansenism long after Jansenism had ceased to be a genuinely religious inspiration.” 82
77 Desman Keenan, The Catholic Church in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Gill & Macmillan Ltd., 1983) 12, 22.
78 Corish, Maynooth College , 31.
79 Yates (142) states that Lanigan was eventually “awarded a professorship” at Maynooth but this is not mentioned in any other references to his life and seems implausible.
80 T.P. Kennedy [“Church Building,” in P.J. Corish, ed., History of Irish Catholicism , V. 8 (Dublin, 1980)] referenced by Keenan, 97.
81 Desmond Bowen, Souperism: Myth and Reality (Mercier Press, 1970) 53; see also Kennan, 97.
82 Quoted in Keenan, 107.
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Though highly skeptical,
83
Patrick Corish is unwilling to dismiss the likelihood of
Jansenists at Maynooth. He notes that in the early years, Rome considered Maynooth “of being
‘French’, ‘Jansenist’, ‘Gallican’. The charge of ‘Jansenist’ or ‘rigorism’ persisted.” 84
Corish writes, “One does come across a charge, how well founded it is not easy to say, that the
Maynooth priest was a rigorist because of the character of his theological training, dominated, it was alleged, by the Jansenistic stain imported by his professors … All we can say is there may be something to this charge.” 85 Add to this evidence that at least some of the founding
Maynooth faculty came from a Jansenist-led Irish College in Rome, the link is quite plausible.
86
Conclusions
This paper has documented the widely-held view that Jansenism was one source of the antipleasure views held by many Irish Catholics through the mid-twentieth century. Indeed, in a recent book to train psychologists engaged in family therapy, its lead author, Monica
McGoldrick stated, “Jansenism, a French mystical movement with a grim ideology, dominated the Irish Church.” 87
This paper also explored how the rigorist teachings at Maynooth transformed Irish religiosity in the pre-Famine period and provided a foundation and supportive priesthood for the post-Famine devotional revolution. In particular, it appears that the
83 Paul Corish, The Irish Catholic Experience: A Historical Survey (Michael Glazier, 1985) 131; and in The Catholic
Community in the 17 th and 18 th Centuries (Helicon Limited, 1981), Corish concludes, “’Jansenism’, then, can be dismissed as an explanation of the development of any stern or anxious strain in Irish Catholic morality but that such a strain did develop can hardly be questions.” (87-88)
84 Corish, Maynooth College , 122.
85 Corish, The Irish Catholic Experience , 162.
86 Ruth Clark [ Strangers and Sojourners at Port Royal (Cambridge University Press, 1932) 119] writes, “[I]n the time of Scipione de’ Ricci, some young Irish ecclesiastics came under the influence of the Italian Jansenist
Tamburini who ‘appeared to have infused the poison of his errors into their minds’. ‘The return of these young men to Ireland’, writes Cardinal Moran, ‘excited considerable alarm.’” (Clark is the primary source Corish relies on when assessing Jansenist influence in the Irish Colleges in France.)
87 Monica McGoldrick, “Irish Families,” in Monica McGoldrick, Joe Giodano, and John Pearce, Ethnicity and
Family Therapy , 2 nd edition (Guilford Press, 1996) 584.
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Maynooth-trained clergy were responsible for the evolution of reverence for chastity to a culture of prudery.
The link between the Maynooth clergy and the embrace by many devout Irish-American
Catholic women of an ascetic behavior towards food is less clear. William Carleton describes the sumptuous meals the Irish clergy expected in the 1820s when they held station at the homes of well-to-do parishioners. For even though the planned dinner consisted of “an abundance of fowl, and fish, and bacon, and hung beef – yet by some unaccountable and disastrous omission, there was neither fresh mutton nor fresh beef. The priest, it must be said, was a man of considerable fortitude, but this was a blow for which he was scarcely prepared, particularly as a boiled leg of mutton was one of his fifteen favourite joints at dinner.”
88
The practice of stations did evolve. First, the requirement of providing suppers to the clergy was terminated and finally the practice of stations was ended. In addition, the struggles against the festive aspects of the fairs and pilgrimages may have spurred the anti-pleasure tendencies of the rigorist attitudes. Finally, as the position of nuns became more prominent, many devout women might have sought to emulate a portion of their austere lifestyle.
Most controversial, this paper presented the circumstantial evidence that has led some researchers to contend that there was a link between Jansenist beliefs held by some early
Maynooth faculty and the rigorist teaching there. This paper pointed out that many twentiethcentury researchers have focused on the Gallican rather than the Jansenist-like beliefs of the
Maynooth faculty. Through the 1820s when Rome criticized the teaching of ethics at Maynooth, it characterized deviations there as Jansenist. This issue disappears, however, with changes in
Rome. Cardinal Bartolomeo Cappelari was elected Pope Gregory XVI. He was an extremely ascetic individual “responsible for the revival of traditional Augustinian and Thomistic theology
88 William Carleton, Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry (William Tegg, 1832) 162.
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in the Rome schools.” Cappelari had been Paul Cullen’s mentor and patron. Cullen was deeply imbued with the Augustinian piety that so characterized Jansenism. “The friendship of Gregory
XVI encouraged Cullen to display more openly his political conservatism. … [and] his growing antagonism to liberalism in every form.”
89
Paul Cullen strongly supported his vice rector, Tobias Kirby, when puritanical discipline is instituted at the Irish College. Many of the Irish students complained about the rigorism, giving the College some bad press in Ireland.
90 Despite these criticisms, the number of Irish students
Cullen and Kirby recruit remained high and “by the process of natural selection those who remained … shared the passionate beliefs and the vision of Cullen.” 91
When Cullen came to
Ireland, Kirby succeeded him as rector and Roman agent for the Irish bishops. Kirby reinforced
Cullen’s mission by sending him eager young zealots, men who would confront “the hated liberalism of their age with a frame of mind not very different from that of their Counter-
Reformation predecessors.” 92
For many observers, the similarities between the rigorist views of Cullen and the Maynooth faculty made them indistinguishable. O'Faoláin identifies Jansenism as the source of the rigorist values held by the pre-Famine priesthood. He then contends, “[T]he spirit of rigorism, often called Jansenism, imported from France into Maynooth could not have outlasted the 1850’s there. This is true; but another fresh element had meanwhile entered Ireland, this time from
Italy, which gave this rigorism in morals a new lease of life.”
93
And these importations are those priest trained by Kirby at the Irish College in Rome. Thus, it was the perceived Gallican not
89 Bowen, Paul Cardinal Cullen , 11-12.
90 Bowen, Paul Cardinal Cullen , 24.
91 Bowen, Paul Cardinal Cullen , 28.
92 Bowen, Paul Cardinal Cullen , 167.
93 Sean O'Faoláin, The Irish: A Character Study (Devin-Adair Company, 1956) 146.
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Jansenist beliefs held by the Irish priesthood that created tensions with Cullen and understandably shaped research.
94
As an outlawed movement, Jansenism lost any semblance of organization after the French revolution. As a result, Jansenist beliefs became more personal and circumspect so that tangible evidence is virtually impossible to obtain. Did Anglade’s rigorism reflect Jansenist beliefs that he was exposed to in France? Did Bishop Moylan’s behavior reflect a presence of Jansenist beliefs at Maynooth?
95 How do we assess the charges of Jansenist deviations made by Rome prior to 1830?
Unlike the almost apologetic term, devotional, or even the more formal term, rigorism,
Jansenism captures the totality of the ascetic piety that engulfed Irish Catholicism, as well as identifying a plausible link in its development. None of the other terms gives justice to its emphasize on the sinfulness of man and the need to reject bodily pleasure in this life if one is to have any chance of being saved by God’s grace. Thus, we should not be dismissive of those in the twentieth century who chose to characterize the rigorist values of Irish Catholicism as
Jansenist.
94 James O’Shea [ Priest, Politics and Society in Post-Famine Ireland: A Study of County Tipperary 1850-1891
(Humanities Press, 1983) 19] reported that the Irish Catholic leadership believed that a student “brought up in the worldly and independent spirit of Maynooth would hardly submit to the regime in [the Irish College in] Rome.” He also noted that Cullen’s policies “weaken[ed] one traditional point of contact between priest and people,” by eliminating the role of stations (37) and sought to rein in those clergy he felt were “trying to undermine the bishops’ authority to discipline their priests.” (188)
95 Stories about Lanigan’s prodigious appetite suggest that in his personal life, he was not a strict Jansenist; see
Seamus King, “Dr. John Lanigan,” Post Advertiser (1985). http://www.seamusjking.com/Articles%20Full/dr_john_lanigan.html
28