A few years ago, I read the following excellent book:
Cyril Korolovsky, Living Languages in Catholic Worship: An
Historical Inquiry (trans. Donald Attwater; London: Longmans, Green and
Co., 1957)
I first became aware of the book as it was referenced in the late Anthony Cekada's book, Work of Human Hands: A Theological Critique of the Mass of Paul VI. Korolovsky discusses the use of vernacular languages in Catholic liturgies,
showing that a “higher” form of the local languages were used. For liturgy
nerds like myself, I would recommend getting a copy of this book.
While reading a book on the Church of Ireland’s missionary
campaign in Dingle (An Daingean, a Gaeltacht area about an hour away
from where I live), there is a discussion of the Anglican use of Irish in
church services, which reminded me of Korolovsky's book.
The use of Irish in church
services
As a fluent Irish speaker, Rev.
Thomas Moriarty was certain that a knowledge of the Irish language was very
advantageous in his work. ‘Speak little or much of Irish,’ he told a meeting of
the Kerry Auxiliary of the Irish Society in 1844, ‘the people have a reverence
for anyone addressing them in that language.’ He referred to ‘a mid-wall of
partition’ that could be ‘broken down by the music of the Irish tongue’. In
Moriarty’s view, Protestants should oppose English prayers for Irish-speaking
people as strongly as they opposed Latin prayers. At a fund-raising meeting in
Winchester in 1857, he outlined how the Irish language had been neglected by Protestants
and told his audience, ‘The Irish tongue is no patois, no brogue of the
English, but a pure language, whereas the English is a conglomeration’. In an
address to members of the Irish Society in Cork, Moriarty was proud to declare
that ‘their church, and their church alone, produced for Ireland a Bible in the
native tongue, for which it deserved the name of the National Church’. While
many Catholic priests and bishops were fluent in Irish, Moriarty believed that
they had ‘some hidden reason for not giving the word of God in the national
language’. He claimed that a priest in Ventry had thrown part of an Irish Bible
into a fire and told his audience:
It was therefore important to have
it known that the Protestant church alone circulated the scriptures in the
Irish tongue and spent money and labour in enabling the peasantry to read them,
that they spent money on inspectors and gave their own time and talent in the
midst of all persecution, shame and reproach, peril and danger because they
loved their country and the people [. . .] It should be known that though they
knew English well, the Roman Catholics could not be reached by it, for
obstacles sprung up in their minds against the Protestant religion when
explained in English, but the Irish language removed all the prejudices felt to
their religion in the sassenagh [English] garb.
Just as the poetry of the Bible
worked its power on those who were enabled to read it in their own language,
the richness of the Irish language also had an enchanting effect on some of
those who encountered it for the first time. In 1880, Canon Samuel Hayman, who
is best known as a historical of Youghal, Co. Cork, and who first learned Irish
when he was in Glanwroth, wrote admiringly of the language, ‘Irish is older by
centuries than the Greek of Homer and it is yet a living, spoken language—no
pathetic, so copious that the proverb runs: “IF you plead for your life, plead
in Irish”.’ Hayman also quoted Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna as ‘enthusiastically exclaiming’,
‘If aught could bring me grief in heaven, it would be, when standing alone
among those redeemed out of every kindred and tongue and people and nation, to
listen and share in their glad acclaim, if the Irish language was unspoken
there’”. Charlotte Elizabeth marvelled at the survival of the Irish
language over centuries and advised her fellow evangelicals, ‘Destroy it not,
for a blessing it in it’. As a meeting of the Irish Society of London in 1843,
Rev. Edward Nixon of Castletown, Co. Meath, countered the charge that the Irish
language was ‘barbarous’, he said, to cheers from the audience, that ‘if there
was only to be one language in Ireland, he would say let it be the tongue which
was the most pure and that was the native language of the country’.
Elizabeth Colthurst, a Cork-born
poet and evangelical who lived for a time in Danesfort, Killarney, also
appreciated the Irish language. She wrote for English readers in order to
elicit financial support for the mission in west Kerry. Colthurst published
several short books of morality tales and sentimental verses intended to
instruct and inspire older children. Two of these were entitled Tales of
Erin and The Little Ones of Innisfail, or The Children of God,
published in the late 1840s.
This is Colthurst’s description of
a religious ceremony conducted through Irish in west Kerry:
My readers in all probability have
never heard the Irish language and perhaps only heard of it as a combination of
barbarous sounds. They can then have very little idea of the deep
heart-touching pathos with which these poor people, men women and children,
made their responses in our beautiful liturgy. (Bryan MacMahon, Faith and
Fury: The Evangelical Campaign in Dingle and West Kerry 1825-45 [Dublin:
Eastwood Books, 2021], 36-37)