Thursday, May 26, 2022

The Use of the Irish Language in Anglican Church Services during the Evangelical Campaign in Dingle, 1825-1845

 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)

 

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