Joe Biden, Ireland and Irish Catholicism

Is Joe clinging to an extinct identity?

Joe Biden is in Ireland today. His visit has prompted a number of pieces about Biden’s Irishness (or not), including this one by Fintan O’Toole. I agree with some parts of it, which is unusual for me and Fintan, so it’s worth diving into. I wrote about Joe’s confusing and contradictory feelings about Irishness in the past, here.

The core of his argument is that Biden is attached to an explicitly Catholic version of Irishness that Ireland has left behind.

He (Biden) chose to be Irish because he identifies so profoundly with Catholicism…

In her memoir, Growing Up Biden, the president’s sister and long-time political adviser and campaign manager, Valerie… puts it: “In Catholic neighborhoods, the parish in which you lived was everything; you identified yourself by name first, parish second.”

(…)

The strange thing is that, in Irish-America, this parochial Catholic world can be recalled with a simple, uncomplicated fondness that is almost impossible now in Ireland itself. Valerie can write that “There was such a strong sense of community, of instant belonging. The kids’ values were shaped by parents inside the home, reinforced by the nuns at school, and watched over by the looming church spire when they played outside.”

This nostalgia is possible, I suppose, because words like “reinforced”, “watched” and “looming” do not, in the context of American Catholic suburbia, bring to mind Magdalene Laundries and Mother and Baby Homes and parish priests burning novels and teachers being sacked for writing them.

I think Fintan is wrong on his own terms here, a quick google search for “Catholic Child Abuse Scranton” brings up this. At least one Magdalen Asylum existed in Pennsylvania. I take his point that the breadth, depth and context of these arrangements were different in Ireland. Though I’m not sure if his mention of book burning is a journalistic flourish or a reference to a real event. There was one that I know of that happened in the 1940s but not many outside of that. (Thanks to @ColmONe89571824 on twitter for bringing that case to my attention, I was unfamiliar.)

This week in particular, though, these radically different perspectives produce a strange collision. Biden is here because he identifies passionately with a religious idea of Irishness that has lost much of its grip on the homeland. It’s Irish, Joe, but not as we know it.

This is not about Catholicism as such — or even about Irishness. It’s about that fusion of ethnicity and religion, of faith and politics: “Irish Catholic”.

For Biden — as for many people of Irish heritage in America — it’s a sweet and natural pairing. But at home, on our own volatile little inlet, the cocktail has been toxic.

It produced the repressive and sectarian State from which we are still emerging. And it helped to underpin the very conflict whose ending Biden is here to celebrate: the synthesis of religious and national ideas of belonging has been all too literally deadly.

Thus, while Biden can feel an innocent pleasure in the notion of “Irish Catholic” as a political identity, too many of us on both parts of the island have learned the hard way that there’s nothing innocent about it.

I think Fintan overestimates the extent to which the practice of Catholicism is actually fading in Ireland. I live in the most religiously deracinated part of the country and still attend Christenings, Confirmations and Communions on a few times a year, not just funerals. I’ll attend two Confirmations this month and the pews will be writhing with unruly kids.

Fintan is of course 100% correct to say the formal power of the church itself has vanished.

He’s also correct that at an official level, Catholicism has no position in Irish life, except as a toxic point of reference to steer away from. Official here means the things said and done by people in respectable positions in cultural life - i.e. people like Fintan, or John Banville, who recently said that Catholic Church is an evil institution that should be abolished.

From a governmental point of view, the attitude toward the church is more like the attitude state functionaries have towards a dictator who’s been brain-dead for 30 years - you just have to keep spoon-feeding him his mush and changing his bedsheets until he goes away.

In 2023 John Banville’s position is much closer to the respectable Irish one than Joe Biden’s is. I’m not sure Joe Biden understands that.

Fintan ends by saying:

It says a lot that a US president can seem to most Irish people like a kind of throwback. Not, in Biden’s case, an unpleasant or unwelcome one — but a reminder, nonetheless, of how our own names for who we are have had to change.

For most Irish people, identity and catholicism are intertwined in a way that’s not easy to unpick without the whole tapestry coming apart in your hands. I say this as a factual judgment rather than an emotional or psychological one; it’s true whether people accept it or not.

We might not call identify as “Irish Catholic” anymore but it doesn’t change the fact that Catholicism suffuses every part of our past and much of our present, and not just as a tale of oppression of the people by the church. I think Irish people themselves are much better at instinctively navigating this dilemma than its cultural authorities are.

Fintan is dead right that Joe clings to a homogenous version of Irish Catholicism that no longer has any official respectability or currency in Ireland itself. But he’s dead wrong to imply that we’ve found some new, unique way of understanding ourselves. Joe, for all his myriad flaws, understands that whatever you are, you have to be something. That’s a problem Fintan is still wrestling with, whether he knows it or not.