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Andrew Dunleavy, The Catechism of Christian Doctrine (1742)

Long before the invention of PowerPoint and frequently asked questions on websites, Catholics were instructed in their faith by means of question and answer booklets setting out Church doctrine. The standard reference for pre-Vatican II catechesis (religious instruction given in advance of baptism or confirmation) was the Catechism of the Council of Trent, 1566, also known as the Roman Catechism. This emerged in response to catechisms devised by Lutherans. Printing had made the Reformation possible by making Scripture available to literate laypeople. Protestantism emphasised the primacy of the Bible and its unmediated study by the faithful, Catholicism the primacy of doctrinal interpretations of Scripture by the priesthood. In the centuries since, the Reformation printed Catechisms tailored in different editions for children and the general population; these so-called Penny Catechisms were far more influential than the Bible in shaping Irish Catholicism.

The Penny Catechisms were derived from longer ones designed for the education of priests. An early Irish example, The Catholic Christian Doctrine for the use of pastors and Catechesis in order to instruct Children and Illiterate Persons, attributed to Rev. F.W. Devereux of the Diocese of Ferns, drew on the text of the Douay Catechism, published in Rheims in France in 1648, the town where the standard Catholic English-language Bible was first printed. Both answered similarly a question about how children, the old, blind people and the lame would be represented on Judgement Day. All would be restored as if they had reached the perfect age of thirty-three years , because that was reportedly the age at which the saviour died.

One authored during the 1770s by James Butler, Archbishop of Cashel, remained in print into the twentieth century. A 1922 Butler catechism published in Waterford was described on the front cover as ‘Revised, Enlarged, Approved and Recommended by the Four R.C. Archbishops of Ireland.’ The earliest full-length catechism to be published in both English and Irish was composed by Andrew Dunleavy (or Donleavy) in the early 1740s. Dunleavy was Director of the Irish College at the time. He had grown up in Sligo under the Penal Laws but escaped to France in 1710 to study for the priesthood. His catechism appeared in both Irish (Gaelic) and English: The Catechism of Christian Doctrine by way of Question and Answer Drawn Chiefly From The Express Word of God and Other Pure Sources. It was published in its third edition for the Royal Catholic College of St Patrick, Maynooth in 1848 after which it was adopted by a number of dioceses. An early edition was accompanied by a 1741 testimonial to its excellence by Michael O’Gara, Archbishop of Tuam. A near-copy of the Dunleavy Catechism attributed to Michael O’Reilly, who became Archbishop of Armagh in 1749, remained in use in Derry well into the twentieth century. 1

Dunleavy set out his text in both languages on facing pages and the 1848 Maynooth edition included an appendix that explained the spelling, typeface and pronunciation of the Gaelic alphabet. It also reproduced Dunleavy’s original 1742 foreword which argued that children’s catechisms were inadequate for the spiritual education of lay adults. Dunleavy explained that his work had been prompted by the great scarcity of full catechisms in Ireland. Unlike many other catechisms which began with the question, ‘Who made the world?’ Dunleavy’s first question was, ‘What is the Catechism?’ He defined it as ‘a plain and intelligible explanation of the Articles of the Christian Faith necessary for salvation; and of other points belonging to the service of God’.

Unlike subsequent abbreviated Penny Catechisms, Dunleavy cited specific passages from Scripture in support of answers to questions. And again, unlike later ones, responses to some questions took the form of scholastic disputations and discussions of social norms. For example, what became a simple question later on whether to fast on the Sabbath opened up into a discussion of fasting as mandated by the ‘Jewish Church’ and ‘the modern Churches of England and Holland’. Dunleavy recommended restricting the faithful to one midday meal during periods of fasting with further moderate consumption permitted at night or at the end of a long day. He exempted sick people, weakly older people, young people under twenty-one years of age, women big with child and people who undertook hard labour. In Dunleavy then, doctrine, custom and practice were not presented as one and the same.

Many catechisms from other English-speaking countries also circulated in Ireland. A collection of these is to be found on the shelves of the Central Catholic Library in Dublin. Moral instruction in the shorter versions aimed at children and the uneducated poor tended to be stern and forcefully put. For example, the Abridgement of Christian Doctrine for the Lower Classes (1906) by Thomas Byrne, Bishop of Nashville, declared in response to a question on mortal sin that one such sin would merit hell. But in Byrne’s longer Abridgement of Christian Doctrine for the Higher Classes (1906) no such simple question was posed. Instead the emphasis was on how those in mortal sin may be deprived of the sacraments. What, Byrne asked, ought a Christian to do if a Bible should be offered him by a Protestant? He ‘ought to indignantly spurn it, because it is forbidden by the Church; and, if he should have accepted it without adverting to what it was, he should at once pitch it into the fire, or fetch it to his Pastor’.

Penny Catechisms offered a mechanism for standardising the means by which doctrine was to be taught to children and full-length catechisms were preferred for the instruction of the educated classes to Bible study. An appendix on the history of Catholic religious education in a 1943 Religious Knowledge Course for Primary Schools, published by the Archdiocese of Glasgow, explained that the teaching of the Bible seemed ‘unrelated to the scheme of religious knowledge; it leads nowhere. And yet, being God’s Revelation to man, the Bible is largely the source of dogma.’ It argued against teaching ‘Bible history’ (‘perversions of historical truth that do so much to warp the outlook of Catholic children’) declaring that ‘we, as Christians, have little interest in the history of the Jewish race’. The Old Testament afforded stories showing the beauty of virtue and the punishment of sin and contained much that might be worked into the body of doctrine. The New Testament stood on a different plane, it dealt with divine reality. Antipathy towards the use of the Bible for religious instruction was doctrinal and pedagogical even though it commonly appeared sectarian.2

In Ireland during the 1820s religious education became extremely politicised. The Kildare Place Association (named for the Dublin address from which the scheme was run) funded a system of state-funded Protestant schools, which were accused by Catholics of engaging in aggressive proselytising. Such schools co-existed uneasily with a larger and rapidly expanding unfunded system of Catholic schools in a context where Catholics were highly mobilised and where Catholic Emancipation was imminent. In opposition to the Kildare Place Society, Catholic prelates and influential laymen established the Irish National Society for Promoting the Education for the Poor in 1821 to articulate Catholic grievances and to propose alternatives. In January 1826 the Irish Catholic Bishop drew up resolutions, backed by the Catholic Association, supporting a ‘Mixed Education’ school system. Their proposals endorsed the admission of Protestants and Catholics into the same schools ‘provided sufficient care be taken to protect the religion of the Roman Catholic children and furnish them with adequate means of religious instruction’. A Royal Commission had been established in 1824 to examine how existing schools worked and to come up with a viable alternative system.

A form issued by the Royal Commission to all parish priests and ministers in Ireland during the summer of 1824 asked these to enumerate every book and printed paper of every description, which was or had been taught or in any way used, either for amusement or instruction, within School during the previous six months. In cases where Scriptures were used, respondents were asked to state whether it was the Bible at large or the New Testament alone; whether the translation used was that of the Established Church (the King James Bible) or the Catholic Douay Version. 1824 returns from Catholic schools, as analysed by Rev. Martin Brenan, then Professor of Education at St Patrick’s College Maynooth, were published as Schools of Kildare and Leighlin in 1935. Catholic religious instruction comprised, according to Brenan, ‘systematic grounding in the truths of faith as set forth in the catechism, as well as acquaintance with the recognised authorities on the ascetical and spiritual life’. The Commissioners took inventories of the content of parish libraries, reporting that these held between 89 and 280 religious books. The parish priest of Dunleckny wrote a letter to the Commissioners expressing his hope that, having examined his books and Catechisms, they were satisfied as to ‘the falsehood of the many charges brought by persons of other religions against the Catholic Clergy, and particularly that of their anxiety to keep the people in ignorance’.3

In 1826 in the Diocese of Kildare and Leighlin just under 37,000 Catholic children were able to attend school, about half the total. The Commission identified the existence of many small private pay schools, the so-called ‘Hedge’ schools, in each parish. Reports collated by the Royal Commission gave tantalising glimpses of how such Hedge Schools were established and run. Fr Edward Earl the local parish priest described one such school in Killkeaskin:

Margaret Cooly. Opened School Herself. Roman Catholic; is 80 years or more; teaches Reading and Sewing; was taught in Dublin. Salary about £3 per year; rates 1.s.8d. per quarter. Has no fixed school-house; lives in an out-office at Killkeaskin where she teaches. Books – Primer, Reading Made Easy, Spelling Book, Butler’s Catechism.

Another better-off school, where the teacher Patrick Moore charged a shilling more per pupil per quarter, described a schoolroom built of lime and stone and thatched with straw, part of a house 14 feet in length with more than 50 pupils, with seats belonging to the Church. Moore had formal qualifications and a better library that, unusually, included both Protestant and Catholic texts. As listed by Fr Earl:

Books – Primer, Reading Made Easy, Child’s New Play Thing, Universal Spelling Book, The Deserted Child, Travels at Home, Gough’s and Voster’s Arithmetic, 4 Protestant Testaments, 1 Douay Testament, all New Testaments, Butler’s Catechism, The Church Catechism. The master said he bought the Douay Testament to compare it with the Protestant Testament; I told him to send it home; he did so. The Protestant Testaments were all given originally by the Protestant Ministers.

In ordering Moore to get rid of his Douay Bible, Fr Earl was doing no more than what Catholic clergy had done for centuries, insisting that the interpretation of Scripture was not the business of laypeople.

The Royal Commission’s 1826 proposals required that the master of each school in which the majority of pupils profess the Roman Catholic faith, ‘be a Roman Catholic and that, in schools in which the Roman Catholic children form only a minority, a permanent Roman Catholic assistant be employed’. These proposals were worked into a bill by Thomas Wyse, a Catholic Association MP. This bill was subsequently reworked by E.G. Stanley, the chief Secretary for Ireland in consultation with Lord Grey’s Whig government. A petition on educational reform from the Irish Catholic Hierarchy was presented to both Houses of Parliament in 1830.

The Catholic Church initially supported the system but became increasingly ambivalent to it over time. Presbyterians clamoured for a return of the old system. In 1832 the Synod of Ulster raised the cry of ‘the bible unabridged and unmutilated’ and held back from the board’s schools. The appearance of neutrality was crucial in managing demands for control from both sides. Under the leadership of the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin Daniel Murray and his Church of Ireland equivalent Richard Whately, the compromise brokered in 1830 survived for two decades. Some Catholic leaders, notably Archbishop McHale of Tuam, campaigned for a system of Catholic denominational schools and stepped up their demands over time. In 1839, to counter such demands, Murray requested that a legate be sent from Rome to evaluate the system. An evaluation was conducted the following year by the future Catholic Archbishop of Dublin Paul Cullen who concluded at the time that the schools ‘could not have been more Catholic than they are’.4 Even before the Devotional Revolution and the cementing of Catholic power usually attributed to Cullen, the widespread use of catechisms by lay teachers helped make this possible.

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Notes

1Michael Tynan, Catholic Instruction in Ireland 1720–1950 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1985).

2Various catechisms in the holdings of the Catholic Library in Dublin are cited.

3Rev. Martin Brenan, Schools of Kildare and Leighlin 1775–1835 (Dublin: MH Gill and Sons, 1935).

4Peadar McSuibhne, Paul Cullen and his Contemporaries, vol. 4, (Kildare, Leinster Leader, 1974), p.8.