The Quiet Tragedy of
Canon Sheehan

Tom Garvin

Issue 390, vol.98, Summer 2009

His great crusade was to stop people (especially women) emigrating to England or America, or even migrating to the big towns nearer home; to this end he himself set up little factories and small-scale commercial concerns. He considered the newly-emerging world of urban commerce to be rooted in materialism, and held that industrialisation (and the attendant prosperity) resulted only in morel degeneracy – eventually with sexual profligacy becoming evident even on the streets. As a counterblast, he went so far as to approve the idealism of the violence-prone Fenians – since at least they venerated the spirit of self-sacrifice.

For Canon Sheehan, the other great contemporary bugbear was the threat to legitimate authority posed by socialism and by an over-emphasis on democracy. The European heirs to the Reformation, along with the ideological residue of the French Revolution, had only propagated (he felt) a pervasive philosophical and religious scepticism which bordered on full-blown paganism. Sheehan believed that the inadequate education of Ireland’s up and coming young men was undermining their religious faith : they were coming under the influence of writers (such as George Moore) who were non-Catholic or anti-Catholic – and soon would no longer be amenable to clerical guidance. He proposed for Ireland an English-language literature of Christian idealism.

He believed that priests, as well as being spiritual leaders, should take an active social and political role in their communities in order to forestall contemporary alien influences : each Catholic parish becoming in effect a tiny Platonic (if not feudal) polity united by love against the world outside. He even hoped that landlords might convert to the Catholic faith – thus healing the rift with their tenants.

Even a century before today’s ‘globalisation’, this degree of self-sufficiency was something of a chimera. Another tragic element in the life of Sheehan was that he dared not put his head above the monolithic clerical parapet of the day by too publicly advocating even mildly proactive approaches in Catholic education or in parish leadership. Further – orphaned at twelve, and thrown upon the mercies of a seminary life and of a clerical social circle – he was a rather isolated, and probably lonely, figure.

Tom Garvin is Emeritus Professor of Politics and Research, Fellow School of Politics and International Relations, University College Dublin