The shrines and grottoes that are to be found all over the country are a testament to how the Catholic people of Ireland embraced a year devoted to the Virgin Mary, writes Maolsheachlann Ó Ceallaigh.

 

They are to be found all over Ireland, in tiny villages and drab housing estates. They are rarely mentioned in tourist guide books. But if you are reading this in the Emerald Isle, there is probably one not very far from you right now.

What are they? They are the shrines and grottoes erected in honour of the Virgin Mary, in the Marian Year of 1954.

These shrines usually show the Blessed Virgin as she was traditionally portrayed at this time: light blue hooded mantle, white veil over her head, hands clasped in prayer or palms spread outwards, showering graces on her children. Sometimes the figure of St. Bernadette Soubirous kneels before her, gazing upwards in awe and veneration.

These shrines and grottoes are rarely very distinguished as works of art. Often, the figures are crudely sculpted, the paint peeling from decades of the Irish rain and wind. Still, however, you will usually find fresh flowers lying at the Virgin’s feet. Often, there are rosary beads, prayer cards and other little tokens left beside her, each one evidence of some heartfelt petition; recovery from illness, perhaps, or the hope for the healthy birth of a child.

It’s easy to stand before one of these shrines, some quiet evening, and forget about the sights and sounds of the twenty-first century around you. To travel in imagination to the time it was erected, only seventy years ago but, in many ways, a whole other world…
In 1954, the Republic of Ireland had only existed a few years, since 1948 when Taoiseach John A. Costello (who was to return to office that year) announced that the country was no longer a part of the British Commonwealth. Indeed, the state itself had only been independent for a little over thirty years. The drama of the War of Independence and the Civil War was still a living memory.

After centuries of persecution, Irish Catholicism had finally emerged into the sunlight. The Constitution adopted in 1937 declared: “The State recognises the special position of the Holy Catholic Apostolic and Roman Church as the guardian of the Faith professed by the great majority of the citizens.”

In 1932, Ireland had hosted the Eucharistic Congress, a gathering of the entire Catholic world in Dublin. It was widely considered a triumph, a demonstration both of the new State’s ability to organize a major international event, and of the country’s vibrant Catholic faith. Attendance at Sunday Mass was almost universal among Catholics and vocations to priesthood and religious life were booming.
There were, however, shadows on the horizon.

The most obvious shadow was the threat of communism. Today, it’s easy to look back on this period of history and joke about “Reds under the bed” hysteria. With the benefit of hindsight, we know that the Soviet Union was to fall in 1989, and that only a handful of countries would remain communist in the twenty-first century.
In 1954, however, vast swathes of the globe were under communist rule, including most of eastern Europe, and there were active communist movements in Western Europe and elsewhere. The Catholic Chuch faced persecution in many of these countries. To take only one example, the Irish missionary priest Fr. Aedan McGrath was imprisoned and tortured in communist China, under trumped-up charges of espionage.

Another shadow was the rise of consumer society, the mass media and more permissive social ideas. Irish observers could clearly see this trend at work abroad. As Bishop Patrick O’Boyle of Kilalla warned Irish emigrants to Britain in 1952: “Life in Britain is not, unfortunately, sympathetic to our Irish and Catholic ideals of morality. Let those who emigrate beware of the dangers, moral, religious, and social, that will confront them.”

Pius XII, who reigned as Pope from 1939 to 1958, was much preoccupied by these twin shadows of communism and encroaching secularisation. It was partly in response to them that he announced the Marian Year of 1954, in his September 1953 encyclical Fulgens Corona (“Radiant Crown”).

Strictly speaking, the Marian Year ran from December 1953 to December 1954. It was to be a year of increased devotion to the Virgin Mary all over the Catholic world. The year was chosen to celebrate a hundred years since the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary was proclaimed in 1854. (The dogma of the Immaculate Conception has nothing to do with the conception of Jesus, or the Virgin Birth.

Continue reading in this week’s Ireland’s Own