Religious Material Culture

Religious identity and material culture intersect in Irish society and literature. Churcharchitecture, religious artefacts, and ritual paraphernalia find their origins in theDevotional Revolution, when under the influence of Cardinal Paul Cullen, IrishCatholic practices were standardised and aligned with Rome. During this period, thebuilding of outsized churches, along with the ritualized bodies of believers, becamesignifiers of an increasingly respectable and confident Irish Catholic identity. The1932 Eucharistic Congress illustrates the merging of church and state, and theutilisation of modern modes of production, dissemination, and consumption. VaticanII’s makeover of the liturgy allowed for modern designs in architecture and print totransform the experience of the Mass. Religion and nationalism increasingly sharedthe same iconography and cultural vocabulary in twentieth-century Ireland. Such aconflation of ‘Catholic’ and ‘Irish’ finds another material counterpart in theMagdalene Laundries, which now stand as a symbol of the church/state institutionalabuse of Irish women and children.