Source: The Guardian

One of Ireland’s leading theologians has accused the leader of the 1916 Easter Rising against British rule of using Catholicism in an unchristian way to attract people to the cause.

As Ireland prepares for the 100th anniversary of the uprising this Easter Sunday, the Jesuit intellectual Father Seamus Murphy has launched a blistering attack on the morality of the revolt and those behind it.

Murphy said leader Patrick Pearse’s portrayal of the rebellion as a sacrifice “might masquerade in Catholic devotional dress, but its meaning, the master who it served, was not the Christian God”.Writing in the spring edition of the Jesuit journal Studies, Murphy is the first major Irish religious figure to launch a blistering attack on the Rising’s legacy.

Unionists in Northern Ireland are boycotting the centenary, which will climax with a march through Dublin city centre on Easter Sunday morning. Meanwhile some Irish republic-based writers have warned that hardline dissident republicans opposed to the peace process will exploit the commemorations and recruit a new generation of fighters.

In his article, Murphy accuses Pearse of using and abusing “ordinary Irish Catholics’ reverence for the sacrifice of the Catholic mass, and their spiritual openness (or ‘vulnerability’) to its symbols”.

The associate professor of philosophy at Loyola University Chicago, and one of Irish Catholicism’s leading intellectuals, said: “Pearse, familiar with but not overpious about, his Catholicism, uses the Old Testament and scapegoat themes, but NOT with Christian meaning.“However, since all this superficially resembles some Catholic mass themes, he is able to channel the Catholic energy that is out there among ordinary Irish Catholics in the direction of a violent bloody undemocratic and intolerant nationalism. It’s very clever.”

A poet and teacher, Pearse was the leader of the rebellion and read out the proclamation the rebels declared for independence on the first day of the rising at the revolt’s HQ – the General Post Office in what is now Dublin’s O’Connell Street. All seven signatories of the proclamation in Easter 1916 who surrendered to the British were executed in May of that year.

While the rebellion had minimal support in Easter week 1916 with thousands of Dubliners fighting in British regiments on the western front in Europe, the execution of Pearse and his comrades generated enormous sympathy to the republican cause. Pearse himself saw their deaths as a Christlike sacrifice that would, through blood, create a new nation.

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